The Georgics

Overview

Composed

Probably between about 37 and 29 BC; ancient biography says Virgil spent seven years on it and read it to Octavian at Atella in the summer of 29 BC, after Actium

Genre

Didactic poem: verse instruction in farming, addressed to a patron and, nominally, to the farmer

Metre

Latin dactylic hexameter, the metre of Hesiod, Aratus and Lucretius as well as of Homer

Length

4 books, about 2,190 lines of Latin (514, 542, 566 and 566 lines)

Subject

Book 1, crops and the weather; Book 2, trees, especially the vine and olive; Book 3, cattle, horses, sheep and goats; Book 4, bees

Addressees

Maecenas, named at the opening of every book; Octavian, invoked as a god-to-be; and the farmer, the notional pupil

Models

Hesiod's Works and Days above all; also Aratus' Phaenomena, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, Hellenistic didactic poets and Roman prose writers on agriculture such as Varro

Speaker

A teaching voice that gives precepts, addresses the farmer as 'you', and repeatedly breaks off into digressions, prayers and confessions of his own ambitions

Structure

Technical instruction alternating with famous digressions; each book ends with a set piece: civil war (1), the farmer's life (2), the plague (3), Aristaeus and Orpheus (4)

Key themes

Labour and its limits; the Golden Age lost; Italy and Rome after civil war; love, disease and death in nature; the bee-state; poetry and its power over death

Context

Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC) was born near Mantua and had already made his name with the Eclogues, ten pastoral poems published around 38 BC, before he turned to the Georgics. The poem's title means 'matters of the farmer' (from the Greek georgos). The ancient Life by Donatus, which goes back to Suetonius, says that the work took seven years and that Virgil read it to Octavian at Atella in 29 BC, as the victor of Actium returned from the East, with Maecenas taking over the reading whenever the poet's voice failed. The details may be embroidered, but the date of completion is not seriously doubted: the poem's final lines describe Caesar 'thundering' in war by the Euphrates (Wilkinson 1969) (Thomas 1988).

The Georgics belongs to the ancient genre of didactic poetry, in which a teacher instructs a pupil in verse. Its chief model is Hesiod's Works and Days (about 700 BC), a poem of farming precepts and moral warning addressed to the poet's brother; Virgil acknowledges the debt when he promises to sing 'the song of Ascra', Hesiod's village, through the towns of Rome (2.176). Book 1's weather signs adapt the Phaenomena of Aratus, a Hellenistic poem on the stars, and the whole work is in constant conversation with Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, the great Latin didactic poem of the previous generation, whose Epicurean confidence in reason Virgil both admires and resists. The poem also draws on prose agricultural writers, among them Varro, whose dialogue On Agriculture appeared in 37 BC (Farrell 1991) (Gale 2000) (Thomas 1987).

The poem was written in the last phase of the Roman civil wars, between the confiscations of Italian land for veterans after Philippi (42 BC) and Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium (31 BC). Each book opens by naming Maecenas, Octavian's friend and political agent and Virgil's patron, and Book 1 invokes Octavian himself as a future god. The farm is therefore never only a farm: the restoration of the Italian countryside, emptied by war and conscription, was a political theme of the 30s, and the poem's picture of rural labour is shadowed by images of fields turned into battlefields and sickles beaten into swords (Nappa 2005) (Miles 1980).

The four books fall into two pairs, plants (1 and 2) and animals (3 and 4), and readers have long noticed a rhythm of darkness and light: Book 1 ends with civil war, Book 2 with the praise of country life, Book 3 with a plague that destroys the animals, and Book 4 with the rebirth of the bees. Within each book, instruction gives way to digressions, such as the myth of Jupiter and the end of the Golden Age, the praises of Italy, the power of love, the old gardener of Tarentum and the story of Orpheus, which carry much of the poem's meaning. Readers since antiquity have recognised that the poem is less a manual than a meditation on human life conducted through the language of agriculture (Wilkinson 1969) (Otis 1963).

The quotations in this guide come from two translations. John Dryden's version in heroic couplets appeared in his Works of Virgil (1697), with an essay on the Georgics by Joseph Addison; it is free, energetic and very much of its age, and it shaped the English 'georgic' poetry of the following century. H. Rushton Fairclough's Loeb prose translation (1916) keeps closer to the sense of the Latin and is quoted where precision matters. References are to the book and line numbers of the Latin text, not to the lines of either translation (Dryden 1697) (Fairclough 1916) (Low 1985).

Plot overview

The Georgics has no story in the ordinary sense; its 'plot' is the progress of the year's work and of the teacher's argument. Book 1 begins with the tasks of the ploughman: when to break the soil, how to rest and enrich it, which crops to rotate. A myth explains why work is necessary at all: Jupiter ended the easy Age of Saturn and made farming hard, so that need would sharpen human wits. After a calendar of lucky and unlucky days and a long catalogue of weather signs, the book turns to the signs that accompanied the murder of Julius Caesar and the civil wars that followed, and ends with a prayer to the gods of Rome to let the young Caesar save a world in chaos.

Book 2 treats trees, especially the vine and the olive, with instructions on propagation, grafting and the choice of soil. Into this Virgil sets the praises of Italy, a land richer than any fabled East, and a hymn to spring as the season of the world's birth. The book ends with the most famous passage in the poem, the blessing of farmers who, far from war, politics and luxury, live as the old Sabines and the founders of Rome once lived.

Book 3 turns to animals: the breeding of cattle and horses, the overwhelming power of sexual passion in all creatures, and the care of sheep and goats, with contrasting pictures of African nomads and of the Scythians in their frozen north. After advice on snakes and diseases, the book closes with an account of a plague among the animals of Noricum in the Alps, which kills every species and makes even sacrifice impossible.

Book 4 describes the bees: where to place a hive, how to call back a swarm, how bee-kingdoms make war, and the strange 'nature' of a society without sexual love whose race outlives every individual. If a farmer loses all his bees, he can produce new ones from the carcass of a slaughtered bullock, and Virgil explains the origin of this practice in a mythological narrative. The shepherd Aristaeus, his bees dead, consults his mother Cyrene and the sea-god Proteus, who tells him that he is being punished by Orpheus, whose wife Eurydice died fleeing him; Proteus narrates Orpheus' descent to the underworld, his fatal backward look and his death. Aristaeus makes sacrifice, and bees swarm from the bodies of the cattle. A short epilogue sets the poet, at leisure in Naples, beside Caesar conquering in the East.

Book by book

Characters

Speakers and addressees

The poet-teacher

The didactic voice of the poem, who instructs, warns, prays and digresses. He presents himself as a priest of the Muses who would like to know the causes of things but will settle for loving the countryside, and in the epilogue he names himself as Virgil, idling in Naples. Much of the poem's meaning depends on the gap between his confident precepts and the failures he describes (Volk 2002) (Perkell 1989).

Maecenas

Gaius Maecenas, Octavian's close friend and political agent and the patron of Virgil and Horace. He is named near the start of every book; in Book 3 the poet calls his commands 'not easy' (haud mollia iussa), a phrase that has fed debate about how far the poem was commissioned (Nappa 2005).

Octavian (Caesar)

The future Augustus, called 'Caesar' throughout. Book 1 invokes him as a god-to-be and ends with a prayer that he may save the age; Book 2 praises his eastern victories; the proem to Book 3 places him in the centre of a poetic temple; the epilogue shows him 'thundering' by the Euphrates. Readers disagree about how much of this praise is wholehearted (Nappa 2005) (Miles 1980).

Romans

Julius Caesar

Octavian's adoptive father, whose murder in 44 BC is accompanied in Book 1 by the sun's eclipse and a series of portents. His death leads directly into the poem's picture of civil war.

Mortals

The farmer

The notional pupil, addressed as 'you' and also described as the agricola, the colonus or the 'hardy youth'. He is sometimes a small farmer who works with his own hands, sometimes a landowner with slaves and estates; who he is meant to be, and whether the poem's real readers were farmers at all, remains an open question (Thibodeau 2011).

The old Corycian

An old man from Corycus in Cilicia whom the poet remembers seeing near Tarentum. On a few acres of poor land he grows vegetables, flowers, fruit and bees, and feels as rich as a king. He is the poem's most complete picture of contented labour (Thomas 1988).

Gods

Jupiter

The 'Father himself', who ended the Golden Age of Saturn and made farming hard so that need would teach men the arts. He also sends the weather and its signs, and gave the bees their nature as a reward for feeding him as an infant on Crete (Gale 2000).

Saturn

Jupiter's father and ruler of the Golden Age, when the earth gave its fruits unasked. Italy is the 'land of Saturn', and the farmer's life at the end of Book 2 is described as the life golden Saturn lived on earth.

Ceres and Bacchus

The goddess of grain and the god of wine, invoked at the opening of the poem and of Book 2. Ceres first taught men to plough with iron when the acorns failed. The farmer's year is punctuated by their festivals.

Animals

The bees

The subject of Book 4, described as a society with kings, citizens and armies. They hold property in common, reproduce without sexual love, and sacrifice themselves for the king; their race is immortal though each bee is short-lived. Ancient writers thought the leader of the hive was male, a 'king' (Griffin 1979).

The Aristaeus epyllion

Aristaeus

A shepherd and beekeeper, son of Apollo and the nymph Cyrene, who loses his bees and learns that he is being punished for causing Eurydice's death. He obeys instructions, offers sacrifice and is rewarded with a new swarm. Some readers see him as an image of the practical, pious Roman; others find him an unsympathetic beneficiary of others' suffering (Otis 1963) (Perkell 1989).

Cyrene

A water-nymph, Aristaeus' mother, who lives with her sisters in a palace beneath the river Peneus. She receives her son's complaint, as Thetis receives Akhilleus' in the Iliad, and tells him how to master Proteus and appease the nymphs.

Proteus

The prophetic old man of the sea, who knows past, present and future but must be seized and held through all his changes of shape before he will speak. His narrative of Orpheus forms the inner story of Book 4. The episode adapts Menelaus' encounter with Proteus in Odyssey 4.

Orpheus

The legendary singer of Thrace, whose song charms the powers of the underworld into releasing his wife. He loses her by looking back, mourns alone for seven months, rejects all other love and is torn apart by Thracian women. He is the poem's great image of the power and the limits of art (Parry 1972) (Griffin 1979).

Eurydice

Orpheus' wife, bitten by a snake as she fled from Aristaeus. Allowed to follow Orpheus back to the light, she is lost again when he turns; her last speech, as she is drawn back into the dark, is one of the most moving in Latin poetry.

Themes

Labour

Work is the poem's central subject. Virgil's version of the myth of the ages makes labour a deliberate condition of human life imposed by Jupiter, and the instructions that follow present farming as a never-ending struggle against weeds, pests, weather and the natural tendency of things to decline. The verdict 'labor omnia vicit improbus' (1.145–146) can be read as praise of human achievement or as a lament for a world dominated by toil (Altevogt 1952) (Thomas 1988).

The poem also shows labour succeeding: the grafted tree bears new fruit, the old Corycian makes a garden from poor soil, and Aristaeus regains his bees. Against these stand the plague of Book 3, against which all skill is useless, and the 'labor' of Orpheus, lost in a moment. Much of the critical debate about the Georgics is a debate about whether its picture of work is ultimately hopeful (Putnam 1979) (Gale 2000).

The Golden Age and its loss

The poem repeatedly measures the farmer's world against the Age of Saturn, when the earth gave freely and no one needed to work. Book 1 tells how that age ended; Book 2 suggests that something of it survives in Italy and in the countryside, where Justice left her last footprints; the epilogue's language of renewal and the propaganda of the age of Augustus held out the hope of its return. The poem never quite says whether that hope is realistic (Miles 1980) (Perkell 1989).

War, peace and Rome

The Georgics is a poem of peace written during civil war. Fields are deserted when the farmers are conscripted, sickles are beaten into swords, and the plough turns up the bones of the dead. Against this, Octavian is offered the role of saviour, and the praises of Italy celebrate the land as the mother of soldiers and heroes. The poem's images of order and disorder, from the runaway chariot to the bee-state, are also political images (Nappa 2005) (Griffin 1979).

Nature: order and violence

Nature in the Georgics is both a source of order, visible in the seasons, the stars and the signs of the weather, and a force of disorder: storms flatten the crops, love drives animals to frenzy, and disease destroys whole species. Virgil draws on Lucretius' account of a universe of atoms and natural causes, but his nature is also full of gods and of a sympathy that makes the sun 'pity' Rome. The tension between scientific explanation and religious feeling runs through the poem (Ross 1987) (Gale 2000).

Love and death

Sexual love is the great destructive force of Book 3, a madness that is 'the same for all'. In Book 4 the bees are exempt from it, and their society survives; Orpheus is ruled by it, and dies. The bugonia, in which new life comes from a dead body, closes the poem with an image of regeneration that depends on death, and it is still argued whether that image consoles or disturbs (Parry 1972) (Perkell 1989).

Poetry and the poet

Virgil keeps reflecting on his own art: as a successor to Hesiod and a rival of Lucretius, as a builder of a poetic temple to Caesar, as a writer who leaves gardens for others to describe, and, in the person of Orpheus, as a singer whose song can move the dead but cannot save what it loves. The poem is at once a didactic work and an argument about what poetry can do (Parry 1972) (Farrell 1991) (Volk 2002).

Smallness and greatness

A recurrent device of the poem is the comparison of small things to great: the bees' wars and cities are described in epic terms, the gardener on his few acres equals kings, and the great events of history are seen from the perspective of the field. Virgil himself uses the formula 'if one may compare small things with great' (4.176). The effect can ennoble the small or diminish the great, and often does both at once (Griffin 1979) (Wilkinson 1969).

Motifs

Signs

The farmer must learn to read signs: of the soil, the stars, the weather, the health of animals and bees. Book 1 extends the idea to history, when the sun's darkening signals the murder of Caesar. Reading the world correctly is the didactic poem's main lesson, but the signs are not always clear, and the plague of Book 3 makes the entrails of sacrifice illegible (Ross 1987).

Digression

Each book breaks away from instruction into extended set pieces: the myth of Jupiter, the portents, the praises of Italy and of country life, the temple, the power of love, the Scythian winter, the plague, the old Corycian, Orpheus. These digressions, and the way the poet abruptly returns from them, give the poem its shape (Wilkinson 1969) (Otis 1963).

Prayer and invocation

The poem is full of prayers: to the rural gods and Octavian at the start, to the native gods of Rome at the end of Book 1, to Bacchus and to the Muses in Book 2, and in the sacrifices of Aristaeus. They express the farmer's dependence on powers beyond his control, and their success or failure is part of the argument.

Fire, water and the elements

The four elements, fire, water, air and earth, are everywhere in the poem's descriptions of farming, from the burning of stubble to irrigation, and they take on philosophical weight through the influence of Lucretius and Empedocles. Proteus' transformations into flame, beast and river have been read as a figure for the changing elements of nature (Ross 1987).

The plough and the sword

The plough, emblem of peace and order, is repeatedly set against the weapons of war: the ploughman uncovers javelins and helmets, curved sickles are straightened into swords, and the ox at the plough dies of plague. The pairing condenses the poem's concern with peace and civil war (Nappa 2005).

Symbols

The runaway chariot

The simile that closes Book 1 pictures the world at war as a chariot whose horses ignore the reins. It stands for the failure of control, by farmer, ruler or poet, and it returns, reversed, in the chariot races of the Book 3 proem, where the poet himself is the driver.

The grafted tree

The tree that 'marvels' at fruit not its own (2.82) symbolises the farmer's power to transform nature, and perhaps also the poet's art of joining Greek forms to Roman matter. Its wonder carries a hint of the unnatural.

The bees

The bee-society of Book 4 has been read as an image of the ideal state, of Rome under Augustus, of the poet's community, and of immortality achieved by the race rather than the individual. Its lack of love and art makes it a model that is admirable but limited (Griffin 1979) (Perkell 1989).

The head of Orpheus

The severed head that still sings Eurydice's name as it floats down the river is the poem's most haunting image of the survival of song beyond death. It answers, in a darker key, the bugonia's promise of life from death (Parry 1972).

Critical debates

Optimist and pessimist readings

Mid-twentieth-century critics such as Friedrich Klingner, Brooks Otis and L. P. Wilkinson read the Georgics as a poem of affirmation: labour, piety and the leadership of Octavian bring order out of chaos, and the regeneration of the bees at the end confirms that loss can be overcome. Otis saw the poem's design as moving from darkness to light in a structured sequence (Klingner 1963) (Otis 1963) (Wilkinson 1969).

From the 1970s Michael Putnam, David Ross and Richard Thomas developed a darker reading, parallel to the 'pessimistic' readings of the Aeneid. On this view nature resists human control, labour brings only temporary success, the praises of Italy and of country life are idealisations contradicted by the rest of the poem, and the plague and the death of Orpheus outweigh the rebirth of the bees. Thomas's commentary in particular reads the instructions themselves as full of violence and failure (Putnam 1979) (Ross 1987) (Thomas 1988).

Other scholars, including Gary Miles and Christine Perkell, stress that the poem holds opposing views in tension rather than resolving them, and that its ambiguity is part of its meaning. More recent work, such as Monica Gale's study of Lucretius in the poem, tends to see an argument conducted between competing world-views rather than a single verdict (Miles 1980) (Perkell 1989) (Gale 2000).

What does labor improbus mean?

The phrase at 1.145–146 has been debated more than any other in the poem. Improbus can describe something that knows no limit (relentless, insatiable) or something morally bad (wicked, shameless), and labor can mean effort or hardship. A positive reading, influential in German scholarship and set out in Heinrich Altevogt's monograph, takes the line as praise of the toil that conquers all obstacles; others hear a negative judgement, in which labour has 'overcome' human life as an enemy might (Altevogt 1952) (Klingner 1963).

The tense also matters: 'vicit' is a perfect, and may describe what happened once, after Jupiter's reign began, or state a general truth. Richard Thomas reads the context as a bleak account of the end of the Golden Age, while Monica Gale and others relate it to Lucretius' ambivalent history of human progress. Most recent critics accept that the ambiguity is deliberate (Thomas 1988) (Gale 2000).

Is the Georgics a farming manual?

Ancient readers already debated whether Virgil's precepts were practically useful, and Seneca remarked that Virgil aimed at what was said most beautifully, not most truly. Much of the information comes from earlier writers rather than experience, and Thomas has shown how closely Virgil works from prose sources such as Theophrastus and Varro while transforming them (Thomas 1987) (Wilkinson 1969).

Modern scholarship has therefore asked who the poem's audience was. Katharina Volk treats didactic poetry as a genre defined by its fiction of teaching rather than by real instruction, and Philip Thibodeau argues that the poem was written for elite landowners who enjoyed imagining themselves as working farmers, 'playing the farmer'. The practical surface and the poetic meaning are now usually seen as inseparable (Volk 2002) (Thibodeau 2011) (Batstone 1997).

The poem and Octavian

The Georgics was finished in the years when Octavian became sole ruler, and its praise of him is lavish. Earlier critics often read the poem as support for a programme of agricultural revival sponsored by Octavian and Maecenas, though there is little evidence for such a programme, and the ancient story that Maecenas commissioned the poem rests mainly on the phrase 'haud mollia iussa' (3.41) (Wilkinson 1969) (Griffin 1979).

More recent work emphasises that the poem was written over years of uncertainty and that its picture of Octavian changes from book to book. Christopher Nappa reads the Georgics as a poem of advice and warning addressed to a ruler whose character was not yet settled, while Jasper Griffin connects the bee-state of Book 4 with Roman ideas of the citizen's subordination to the community (Nappa 2005) (Griffin 1979) (Miles 1980).

Aristaeus or Orpheus?

The ending of Book 4 juxtaposes two figures. Aristaeus, guilty of causing Eurydice's death, obeys his mother and the gods and regains his bees; Orpheus, the innocent poet, loses everything. Otis and others read Aristaeus as the poem's model, the pious worker whose ritual secures the regeneration of life, and the Orpheus story as a warning against unrestrained passion (Otis 1963).

Adam Parry, Jasper Griffin and Christine Perkell, among others, find the emotional weight of the episode on Orpheus' side. For Parry the story is a reflection on the power of art to give lasting form to loss; for Griffin the contrast sets the collective, impersonal values of Rome against individual love and grief; for Perkell the poet himself is figured in Orpheus. Joseph Farrell shows how the episode shifts the poem's models from Hesiod to Homer, preparing the way for epic (Parry 1972) (Griffin 1979) (Perkell 1989) (Farrell 1991).

The 'laudes Galli'

Servius, the fourth-century commentator, states in two notes (on Eclogue 10 and on Georgics 4.1) that the second half of Book 4 once contained praise of Cornelius Gallus, the elegiac poet and Virgil's friend, who as prefect of Egypt fell from Octavian's favour and killed himself in 27 or 26 BC; Virgil, he says, replaced it with the story of Aristaeus at Octavian's command (Thomas 1988) (Mynors 1990).

Most modern scholars reject the claim. The surviving poem was complete by 29 BC, the epyllion is carefully integrated with the rest of the book, and a substitution after 26 BC would imply a second edition of which there is no other trace. A minority have accepted some version of the story, and the question remains a classic example of the problems of ancient biographical evidence (Wilkinson 1969) (Griffin 1979).

Virgil and Lucretius

Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, an Epicurean poem promising freedom from fear through knowledge of natural causes, is the nearest Latin model for the Georgics. Virgil echoes it in his language and structure, praises the man who 'knows the causes of things' (2.490) and ends Book 3 with a plague modelled on the one that closes Lucretius' poem (Gale 2000) (Farrell 1991).

Critics disagree about the attitude this implies. Some see Virgil as moving away from Epicurean rationalism toward traditional religion and Stoic ideas, as in the bees' 'share of the divine mind'; Gale argues that the poem stages a dialogue between Lucretian and non-Lucretian views without fully endorsing either, and Ross reads its natural science as a key to its meaning (Gale 2000) (Ross 1987).

Dryden and the English georgic

Dryden's translation of 1697, prefaced by Joseph Addison's essay on the Georgics, gave English readers a Virgil in heroic couplets, and the poem became a model for a long line of English poems on rural work and landscape, among them John Philips's Cyder and James Thomson's The Seasons. Anthony Low has argued that the georgic ethic of hard work had already become a significant force in seventeenth-century English poetry and thought (Dryden 1697) (Low 1985).

Dryden's version is a free translation that often expands and modernises the Latin, as in the parliamentary 'Lords and Commoners' he introduces into Book 2. It is a valuable record of how the poem was read at the end of the seventeenth century, but students should check its sense against a closer translation such as Fairclough's (Fairclough 1916).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does Jupiter make farming hard in Book 1, and is his decision presented as a punishment or a gift?

   Read the myth at 1.118–146 and compare Hesiod's account of Prometheus and the ages in the Works and Days. Consider the phrase 'sharpening mortal hearts with cares' and the ambiguity of 'labor improbus'.

2. How does Book 1 move from weather signs to civil war, and what is the effect of ending with the runaway chariot?

   Trace the transition through the sun's signs (1.463ff.) and the portents of Caesar's death. Ask what the farmer, the ruler and the reader are being taught to 'read'.

3. Are the praises of Italy in Book 2 realistic, idealised or both?

   Compare the claims of perpetual spring and double harvests (2.149–150) with the instructions on hard work in Books 1 and 2. Consider the ethnographic tradition of praising distant lands.

4. What kind of happiness does the end of Book 2 offer, and why does Virgil distinguish two kinds of 'blessed' men?

   Compare 'felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas' (2.490) with 'fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis' (2.493). Who is the first figure, and why might the poet choose the second?

5. How does the proem to Book 3 present the relationship between the poet and Caesar?

   Look at who triumphs in the imagined games and who stands in the temple. Consider the promise of a future epic and the reference to Maecenas' 'not easy' commands.

6. Why does Book 3 end with the plague of Noricum, and how does Virgil's plague differ from Lucretius'?

   Lucretius ends his poem with a human plague at Athens. Consider the failure of sacrifice and medicine, the bullock that dies at the plough, and where Book 3 leaves the farmer.

7. Is the bee-society of Book 4 an ideal state?

   List its virtues (common property, division of labour, loyalty to the king) and what it lacks (love, individual art). Consider the mock-epic battle and the bees' immortality as a race.

8. What is the function of the old Corycian gardener in Book 4?

   Compare him with the farmer at the end of Book 2 and with the bees that follow. Note that the poet claims he has no room to describe gardens.

9. Compare Aristaeus and Orpheus. Which of them is the poem's model, and is the question a fair one?

   Consider guilt and innocence, obedience and passion, success and failure. Read the debate between Otis on the one hand and Parry, Griffin and Perkell on the other.

10. How does Dryden's translation change the Georgics, and what can it tell us about its English readers in 1697?

    Compare one passage in Dryden and Fairclough (for example 1.145–146, 2.458–474 or 4.132–133). Look for expansions, moralising and modern references such as the 'Lords and Commoners' in Book 2.

Further reading

• Altevogt, Heinrich. Labor improbus: Eine Vergilstudie. Münster: Aschendorff, 1952.
• Batstone, William W. "Virgilian Didaxis: Value and Meaning in the Georgics." In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale, 125–144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Dryden, John, trans. The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. London: Jacob Tonson, 1697.
• Fairclough, H. Rushton, trans. Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1916.
• Farrell, Joseph. Vergil's Georgics and the Traditions of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Gale, Monica R. Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Griffin, Jasper. "The Fourth Georgic, Virgil, and Rome." Greece & Rome 26.1 (1979): 61–80.
• Klingner, Friedrich. Virgils Georgica. Zürich: Artemis, 1963.
• Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
• Miles, Gary B. Virgil's Georgics: A New Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
• Mynors, R. A. B., ed. Virgil: Georgics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Nappa, Christopher. Reading after Actium: Vergil's Georgics, Octavian, and Rome. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
• Otis, Brooks. Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
• Parry, Adam. "The Idea of Art in Virgil's Georgics." Arethusa 5.1 (1972): 35–52.
• Perkell, Christine G. The Poet's Truth: A Study of the Poet in Virgil's Georgics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
• Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Ross, David O., Jr. Virgil's Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
• Thibodeau, Philip. Playing the Farmer: Representations of Rural Life in Vergil's Georgics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
• Thomas, Richard F. Lands and Peoples in Roman Poetry: The Ethnographical Tradition. Cambridge Philological Society Supplementary Volume 7. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1982.
• Thomas, Richard F. "Prose into Poetry: Tradition and Meaning in Virgil's Georgics." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 91 (1987): 229–260.
• Thomas, Richard F., ed. Virgil: Georgics. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Volk, Katharina. The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Wilkinson, L. P. The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.