Propertius also recognises him as the disciple of the sage of Ascra:—
Tu canis Ascraei veteris praecepta poetae,
Quo seges in campo, quo viret uva iugo[275].
Though Hesiod can scarcely have taken the highest rank as a poet, yet a peculiar reverence attached to his name from his great antiquity, and from the ethical and theological spirit of his writings. As Virgil chose the mould of Theocritus into which to cast the lighter feelings and fancies of his youth, he naturally turned to ‘The Works and Days of Hesiod’ as a more suitable model for a poem on rural life, undertaken with a more serious purpose, and demanding a severer treatment.
The change in Virgil’s life between the composition of the Eclogues and the Georgics had however much more influence in determining the difference in the character of the two poems, than the mere artistic desire to enter on a new path of poetry. During the composition of the earlier poems Virgil was living in a remote district of Italy, associating with the country-people or with a few young poets like himself, and coming in contact with the great world of action and national interests only through the medium of his intercourse with the temporary governors of the province. Rome and its ruler and the powerful stream of events in which his own fortunes were finally absorbed affect his imagination as they might do that of one who heard of them from a distance, but who in his ordinary thoughts and sympathies was living quite apart from them;
Urbem quam dicunt Romam Meliboee putavi
Stultus ego huic nostrae similem[276].
But before undertaking the task of writing the Georgics he had become an honoured member of the circle of Maecenas, the intimate friend of Varius and of Horace (who himself owed his introduction to that circle to the kindly offices of the two older poets) and of others distinguished in literature and public affairs. He had lived for a time near the centre of the world’s movement, in close relations to the minds by which that movement was directed. As the most genuine of his Eclogues had been inspired by his personal share in the calamities of his country, it was natural that he should, now when his own fortunes were restored through the favour of those at the head of affairs, feel a stronger and more disinterested sympathy with the public condition, at a crisis to which no one capable of understanding its gravity could feel indifferent. It was natural that his new relations and the impulse of the new ideas which came to him through them should move him to undertake some work of art more suited to his maturer faculty, his graver temperament, and the firmer fibre of his genius. Nor is there any difficulty in [pg 177]believing that Maecenas may have had some influence in determining him to the choice of a subject which enabled him to range over the whole of that field of which he had already appropriated a part, which would afford scope to the literary ambition urging him to write a poem on a greater scale and of more enduring substance, and which, at the same time, might serve indirectly to advance the policy of reconciliation and national and social reorganisation which Caesar and his minister were anxious to promote. Among ‘the ancient arts by which the Latin name and the strength of Italy had waxed great,’ none had fallen more into abeyance, through the insecurity of the times, than the cultivation of the land. The restoration of the old ‘Coloni’ of Italy and the revival of the great forms of national industry, associated with the older and happier memories of Rome, had been a leading feature in the policy of the great popular leaders from the Gracchi down to Julius Caesar. Among the completed glories of the Augustan Age, Horace, some twenty years later, specially notes the restoration of security and abundance to the land:—
Tutus bos etenim rura perambulat,
Nutrit rura Ceres almaque faustitas[277],