Helps to Latin Translation at Sight

by Edmund Luce

Sentence IV.—

grieves for nor pities. This quite obscures the point. Vergil says that a country life, with its absence of poverty, so commonly met with in a town, saves a man from the necessity of feeling a pang of pity for the poor.

Before you put aside this passage, try to avail yourself of some of the following suggestions. Thus:—

I. For the Poet Vergil[17] (70 B.C.-19 B.C.).—The chief facts of his life and the subject of his great poems are clearly and shortly given in the Student’s Companion to Latin Authors (a useful and convenient book of reference).

II. For the Georgics, Poems on Husbandry. (The passage for translation is taken from Georgic II. lines 490-499.) See—

(i.) Student’s Companion to Latin Authors, pp. 157-8.

(ii.) Nettleship’s Vergil, pp. 37-45.

(iii.) Sellar’s Vergil, pp. 174-198.

Notice especially the political purpose of the Georgics—to help the policy of Augustus, which aimed at checking the depopulation of the country districts. Compare the alarming migration from the country to the towns in England at the present day.

III. Relation of Lucretius to the Georgics.