The Intention of Virgil's Georgics

Extract

Many and various have been the approaches to Virgil's Georgics. Dryden once stated roundly that they were ‘the best poem of the best poet’. The director of a well-known botanical garden maintains, rather oddly, that they are the best thing for starting boys on botany. It is worth while to try to discover what Virgil himself thought he was doing, and for what readers he intended his poem.

Let me first recall the circumstances of his upbringing. He spent his childhood on his father's farm, amid the sights and sounds and smells of the country. But by his fifteenth year he was sent to school at Cremona, and from there on to Milan, after which he completed his studies at Rome and near Naples. There is every indication that his bent was for literature and philosophic speculation, and no good evidence that he was ever himself a farmer. By 37–6 B.C., when he was 33, he was already established as a poet, and with Varius had become the nucleus of Maecenas’ circle. He had run through the gamut of pastoral poetry, and was on the look-out for fresh woods and pastures new. His intense love of the country, attested in every line of the Georgics, would in itself suffice to account for his choice of subject, and the impact of Lucretius’ recent masterpiece for his choice of form.

At the close of his breathless baroque overture Virgil alleges pity for the ignorance of the rustic as his motive for writing, but that is simply part of the game.