the specification of lucky and unlucky days, the reference to the old Greek fables of Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus, are, though not directly imitated from Hesiod, yet conceived in his spirit.
But, besides appealing to primitive religious and mythological associations, the poet of Andes aims at reproducing some flavour of the sentiment of a remote antiquity and of the quaint naïveté characteristic of the sage of Ascra. The very use of such an expression as ‘quo sidere terram Vertere,’[pg 195]—the thought of the husbandman’s labours as being regulated not by the Roman Calendar[302], with its prosaic divisions of the month by kalends, nones, and ides, but by the rise and setting of the constellations,—the picturesque signs of the change of the seasons, as in the line
Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris[303],—
the use of such quaint expressions as ‘nudus ara, sere nudus,’—seem all intended to remind the reader that the subject is one ‘antiquae laudis et artis,’—the most ancient and unchanging of the great arts of life,—that too in which man’s dependence on Nature and the Spiritual power above Nature is most vividly realised[304]. This infusion into the practical realities and prosaic details of his subject of something of the wonder and ‘freshness of the early world’ Virgil derives from the relation which he establishes between himself and his Boeotian prototype.
Though in spirit and poetical inspiration Virgil’s debt to Hesiod is greater, yet the Georgics present more direct traces of imitation of the Alexandrine poets. It is in accordance with the learning and science of Alexandria that the subject is illustrated by local epithets, such as ‘Strymoniae grues,’ by reference to the products of distant lands—
nonne vides croceos ut Tmolus odores, etc.,—
by recondite mythological and astronomical allusions and by the substitution of the names of various deities, such as Liber and Ceres, for the natural products which were supposed to be [pg 196]their gifts. But to several special authors his debt is more direct. Thus the passage, i. 233—
Quinque tenent caelum zonae, etc.,—
is copied from Eratosthenes. The account of the signs of the weather, from i. 355 to 465, is taken from the Διοσημεῖα of Aratus, a work so popular at Rome, that it was not only imitated and almost incorporated in his poem by Virgil, but had been translated by Cicero in his youth, and was subsequently translated by Germanicus. Again, the description at iii. 425, of the dangerous serpent that haunts the Calabrian pastures, is closely imitated from the extant Θηριακά of Nicander; nor can we doubt that there were in the fourth Book imitations of the lost Μελισσουργικά of the same author, who probably anticipated Virgil in the use which he made of Aristotle’s observations on the habits of bees.
A comparison of the passages in the Georgics with those of which they are imitations produces the impression not only of Virgil’s immense superiority as a poet over the Alexandrine Metaphrastae, but of the immense superiority of the Latin hexameter, as an organ for expressing the beauty and power of Nature, over the exotic jargon and unmusical jingle which those writers compounded out of their epic studies and their scientific nomenclature. To take one or two instances of Virgil’s imitations from these writers:—in the passage Georg. i. 233–246, Virgil reproduces very closely scientific statements of Eratosthenes and Aratus. But of the five lines which follow—