I suspect that Virgil was not only a reader of all that had been written on the subject, but that he was also an insistant questioner of every sagacious landholder and every sturdy farmer that he fell in with, whether on the Campanian hills or at the house of Mæcenas. How else does a man accomplish himself for a didactic work relating to matters of fact? I suspect, moreover, that Virgil, during those half-dozen years in which he was engaged upon this task, lost no opportunity of inspecting every bee-hive that fell in his way, of measuring the points and graces of every pretty heifer he saw in the fields, and of noting with the eye of an artist the color of every furrow that glided from the plough. It is inconceivable that a man of his intellectual address should have given so much of literary toil to a work that was not in every essential fully up to the best practice of the day. Five years, it is said, were given to the accomplishment of this short poem. What say our poetasters to this? Fifteen hundred days, we will suppose, to less than twice as many lines; blocking out four or five for his morning's task, and all the evening—for he was a late worker—licking them into shape, as a bear licks her cubs.
But cui bono? what good is in it all? Simply as a work of art, it will be cherished through all time,—an earlier Titian, whose color can never fade. It was, besides, a most beguiling peace-note, following upon the rude blasts of war. It gave a new charm to forsaken homesteads. Under the Virgilian leadership, Monte Gennaro and the heights of Tusculum beckon the Romans to the fields; the meadows by reedy Thrasymenus are made golden with doubled crops. The Tarentine sheep multiply around Benacus, and crop close those dark bits of herbage which have been fed by the blood of Roman citizens.
Thus much for the magic of the verse; but there is also sound farm-talk in Virgil. I am aware that Seneca, living a few years after him, invidiously objects that he was more careful of his language than of his doctrine, and that Columella quotes him charily,—that the collector of the "Geoponics" ignores him, and that Tull gives him clumsy raillery; but I have yet to see in what respect his system falls short of Columella, or how it differs materially, except in fulness, from the teachings of Crescenzi, who wrote a thousand years and more later. There is little in the poem, save its superstitions, from which a modern farmer can dissent.[14]
We are hardly launched upon the first Georgic before we find a pretty suggestion of the theory of rotation,—
"Sic quoque mutatis requiescunt fœtibus arva."
Rolling and irrigation both glide into the verse a few lines later. He insists upon the choice of the best seed, advises to keep the drains clear, even upon holy-days, (268,) and urges, in common with a great many shrewd New-England farmers, to cut light meadows while the dew is on, (288-9,) even though it involve night-work. Some, too, he says, whittle their torches by fire-light, of a winter's night; and the good wife, meantime, lifting a song of cheer, plies the shuttle merrily. The shuttle is certainly an archaism, whatever the good wife may be.
His theory of weather-signs, taken principally from Aratus, agrees in many respects with the late Marshal Bugeaud's observations, upon which the Marshal planted his faith so firmly that he is said to have ordered all his campaigns in Africa in accordance with them.
In the opening of the second book, Virgil insists, very wisely, upon proper adaptation of plantations of fruit-trees to different localities and exposures,—a matter which is far too little considered by farmers of our day. His views in regard to propagation, whether by cuttings, layers, or seed, are in agreement with those of the best Scotch nursery-men; and in the matter of grafting or inoculation, he errs (?) only in declaring certain results possible, which even modern gardening has not accomplished. Dryden shall help us to the pretty falsehood:—
"The thin-leaved arbute hazel-grafts receives,
And planes huge apples bear, that bore but leaves.
Thus mastful beech the bristly chestnut bears,
And the wild ash is white with blooming pears,
And greedy swine from grafted elms are fed
With falling acorns, that on oaks are bred."
It is curious how generally this belief in something like promiscuous grafting was entertained by the old writers. Palladius repeats it with great unction in his poem "De Insitione," two or three centuries later;[15] and in the tenth book of the "Geoponics," a certain Damogerontis (whoever he may have been) says, (cap. lxv.,) "Some rustic writers allege that nut-trees and resinous trees (τα ῥητινην εχοντα) cannot be successfully grafted; but," he continues, "this is a mistake; I have myself grafted the pistache nut into the terebenthine."