IV.
If the idea of the poem and of the national interests associated with it arose in Virgil’s mind during his life in Rome, it was in his retirement in Campania that he prepared himself for and executed his task. Like the Aeneid it was a work of slow growth, the result of careful study and meditation. Besides the great change of the concluding episode, there are some slight indications that the poem was retouched in later editions; and perhaps a very few lines added to the original work may have been either left finally unadjusted to their proper place, or may have been transposed in the copying of the manuscript[292]. Although regard for his art was a more prominent consideration in the mind of Virgil than of Lucretius, yet he did not, any more than his predecessor, wish to [pg 191]separate the office of a teacher from that of a poet. How far the experience of his early years in the farm in the district of Andes or of his later residence on his land near Nola may have contributed to his knowledge of his subject, we have no means of knowing; but probably the delicacy of his health as well as his devotion to study may have limited his experience to the observation of the labours of others. But the power of vividly realising and enjoying the familiar sights and work of the farm,—the life which he gives to the notices of seed-time and harvest, of the growth of trees and ripening of fruits, of the habits of flocks, herds, and bees, etc.,—the deep love for his subject in all its details—
Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore[293]—
were gifts which could not come from any study of books. The poetry of manhood is, more often perhaps than we know, the conscious reproduction of the unconscious impressions of early years, received in a susceptible and retentive mind. Virgil, in common with all great poets, retained through life the ‘child’s heart within the man’s.’ Through this geniality of nature he was able—
angustis hunc addere rebus honorem[294]—
to glorify trite and familiar things by the light reflected from the healthy memories and the idealising fancies of boyhood and early youth.
But while his feeling is all his own,—the happy survival probably of the childhood and youth passed in his home in the district of Andes,—he largely avails himself of the observation, the thought, and the language of earlier writers, both Greek and Roman. His poem is eminently a work of learning as well as of native feeling. He combines in its varied and firm texture the homely wisdom embodied in the precepts and proverbs of Italian peasants (‘veterum praecepta’),—the quaint and oracular dicta of Hesiod,—the scientific knowledge and mythological [pg 192]lore of Alexandrine writers,—the philosophic and imaginative conceptions of Lucretius,—with the knowledge of natural history contained in the treatises of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and the systematic practical directions of the old prose writers on rural economy, such as the Carthaginian Mago[295], whose work had been translated into Latin,—Democritus and Xenophon among Greek prose writers,—Cato, the two Sasernae, Licinius Stolo, Tremellius, and Varro among Latin authors. The purely practical precepts of the Georgics were apparently selected and condensed from these writers[296]. But no literary inspiration or ideas were likely to have come from any of these last-named authors, unless the Invocation in the first Book may have been suggested by the example of Varro, who begins his treatise with an invocation to the XII Di consentes. The proverbial sayings or rustic songs embodying the traditional peasant lore, such as the ‘Quid vesper serus vehit?’ and the ‘hiberno pulvere, verno luto, grandia farra, Camille, metes[297],’ which add an antique and homely charm to the poem, may have become known to Virgil from the book of the Sasernae, who are quoted by Varro as authorities for many of the old charms used by the primitive husbandmen, such as ‘Terra pestem teneto, salus hic maneto,’ which is to be repeated ‘ter novies.’ Servius notes that the words ‘sulco attritus splendescere vomer’ recall an old saying of Cato, ‘Vir bonus est, mi fili, colendi peritus, cuius ferramenta splendent[298].’ The notices of ceremonial observances, such as [pg 193]the account of the Ambarvalia, and the enumeration of things that might lawfully be done on holy days[299], were probably derived from the pontifical books and the sacred books of the other priestly colleges, of which Virgil made large use also in the Aeneid. In all the writers on practical farming, from Cato to Varro, he found that strong appreciation of the supreme worth of rural industry and that strong interest in its processes and results which justified him in identifying his subject with the thought of the national life.
Among the sources of literary inspiration from which Virgil drew in the Georgics, the oldest, and not the least abundant, was the ‘Works and Days’ of Hesiod. Yet a comparison of the two poems shows immediately that the Georgics do not, either in form or substance, stand in that close relation to their prototype, in which the Eclogues on the one hand, and the Aeneid on the other, stand to the idyls of Theocritus and to the epic poems of Homer. The immediate influence of Hesiod is most apparent in the first Book of the Georgics, in which the subject is treated in connexion with theological ideas; while in the second Book and in the later Books, in which the philosophical conception of Nature, though in subordination to the conception of a supreme Spiritual power, becomes more prominent, the spirit of Hesiod gives place to the spirit of Lucretius. There is, however, a real affinity between the primitive piety of the old Boeotian bard and the attitude in which Virgil contemplated the world, though the faith of Virgil has become more rational under the speculative teaching and enquiry which had taken the place of earlier modes of thought among the Greeks. Virgil is ever seeking to produce a poetical reconcilement between primitive tradition and more enlightened views both of moral and physical truth. Thus he introduces the old fable of the creation of the present race of men in immediate juxtaposition with the assertion of the ‘laws and eternal conditions imposed by Nature on certain places.’ He accepts the belief in a Golden Age and in the blight which fell on the [pg 194]world under the dispensation of Jove; but he regards this blight as sent, not in anger, but as a discipline and incentive to exertion. He describes the natural progress of the various arts of life under this stimulus, but still leaves room for divine intervention in the more important discoveries:—
Prima Ceres ferro mortalis vertere terram
Instituit[300].