Virgil

by W. Lucas Collins

But although the poet makes the labours of the gardener and the vine-dresser the burden of his song, his most brilliant passages, and those best known and remembered, are the frequent digressions in which he breaks away from the lower ground of horticultural details into a higher poetical atmosphere. One of the most beautiful is his apostrophe to Italy in this second book:—

“Colchian bulls with fiery nostrils never turned Italian field,
Seed of hydra’s teeth ne’er sprang in bristling crop of spear and shield;
But thy slopes with heavy corn-stalks and the Massic vine are clad,
There the olive-groves are greenest, and the full-fed herds are glad.
In thy plains is bred the war-horse, tossing high its crest of pride;
Milk-white herds, O fair Clitumnus, bathe them in thy sacred tide—
Mighty bulls to crown the altars, or to draw the conqueror’s car
Up the Sacred Way in triumph when he rideth from the war.
Here the spring is longest, summer borrows months beyond her own;
Twice the teeming flocks are fruitful, twice the laden orchards groan.
In thy plains no tigers wander, nor the lions nurse their young;
Evil root of treacherous poison doth no wretched gatherer wrong,
Never serpent rears its crest, or drags its monstrous coils along.
Lo! where rise thy noble cities, giant works of men of old,
Towns on beetling crags piled heavenward by the hands of builders bold—
Antique towers round whose foundations still the grand old rivers glide,
And the double sea that girds thee like a fence on either side.
. . . . . . . . . .
Such the land which sent to battle Marsian footmen stout and good,
Sabine youth, and Volscian spearmen, and Liguria’s hardy brood;
Hence have sprung our Decii, Marii, mighty names which all men bless,
Great Camillus, kinsmen Scipios, sternest men in battle’s press!
Hence hast thou too sprung, great Cæsar, whom the farthest East doth fear,
So that Mede nor swarthy Indian to our Roman lines come near!
Hail, thou fair and fruitful mother, land of ancient Saturn, hail!
Rich in crops and rich in heroes! thus I dare to wake the tale
Of thine ancient laud and honour, opening founts that slumbered long,
Rolling through our Roman towns the echoes of old Hesiod’s song.”[9]

The Third Georgic treats of the herd and the stud. The poet’s knowledge on these points must be strongly suspected of being but second-hand—rather the result of having studied some of the Roman “Books of the Farm,” than the experience of a practical stock-breeder. Such a work was Varro’s ‘On Rural Affairs,’ which Virgil evidently followed as an authority. From that source he drew, amongst other precepts, the points of a good cow, which he lays down in this formula:—

“An ugly head, a well-fleshed neck,
Deep dewlaps falling from the chin,
Long in the flank, broad in the foot,
Rough hairy ears, and horns bent in.”

Such an animal would hardly win a prize from our modern judges of stock. But Virgil, be it remembered, is giving instructions for selection with an eye to breeding purposes exclusively; and an Italian cow of the present day would not be considered by us a handsome animal. Besides, the object of the Roman breeder was to obtain animals which would be “strong to labour,”—good beasts under the yoke; not such as would lay on the greatest weight of flesh at the least possible cost, for the purposes of the butcher. His points of a good horse are entirely different, and approach more nearly our own ideal—“Fine in the head, short in the barrel, broad on the back, full in the chest.” Bay and dapple-grey he chooses for colour; white and chestnut he considers the worst. He had not reached the more catholic philosophy of the modern horse-dealer, that “no good horse was ever yet of a bad colour.”

The nature of the subject in this Third Georgic allows the poet to indulge even more frequently in digressions. He gives a picture of pastoral life under the hot suns of Numidia, where the herdsman or shepherd drives his charge from pasture to pasture, carrying with him all he wants, like a Roman soldier in a campaign; and again of his winter life in some vague northern region which he calls by the general name of Scythia, but where they seem to have drunk (in imitation of wine, as the southern poet compassionately phrases it) some kind of beer or cider. But the most remarkable of these passages is that which closes the book, and describes the ravages of some terrible pestilence which, beginning with the flocks and herds, extended at last to the wild beasts and to the birds, and even to the fish. There is no historical account of such a visitation in Italy; and it is very probable that Virgil used his licence as a poet to embellish with imaginary details some ordinary epidemic, in order to present to his readers a companion picture to that of the great plague at Athens, which had been so powerfully described by his favourite model Lucretius.

There is no need to say very much about the Fourth and last of the Georgics, which treats exclusively of bees. These little creatures were evidently of more importance in the rural economy of the Romans than they commonly are in ours. Before the discovery of the sugar-cane, the sweetening properties of honey would be much more valuable than they are now; and the inhabitants of a warm climate like Italy make more use of saccharine matter, as an article of ordinary food, than we do. But the habits and natural history of the insect commonwealth to which Virgil devotes this book are so curious and so little understood, that they would only find an appropriate place in a special treatise. There appears to have been no want of interest or research upon the subject among the ancients, for the Greek philosopher Aristomachus is said to have devoted fifty-eight years to this single branch of zoology. Virgil certainly would not help us much in a scientific point of view. The bees were mysteries to him, even more than to us; and, marvellous as they are, he made them more marvellous still. He was quite aware that they had some peculiarities in the matter of sex; but he makes the queen bee, who is really the mother of the swarm, a king, and imagines that they pick up their young ones from the leaves and flowers. He gives also—and with an air of as much practical reality as can be expected from a poet—minute instructions for obtaining a stock of bees at once from the carcass of a steer, beaten and crushed into a mass, and excluded from air: evidently a misapplication of what is said to be a fact in natural history, that bees will take up their quarters occasionally in the dead body of an animal. The honey he considers to be some kind of dew that falls from heaven. One rule which he gives for preventing the young swarms from rising at undue times has staggered some inexperienced commentators. He advises the owner to pick out the queen bees, and clip their wings. Such a recipe certainly suggests at first sight the old preliminary caution—“First catch your bee:” but an experienced bee-keeper will find no difficulty in performing such an operation, if needful.[10]

The fine episode with which this book concludes, in which the poet relates the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, is more attractive than all his discourse upon bee-keeping.

The Georgics have generally been considered as the poet’s most complete work, and it is here, undoubtedly, that he shows us most of himself,—of his habits, his tastes, and his religious opinions. They are poetical essays on the dignity of labour. Warlike glory was the popular theme of the day; but Virgil detests war, and he seeks to enthrone labour in its place. He looks upon tillage as, in some sort, a war in itself, but of a nobler kind—“a holy war of men against the earth,” as a French writer expresses it.[11] He compares its details, in more than one passage, with those of the camp and of the battle-field. But besides this, the Georgics contain what seems to be a protest against the fashionable atheism of his age. He sets the worship of the gods in the first place of all.

“First, pay all reverence to the Powers of heaven”—