But before proceeding further it is well to inquire in what sense the Georgics can be called didactic. What is the essential teaching of the poem, and to whom is that teaching addressed? In outward form it professes to instruct the bewildered farmers, suffering at the time from effects of the recent civil wars as well as from economic difficulties of old standing; and to convey sound precepts for the conduct of agriculture in its various branches. But there is little doubt that the precepts are all or most of them taken directly from earlier[867] writers, Roman or Greek; and we may reasonably suppose that most of them (and those the most practical ones) were well known to the very classes most concerned in their application. It is absurd to suppose that agricultural tradition had utterly died out. The real difficulty was to put it in practice. Now, what class of farmers were to be benefited by the new poem? Was the peasant of the uplands, soaked in hereditary experience, to learn his business over again with the help of the poet-laureate’s fascinating verse? Surely he spoke a rustic[868] Latin, and sometimes hardly that. Was it likely that he would gradually absorb the doctrines of the Vergilian compendium, offered in the most refined language and metre of literary Rome? It is surely inconceivable. Nor can we assume that any remaining intensive farmers of the Campanian plain were in much need of practical instruction: what was needed there was a respite from the unsettling disturbances of the revolutionary period. To suggest that a part of the poet’s design was to supply much-needed teaching to the new coloni from the disbanded armies, would be grotesque in any case, and above all in that of Vergil. If we are to find a class of men to whom the finished literary art of the Georgics would appeal, and who might profit by the doctrines so attractively conveyed, we must seek them in social strata[869] possessed of education enough to appreciate the poem and sympathize with its general tone. Now all or most of such persons would be well-to-do people, owners of property, often of landed property: people of more or less leisure: in short, the cultured class, whose centre was Rome. These people would view with favour any proposal for the benefit of Italian agriculture. Many landowners at the time had got large estates cheaply in the time of troubles, and to them anything likely to improve the value of their lands, and to draw a curtain of returning prosperity over a questionable past, would doubtless be welcome. They would applaud the subtle grace with which the poet glorified the duty and profit of personal labour. But that they meant to work with their own hands I cannot believe. In the true spirit of their age, they would as a matter of course take the profit, and delegate the duty to others.
Two alternatives[870] presented themselves to a landowner. He might let his estate whole or in parcels to a tenant or tenants. Or he might work it for his own account, either under his own resident direction, or through the agency of a steward. All the evidence bearing on the revolutionary period tends to shew that the resident landlord of a considerable estate, farming his own land, was a very rare type indeed. It was found most convenient as a general rule to let an out-of-the-way farm to a cultivating tenant at a money rent or on a sharing system. A more accessible one was generally put under a steward and so kept in hand by the owner. The dwelling-house was in such cases improved so as to be a fit residence for the proprietor on his occasional visits. Growing luxury often carried this change to an extreme, and made the villa a ‘place in the country,’ a scene of intermittent extravagance, not of steady income-producing thrift. True, it seems that the crude and wasteful system of the earlier latifundia had been a good deal modified by the end of the Republic. A wealthy man preferred to own several estates of moderate size situated near main routes of traffic. But this plan required more stewards. And the steward (vilicus), himself a slave, was the head of a slave-staff proportioned to the size of the farm. Now the public effectually reached by the Georgics may be supposed to have included the landowners of education and leisure, whether they let their land to tenants or kept it in hand. I cannot believe that the coloni farming hired land[871] came under the poet’s influence. In other words, the Georgics, in so far as the poem made its way beyond purely literary circles, appealed chiefly if not wholly to a class dependent on slave-labour in every department of their lives.
Maecenas, to whom the poem is in form addressed, had put pressure on Vergil to write it. At the back of Maecenas was the new Emperor, anxious to enlist all the talents in the service of the new dispensation. The revival of rural Italy was one of the praiseworthy projects of the Emperor and his confidential minister. It was indeed on every ground manifestly desirable. But was it possible now to turn Romans of property into working farmers? Would the man-about-Rome leave urban pleasures for the plough-tail? Not he! Nor are we to assume that Augustus was fool enough to expect it. Then what about Maecenas? His enjoyment of luxurious ease[872] was a byword: that he retained his native commonsense under such conditions is one of his chief titles to fame. No one can have expected him to wield the spade and mattock or spread manure. The poet writing with such a man for patron and prompter was not likely to find his precepts enjoining personal labour taken too seriously. His readers were living in a social and moral atmosphere in which to do anything involving labour meant ordering a slave to do it. That the Emperor wished to see more people interested in the revival of Italian agriculture was well understood. But this interest could be shown by investing capital in Italian land; and this is what many undoubtedly did. Recent proscriptions and confiscations had thrown numbers of estates on the market. It was possible to get a good bargain and at the same time win the favour of the new ruler by a well-timed proof of confidence in the stability of the new government. Now it is to say the least remarkable that Dion Cassius, doubtless following earlier authorities, puts into the mouth of Maecenas some suggestions[873] on this very subject. After advising the Emperor to raise a standing army by enlisting the able-bodied unemployed men in Italy, and pointing out that with the security thus gained, and the provision of a harmless career for the sturdy wastrels who were at present a cause of disorders, agriculture and commerce would revive, he proceeds as follows. For these measures money will be needed, as it would under any government: therefore the necessity of some exactions must be faced. ‘The very first thing[874] then for you to do is to have a sale of the confiscated properties, of which there are many owing to the wars, reserving only a few that are specially useful or indispensable for your purposes: and then to employ all the money so raised by lending it out at moderate interest. If you do this, the land will be under cultivation (ἐνεργός), being placed in the hands of owners who themselves work (δεσπόταις αὐτουργοῖς δοθεῖσα): they will become more prosperous, having the disposal of capital: and the treasury will have a sufficient and perpetual income.’ He then urges the necessity of preparing a complete budget estimate of regular receipts from the above and other sources, and of the prospective regular charges both military and civil, with allowance for unforeseen contingencies. ‘And your next step should be to provide for any deficit by imposing a tax on all properties whatsoever that bring a profit (ἐπικαρπίαν τινὰ) to the owner, and by a system of tributary dues in all our subject provinces.’
That this long oration attributed by Dion to Maecenas is in great part made up from details of the policy actually followed by the Emperor, is I believe generally admitted. But I am not aware that the universal income-tax suggested was imposed. The policy of encouraging agriculture certainly formed part of the imperial scheme, and the function of the Georgics was to bring the power of literature to bear in support of the movement. The poet could hardly help referring in some way to the crying need of a great agricultural revival. He did it with consummate skill. He did not begin by enlarging on the calamities of the recent past, and then proceed to offer his remedies. Such a method would at once have aroused suspicion and ill-feeling. No, he waited till he was able to glide easily into a noble passage in which he speaks of the civil wars as a sort of doom sanctioned by the heavenly powers. No party could take offence at this way of putting it. Then he cries aloud to the Roman gods, not to prevent the man of the hour (hunc iuvenem) from coming to the relief of a ruined generation. The needs of the moment are such that we cannot do without him. The world is full of wickedness and wars: ‘the plough is not respected as it should be; the tillers of the soil have been drafted away, and the land is gone to weeds; the crooked sickles are being forged into straight swords.’ The passage comes at the end of the first book, following a series of precepts delivered coolly and calmly as though in a social atmosphere of perfect peace. The tone in which the words recall the reader to present realities, and subtly hint at the obvious duty of supporting the one possible restorer of Roman greatness, is an unsurpassed feat of literary art. It is followed up at the end of the second book in another famous passage, in which he preaches with equal delicacy the doctrine that agricultural revival is the one sure road not only to personal happiness but to the true greatness of the Roman people.
That this revival was bound up with the return to a system of farming on a smaller scale, implying more direct personal attention on the landlord’s part, is obvious. But the poet goes further. His model farmer is to be convinced of the necessity and benefit of personal labour, and so to put his own hand to the plough. The glorification of unyielding toil[875] as the true secret of success was (and is) a congenial topic to preachers of the gospel of ‘back to the land.’ It may well be that the thoughtful Vergil had misgivings as to the fruitfulness of his doctrine. A cynical critic might hint that it was easy enough for one man to urge others to work. But a man like Maecenas would smile at such remarks. To set other people to do what he would never dream of doing himself was to him the most natural thing in the world. So the pressure of the patron on the poet continued, and the Georgics were born.
Let me now turn to certain passages of the poem in which farm-labour is directly referred to, and see how far the status of the labourers can be judged from the expressions used and the context. And first of aratores. In I 494 and II 513 the agricola is a plowman; free, for all that appears to the contrary. In II 207, where he appears as clearing off wood[876] and ploughing up the land, the arator is called iratus: this can hardly apply to an indifferent slave. The arator of I 261, represented as turning the leisure enforced by bad weather to useful indoor work, odd jobs in iron and wood work etc, may be one of a slave-staff whom his master will not have idle. Or he may be the farmer himself. The scene implies the presence of a staff of some kind, driven indoors by the rain. And that the poet is not thinking of a solitary peasant is further indicated by mention of sheep-washing, certainly not a ‘one-man-job,’ in line 272. Why Conington (after Heyne) takes agitator aselli in 273 to be ‘the peasant who happens to drive the ass to market,’ and not an asinarius doing his regular duty, I cannot say. On III 402, a very similar passage, he takes the pastor to be probably the farm-slave, not the owner, adding ‘though it is not always easy to see for what class of men Virgil is writing.’ A remark which shews that my present inquiry is not uncalled for. To return, there is nothing to shew whether the ass-driver is a freeman or a slave. Nor is the status of messores[877] clear. In I 316-7 the farmer brings the mower on to the yellow fields; that is, he orders his hands to put in the sickle. What is their relation to him we do not hear. So too in II 410 postremus metito is a precept addressed to the farmer as farmer, not as potential labourer. On the other hand the messores in the second and third eclogues seem to be slaves, for there is reference to domini in both poems.
The fossor is in literature the personification of mere heavy manual labour. In default of evidence to the contrary, we must suppose him to be normally[878] a slave. Thus the fossor of Horace odes III 18 is probably one of the famuli operum soluti of the preceding ode. But the brawny digger of Georgics II 264, who aids nature’s work by stirring and loosening the caked earth, is left on a neutral footing. Nothing is said. The reader must judge whether this silence is the result of pure inadvertency. That pastores very often means slave-herdsmen, is well known. But Vergil seems to attribute to them a more real and intelligent interest in the welfare of their charge than it is reasonable to expect from rustic slaves. The pastores of IV 278, who gather the medicinal herb used in the treatment of bees, may be slaves: if so, they are not mere thoughtless animals. And the scene is in the Cisalpine, where we have noted that slavery was probably of a mild type. In III 420 the pastor is called upon to protect his beasts from snakes. But we know[879] that it was a part of slave-herdsmen’s duty to fight beasts of prey, and that they were commonly armed for that purpose. In III 455 we find him shrinking from a little act of veterinary surgery, which the context suggests he ought to perform. But we know that the magister pecoris on a farm was instructed[880] in simple veterinary practice, and it is hardly likely that other slaves, specially put in charge of beasts, had no instructions. The pastores (if more than one, the chief,) appear as pecorum magistri (II 529, III 445, cf Buc III 101), a regular name for shepherds: they are not the same as the magistri of III 549, who are veterinary specialists disguised under mythical names. In II 529-31 we have a holiday scene, in which the farmer (ipse) treats the pecoris magistri to a match of wrestling and throwing the javelin. If slaves are meant, then Vergil is surely carrying back rustic slavery to early days as part and parcel of the ‘good old times’ to which he points in the following lines hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini etc. The ipse will then be a genial farmer of the old school, whose slaves are very different from the degraded and sullen chattels of more recent years. But in this as in other cases the poet gives us no clear sign.
A passage[881] in which the reticence of which I am speaking has a peculiar effect occurs in the description of the grievous murrain that visited northern Italy some time before. One of a pair of oxen falls dead while drawing the plough. The tristis arator[882] unyokes the other, sorrow-stricken at the death of its fellow; he leaves the plough where it stopped, and goes his way. Then follows a piece of highly-wrought pathos[883] describing the dejection and collapse of the surviving ox. ‘What now avail him his toil or his services, his past work in turning up the heavy land with the ploughshare?’ And the hardness of the poor beast’s lot is emphasized by the reflexion that disease in cattle is not induced by gluttony and wine-bibbing, as it often is in the case of mankind, nor by the worries (cura) that rob men of refreshing sleep. This much-admired passage may remind us of the high value set upon the ox in ancient Italy, traditionally amounting to a kind of sanctity; for it is said[884] that to kill an ox was as great a crime as to kill a man. We may wonder too what the luxurious but responsible Maecenas thought of the lines contrasting the simple diet and untroubled life of the ox with the excesses and anxieties of man. But, if civilization owed much to the labours of the ox, and if gratitude was due to man’s patient helper, what about the human slave? Is it not a remarkable thing that the Georgics contain not a word of appreciative reference to the myriads of toiling bondsmen whose sweat and sufferings had been exploited by Roman landlords for at least 150 years? Can this silence on the part of a poet who credits an ox with human affection be regarded as a merely accidental omission?
Of poets in general it may I think be truly said that the relation between the singer and his vocabulary varies greatly in various cases. Personal judgments are very fallible: but to me, the more I read Vergil, the more I see in him an extreme case of the poet ever nervously on his guard[885] against expressing or suggesting any meaning or shade of meaning beyond that which at a given moment he wishes to convey. This is no original discovery. But in reaching it independently I have become further convinced that the limitations of his vocabulary are evidence of nice and deliberate selection. The number of well-established Latin words, adaptable to verse and to the expression of ideas certain to occur, that are used by other poets of note but not by him, is considerable. I have a long list: here I will mention only one, the adjective vagus. The word may have carried to him associations below the pure dignity of his finished style. Yet Horace used it freely in the Odes, and Horace was surely no hasty hack careless of propriety, and no mean judge of what was proper. Now, when I turn to the Georgics, Vergil’s most finished work, I am struck by the absence of certain words the presence of which would seem natural, or even to be expected, in any work professedly treating of agriculture in Roman Italy. Thus servus does not occur at all, serva in the Aeneid only, and servitium in the strict sense only Buc I 40 and Aen III 327. In Georg III 167-8 ubi libera colla servitio adsuerint he is speaking of the breaking-in of young oxen[886] in figurative language. So too dominus and domina occur in the Bucolics and Aeneid but not in the Georgics. The case of opera and the plural operae may seem to be on a somewhat different footing in so far as the special sense of opera = ‘the average day’s work[887] of a labourer’ would perhaps have too technical and prosaic a flavour. In the single instance (Aen VII 331-2), where it occurs in the familiar phrase da operam, it is coupled with laborem, which rather suggests a certain timidity in the use of a colloquial expression. The plural, frequent in the writers on agriculture, he does not use at all, whether because he avoids the statistical estimates in which it most naturally comes, or from sheer fastidiousness due to the disreputable associations of operae in political slang. Perhaps neither of these reasons is quite enough to account for the absence of the word from the Georgics. That famulus and famula occur in the Aeneid only is not surprising, for they represent the δμῶες and δμωαὶ of Greek heroic poetry. But famula appears in the Moretum, of which I will speak below.