And the lambs grow in scarlet. So the Fates,
Who know not change, have bid their spindles run,
And weave for this blest age the web of doom.”
W. L. Collins.
The Georgics.—Having shown his powers in the Eclogues, Virgil was not unwilling to put them to a further proof, when Mæcenas suggested a work on husbandry, which should dignify that ancient art and revive a love for the simple pursuits of the fathers of the Republic.
Taking Hesiod’s “Works and Days” as his model, he added the artistic Georgics (agricultural poem) to the works of Cato and Varro on rural life. No less elevated in tone than theirs, it possesses an additional attraction in its dress of verse, glows with the author’s love of nature, and displays his ardent zeal to check the national decay. Virgil labored upon the Georgics for seven years, it being his habit to rise betimes and dictate in the early morning verses which he spent the rest of the day in polishing and condensing.
The Georgics is a didactic poem, and as such, with the work of Lucretius, represents the only department in which the Romans excelled both the Greeks and all modern nations. The first of its four books is devoted to tillage; it gives directions for ploughing (early and often, was Virgil’s motto), sowing, and fertilizing, and explains the signs of the weather. We learn from it that the pests of the modern farmer were not unknown to the old Roman husbandman:—
“With ponderous roller smooth the level floor,
And bind with chalky cement o’er and o’er;
Lest springing weeds expose thy want of art,