This is the obvious and ostensible purpose of the poem; and the truth and accuracy of the instruction were important elements in the estimate which the countrymen of the poet formed of its value. Columella and Pliny, while controverting him on a few minor points[402], attest his practical knowledge as an agriculturist and a naturalist. Similar testimony is given by some modern writers competent to speak with authority on these subjects[403]. Neither ancient nor modern critics regard him as [pg 264]free from liability to mistake, and the tendency of his mind to believe in marvellous deviations from natural law exposed him to errors into which less imaginative writers were not likely to fall; but the substantial accuracy of his observations and acquired knowledge seems to be attested both by positive and negative evidence. It is not a question as to whether the operations described in Virgil satisfy the requirements of skilled or even of unskilled farming in the present day, or whether he does not fall into mistakes in natural history which a modern reader, with no scientific knowledge of the subject, may easily detect; but whether he has adequately represented the methods of ancient Italian agriculture, and whether he is a trustworthy exponent of the scientific beliefs of his age, and an accurate observer of those phenomena which were as accessible to an ancient as to a modern enquirer. On these points he satisfied the best critics among his countrymen. The general truth of his observation is further attested by the survival in Southern Europe, into comparatively recent times, of some of the processes described by him, which seem most remote from our ordinary experience[404]. It is attested also by the accuracy of his description of the unchanging phenomena of Nature, and of the habits of animals.
A modern reader may think the value of his poetry little, if at all enhanced, by the rank which he may claim among the ‘scriptores rei rusticae.’ It may seem matter for regret that so much of the faculty, which should have given permanent delight [pg 265]to the world, should have been employed in conveying temporary instruction. His very fidelity to the office of a teacher detracts somewhat from his poetic office. Though it satisfies our curiosity to know how the ancient Italians tilled their lands and cultivated the vine, yet this satisfaction is quite distinct from the joy which the poetical treatment of a poetical subject gives to the imagination. It is not as repertories of useful information that the great writers of Greece and Rome are to be studied. Their importance in this way has long since been superseded. Each generation adds to the stock of knowledge in the world, modifies the results arrived at by the preceding generation, and dispenses with the works in which these results have been embodied. But a work of power, stimulating moral and intellectual feeling,—whether in the form of poem, history, speech, or philosophic dialogue,—may acquire from long antiquity even a stronger hold over the imagination than it originally possessed[405]. In the didactic poems of Lucretius and Virgil the information conveyed by them possesses permanent value, in so far as it is coloured by human feeling,—in so far as we recognise the passion or affection by which the poet was stirred in acquiring his knowledge and in conveying it to sympathetic readers. And as the scientific enthusiasm of Lucretius animates the driest details of his argument, so the love entertained for his subject by Virgil,—as an Italian, the son of a small Italian land-holder,—
Veneto rusticis parentibus nato inter silvas et frutices educto[406],—
writing for Italians, for whom every detail of farm labour had a fascination unintelligible to us,—brightens with the gleam of human and poetical feeling the technical teaching of the traditional precepts of Italian husbandry. The position of a teacher assumed by him,—a position which no great Greek or [pg 266]English poet could gracefully maintain,—impresses us with the thorough adaptation of the form of the poem to the sober practical understanding of the Italian race. Horace mentions this love of teaching and learning as one of the notes distinguishing the Roman from the Greek genius:—
Maiores audire, minori dicere per quae
Crescere res posset, minui damnosa libido[407].
It adds to our sense of Virgil’s thoroughness as an artist to know that he faithfully performed the office which he undertook; and the fact of his undertaking this office helps to bring home to us the practical, unspeculative genius of those to whom his poem was in the first place addressed.
2. Not only the instruction directly conveyed in the poem, but the frequent illustrations from geography, mythology, and astronomy, have much less meaning to us than they had to the contemporaries of the poet. Yet they help to make us realise the relation in which the Rome and Italy of the Augustan Age stood to the rest of the world and to the culture of the past. By the references to the varied products of other lands we are reminded of the active commercial intercourse between Rome and the East,—a feature of the age of which we are also often reminded in the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace. We see how the success of the Roman arms had made the products of the whole world—the ‘saffron dye of Tmolus,’ the ‘ivory of India,’ the ‘spices of Arabia,’ the ‘iron of the Chalybians,’ the ‘medicinal drugs of Pontus,’ the ‘brood-mares of Epirus[408]’—part of the possessions of Rome. We are reminded too of the fact that many Romans and Italians were settled as colonists in the provinces of the Empire, and that Virgil had them also in view in the instruction which he imparts[409]. The frequent allusions to Greek mythology and to the constellations, on the [pg 267]other hand, help to remind us that the art and science of the past, as well as the material products of the world, had now been diverted to the enjoyment and use of the new inheritors of intellectual culture.
3. It was seen how assiduously Virgil, in the body of his poem, inculcates the necessity and duty of labour. And though the ‘glorification of labour’ was found to be rather a derivative and tributary stream than the main current of interest in the poem, yet it is impossible to doubt that to the mind of Virgil this assiduous toil of the husbandman, on a work so congenial and surrounded with such accessories of peaceful happiness, had a special attraction, even independent of its results. This recognition of the dignity of labour owes nothing to a Greek original. A life of intellectual leisure was the ideal of the Greeks. Hesiod indeed does dwell on the necessity of labour, as the ground both of worldly well-being and divine approval,—and this is another point of affinity between him and Virgil,—but the line in which he claims consideration for work,
Ἔργον δ’ οὐδὲν ὄνειδος, ἀεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος[410],