Georgics
by Virgil · Georgica
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists
A didactic poem in four books on farming, addressed to Maecenas and finished as Octavian was consolidating power. Book one treats crops, weather and the signs of civil war; book two trees and vines, with the praise of Italy; book three cattle and horses, ending in a plague; book four bees and their society, closing with the story of the beekeeper Aristaeus and the descent of Orpheus to recover Eurydice. The poem's subject is labour, and the cost of the order it wins from nature, and it has been called the most perfect poem in Latin by readers from Dryden onward.
We recommendThe Eclogues and Georgics, translated by C. Day LewisOxford World's Classics, 2009A poet's translation that keeps the pace of the Latin; David Ferry's version is the other strong choice.
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- Written
- 29 BCE
- Form
- Lyric poetry
- Language
- Latin
- Length
- Short · 100 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
C. Day Lewis translation
Find this edition: Georgics, opens in a new tabBookshop.org: Georgics, opens in a new tab
Why it's on the list
Making labour the poem's subject, and showing that Jupiter ended the golden age so that need would sharpen men's wits, gives the Georgics a theory of civilisation in which everything worth having is wrested from a nature that resists, and the farmer's year becomes an image of all human effort. Ending the first book with the portents at Caesar's death and a prayer that Octavian be allowed to save a world gone mad turns a handbook on crops into a poem about the civil wars, the farm the place where Rome might be mended. Closing the whole with Orpheus losing Eurydice a second time at the mouth of the underworld, in the middle of a lesson on bees, sets the poem's deepest loss inside its most orderly society and refuses to say what one has to do with the other. Being called the most perfect poem in Latin by readers from Dryden onward, and imitated by every later poet of the land, it fixed the idea that the countryside is where a nation's virtue is kept.
Key themes
- Nature and the cosmos
- Jupiter ended the golden age so that need would sharpen men's wits, and everything worth having is wrested from a nature that resists.
- War
- Ending the first book with the portents at Caesar's death turns a handbook on crops into a poem about the civil wars, the farm the place where Rome might be mended.
- Society and the state
- The bees of book four, with their king and their selfless labour, are a model society, and the poem asks what human society can learn from them and what it cannot.
- Death and mortality
- Book three ends in a plague that kills the animals it has taught the reader to breed, and the poem's lesson on labour includes the labour that fails.
- Love and desire
- Orpheus loses Eurydice a second time by looking back at the mouth of the underworld, in the middle of a lesson on bees, the poem's deepest loss set inside its most orderly society.
Which translation to read
Our pick
The Eclogues and Georgics, translated by C. Day Lewis
Oxford World's Classics, 2009
A poet's translation that keeps the pace of the Latin; David Ferry's version is the other strong choice.
Amazon: the C. Day Lewis translation, opens in a new tabBookshop.org: the C. Day Lewis translation, opens in a new tab
Overview
About one hundred pages, a didactic poem in four books on farming, finished in 29 BCE, addressed to Maecenas and completed as Octavian was consolidating power. Book one treats crops, weather and the signs of civil war; book two trees and vines, with the praise of Italy; book three cattle and horses, ending in a plague; book four bees and their society, closing with the story of the beekeeper Aristaeus and the descent of Orpheus to recover Eurydice.
The poem’s subject is labour, and the cost of the order it wins from nature.
What happens
Book one: crops and weather. Virgil invokes the rural gods and Octavian, sets out the ploughing, sowing and tending of grain, explains that Jupiter ended the golden age so that need would sharpen men’s wits, teaches the signs of weather from the sun and moon, and ends with the portents at Caesar’s death and a prayer for the young ruler.
Book two: trees and vines. The methods of propagating trees lead to the praise of Italy, land of perpetual spring, then to soils, the planting of vines and olives, and close with the praise of the farmer’s life, blessed if he only knew his blessings, set against the poet’s own wish to understand the causes of things.
Book three: cattle and horses. The breeding of horses and cattle, the fury of love in animals and men, and the tending of sheep and goats give way at the end to a plague in Noricum that kills the herds, the ox dying at the plough and the dog going mad.
Book four: the bees. The bees’ hive is a model commonwealth, with its king, its selfless workers, its battles and its swarms, and Virgil teaches how to keep them and how to restore a dead hive from the carcass of a bullock.
Aristaeus and Orpheus. The beekeeper Aristaeus, his bees dead, learns from Proteus that he is punished for the death of Eurydice, whom he pursued; the story within the story tells how Orpheus went down for her, won her with his song, and lost her again by looking back.
The close. Aristaeus sacrifices, new bees swarm from the carcasses, and Virgil signs off from Naples, where he flourished in the pursuits of inglorious ease while Caesar thundered in war by the Euphrates.
How to read it
Read the passage on Jupiter ending the golden age as the poem’s theory of civilisation, everything worth having wrested from a nature that resists, and the farmer’s year as an image of all effort.
Pay close attention to the close of the first book, where the handbook becomes a poem about the civil wars and the farm the place where Rome might be mended.
Notice how the third book ends in plague and the fourth in the loss of Eurydice, so that the poem’s lessons on labour include the labour that fails and the loss that no art recovers.
Consider the bees as a model society and the Orpheus story set inside their lesson, and decide what the poem thinks the one has to do with the other.
Read this poem alongside Lucretius to compare two Latin didactic poems, one that explains the world to free men from fear and one that teaches labour to men who cannot be freed from it.
Questions it raises
- Is the poem’s view of labour hopeful, the discipline that made civilisation, or bleak, the sentence that ended the golden age, and does Virgil decide?
- Why does a poem that praises Octavian as the saviour of a mad world end with a poet at ease in Naples while Caesar thunders abroad?
- What does the plague at the end of book three do to the lessons on breeding that precede it, and why place it there?
- What has Orpheus’s loss of Eurydice to do with the death and restoration of Aristaeus’s bees, and is the poem’s silence on the connection a failure or its meaning?
- Is the hive a model for human society or a warning about what a society without individuals looks like?
- Why did readers from Dryden onward call this the most perfect poem in Latin, and does the judgment survive a reader who has never farmed?
Highlights
The father himself willed that the way of tillage should not be easy, and first stirred the fields by art, sharpening mortal wits with cares, so that labour conquered all, unrelenting labour and want pressing in hard times.
Close paraphrase of the passage that gives the poem its theory of labour, and its most quoted phrase.
The first book ends with the sun darkened and the portents at Caesar's death, wars across the world, and a prayer that the gods allow Octavian to rescue an age overturned, the farmer's ploughshare turning up rusted javelins.
Paraphrase of the passage that brings the civil wars into the poem on farming.
Book four ends with the beekeeper Aristaeus learning why his bees died, and within that story Orpheus descending for Eurydice, winning her, and losing her again by looking back at the edge of the light.
Paraphrase of the poem's closing myth, which sets loss inside the lesson on the most orderly of societies.
