In Our Time - Virgil's Georgics

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

In the year 29 BC the great Roman poet Virgil published these lines: Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death. But happy too is he who knows the rural gods…They’re from his poem the Georgics, a detailed account of farming life in the Italy of the time. ‘Georgics’ means ‘agricultural things’, and it’s often been read as a farming manual. But it was written at a moment when the Roman world was emerging from a period of civil war, and questions of land ownership and management were heavily contested. It’s also a philosophical reflection on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, the ravages of time, and the politics of Virgil’s day. It’s exerted a profound influence on European writing about agriculture and rural life, and has much to offer environmental thinking today. With Katharine Earnshaw Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter; Neville Morley Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of ExeterandDiana Spencer Professor of Classics at the University of BirminghamProducer: Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in the year 29 BC, the great Roman poet Virgil published these lines. Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature's working, has cast beneath his feet all fear,

and fate's implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable death, but happy too is he who knows the rural gods. There from his poem, the Georgics, a detailed account of the farming life in Italy at the time. Georgics means agricultural things, and it's often been read as a farming manual. But in 29 BC, the Roman world was emerging

from a period of civil war, and questions of land ownership, and management were heavily contested. It's also a philosoph. philosophical reflection on humanity's relation with the natural world, the changes, the ravages of time, and the politics of Virgil's day. The Georgics has exerted a profound influence on European writing about agriculture and rural life. With me to discuss Virgil's Georgics are Catherine Earnshaw, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter,

Neville Morley, Professor of Classics and Ancient History, also at the University of Exeter, and Diana Spencer, Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham. Deanna Spencer, what do we know about Virgil's early life? Well, we're lucky to have a life of Virgil, written by Swetonius, so writing in the first century AD more or less. So we actually know more about Virgil's life than we might about other authors from that era. We believe he was born in 70 BC in a small town probably near Mantua in northern Italy, his Alpine Gaul, as it was at the time.

His parents were probably farmers, smallholders of some sort of. sort. He went to Cremona to study as a young boy and then on to Milan to do a kind of higher education and then eventually to Rome probably in around 52 BC. So he's arriving in Rome at quite a turbulent moment in Roman history and he doesn't seem to have thrived particularly in that kind of hurly-burly although he went there to study rhetoric. As far as we can tell, he moved fairly soon to Naples probably in order to continue studying philosophy. He worked with some of the great Epicurean philosophers of the era. He probably fairly soon starts to write the Georgics.

As far as we can tell, the Georgics are emerging out of that, the period of the 30s, which is continuing civil war, and they emerge probably finally at some time in the early 20s. So the Georgics are a product of his kind of middle years, one might say, but he is very much involved with the cultural movements of the day. So he becomes closely aligned with Mycena, the name that will probably come up as we're talking, whose cultural figure attached to Augustus.

Augustus the Emperor. Augustus the Emperor, exactly. He got to know the movies and shakers, because this kind of intellectual world was very closely aligned with political change in Rome as well. You mentioned civil war. So civil war is fracturing everything. And people need to understand what might make sense of that.

And I suppose Epicurean is, which is a philosophical model that filters through the Georgics in many respects as well as the Aeneid Epicureanism was giving some of these people who were key political figures a way of articulating how one might gain stability and peace out of this era of bloodshed. So let's get, he writes the Georgics. He by that time has got a patron, Messinas,

who is close to Octavian who becomes Augustus, the emperor. Absolutely in 27. So he said very, very well connected. Yes. And very, very well supported. Yes. Even though he doesn't take a big part in the politics of the time, he's very near the politics of the time.

And he's well able, as we know, from the Georgics and other works, to reflect and refract them whenever he wants to do that. He writes in the hexameter form, which is the epic form, which would seem a bit strange for a book about agriculture and human beings. Could you give us some idea of the hexameter form? sammy to form. And then in Latin first and then in English, it's a big ask. There you go. I'm sure you can do it. Okay, I'll give you a go at the first line of the book one of the Georgics. Quid faciat latas segetes, quosidere teram vertere, maikenas,

ulmisque adjunge wittis conveniat. So that takes us to the sort of the end of the first clause. And what you will have noticed there talking about Mycinas is that his name crops up, so he's a dedicatee of the poem. So the beginnings of poems are very important in classical antiquity. So what does that say? What that is asking us to consider is what do the happy crops do? What is it that allows the turning of the seasons, the turning of the skies and the stars, and he addresses it to Mycenae, what are the ways in which these things are able to ensure that the crops thrive? So how does the cosmos ensure through its turnings, through the rolling of time, how does this ensure that the crops are able to thrive and therefore human

mankind to survive. So no small ambition. How does the whole thing work? How does the whole thing work? Neville, can you tell us something about the part that farming plays in Roman society, both before he wrote the Georgics and then, as he is writing on afterwards? Farming agriculture is absolutely basic to any pre-modern society. The land is the primary source of wealth, it's the source of food, but also certainly the Romans place it at the heart of their culture as well. So one of the images of the ideal Roman becomes the peasant soldier.

Peasant soldier. Well, peasant soldier, but actually extended to the level of the nobility as well. So one of the sort of the great culture heroes of the Romans is a man called Cincinnati. You know, he's basically legendary, but the story is repeated that he is appointed dictator. So he is given supreme power in the Roman state by a vote of the Senate to save them from the latest invasion.

And the Senate delegation goes to appoint him, and they find him ploughing his tiny little field. He sets that aside, he goes off, he wins the battle. But he immediately lays down power, which of course is good, because you don't want permanent kings in Rome, and he immediately goes back to his farm. So the idea that this is what you want, the idea of public service, the connection to the land. So the sense that, you know, farming is seen to be not just a way you make a living, but it's actually the virtuous way to make a living. Around the writing of the Georgics, was there not a great change in the way land was held?

It's certainly true for some parts of Italy and for some Romans. There are still plenty of little smallholders and tenants following the old goal of self-sufficiency. But increasingly, there are new styles of farming. It's very much connected to the success of the Roman Empire, the flow of wealth and the flow of enslaved people into Italy. so at least some Romans start to build larger holdings which are devoted to production for the market rather than just self-sufficiency. The labour is enslaved labour.

It's a very different form of agriculture because it is now about profit rather than just feeding yourself and your family. There are also, and I think this is something which it suggested is particularly relevant to verse, Virgil, there are also confiscations that through the Roman civil wars, the losing side, get their land confiscated, and that is then redistributed to supporters of the winning side. First of all, we get the conflict between Caesar and Pompey, which Caesar wins,

then we get conflict after the assassination of Caesar between his allies and the group that had sort of. to assassinate him. That leaves us with Octavian, Caesar's nephew and adopted son, and a couple of Caesar's old allies, who inevitably fall out. So we finally get Octavian versus Anthony, and Octavian wins. But all of this having involved huge amounts of bloodshed, and Romans killing Romans. So ex-soldiers are given parcels of someone else. is land. Traditionally, the Roman soldiers would be leaving their farms, fight, and then go back to their farms. It's now very much an army of the landless, and that is how these victorious generals keep the soldiers' support is with the promise that they will be looked after afterwards.

Thank you. Catherine, Catherine, Ionshaw, there's a tradition of writing about agriculture. Can you tell us first about Hesiod and his poem, Works and Days, and how? and that, but it wasn't how it affected Virgil. He's writing about the same time as Homer, so Homer who's written the Iliad and the Odyssey. He's on about 600 BC? A little bit before that, but yeah, about then. They're both writing in Hexameter, in Epos, epic poetry.

But whereas Homer's writing about God's citizen men, Heesiod writes two poems, the Theogony, which is about the birth of the gods and the origins of the universe, and the works and days, which is ostensibly a story about how to farm. But that's also the poem where you get the story of Pandora, for example, the ages of man, there's lots of mythology in there,

there's some strange calendrical bits and pieces. And ultimately it's a moral text. So it's telling you how you should farm and how to live a good life. Is there seeking out of all sorts of values in the human relationship with not just the countryside, but with trees and birds and beasts and everything that's out there? Yes, though it's a very brief text. So unlike the Georgics, which is kind of four books of about five to six hundred lines each,

the works and days is only about 850 lines in total. So it's quite a slim volume, nothing like Homer. And in there, you have definitely got a focus on the relationship to the world around you, but also the relationship to the divine. And throughout both of Hesiod's works, there's a conversation happening about how do we know what the truth about the world is around us and what is our place within that?

And at the start of the works and days, he talks about the two kinds of strife, so good strife and bad strife, and what it is that makes people work well in the world. So they're drawing them a morality from their relationship, And their relationship with the land? Yes. So basically how work helps you have your place in the world.

And that's one of the things that he's used talking about. And that occurs in the myths as well. So in the golden age, nobody works. And that's a particular kind of relationship with the gods. But as time goes on, work comes in. And that makes it both awful and terrible and also the thing that makes us human. And that Greek tradition continues.

So you've got people like Xenophon writing. after that, and that moral streak is there throughout the Greek authors. And then when you get to the Republican period, probably the first author that's writing Latin prose history, Cato the Elder, is best known for his work on agriculture. And there, as Neville's just been talking about, he's setting up a scenario for how Roman agriculture might be working at that point in time that's much more to do with making money, running in the state,

how you deal with a lot of enslaved people. It's an interesting and slightly odd text in some ways. Cato is fundamental to the way that we think about agricultural writing in Rome. I think probably to me one of the most striking similarities and differences between Cato and Virgil is that both of them towards the beginning of their texts talk about how important it is to focus on what, the land is like when you get to a place. Whereas in Virgil, he says, when you come to a land, the first thing you have to do is to learn

what the winds are doing, what the sky is doing, to understand a place and you have to know a place before you can farm there. In Cato, you've got a very similar scenario, but what he's saying is get to know a place, get to find out where the roads are, where the rivers are, to make sure that you're going to make the most money from this estate. And I think that to me is a kind of example of how Virgil is both following that tradition of Cato and also moving it into a slightly different space, one that's more concerned with ethics, perhaps, and less concerned with money.

Nebel, it's been mentioned that George Ix is in four books. Can you give us a brilliant summary of the four books? On the face of it, you've got four books, each of which deals with a different aspect of agriculture. So the first one deals with cereal cultivation, the second with trees, so that's primarily vines but also olives, the third looks at animals, and the fourth is entirely dedicated to bees. And I suppose that's already a little bit of a hint that this isn't actually terribly systematic. Why would you have an entire book on bees? And then if you look in detail at the contents of each book, there are some odd gap.

if we compare what Virgil chooses to talk about compared with what a more, I suppose, systematic or comprehensive account of agriculture might choose to talk about. Virgil in his third book starts off just by talking about horses and oxen and then in the second half of that book talks about sheep and goats. And all sorts of other animals just barely get a mention. And there are also sections, very often the most sort of famous and much quoted sections in these books, which don't entirely connect to the solid agricultural advice.

So the first book talks about agricultural cultivation, it talks about the farmer's year, it then starts moving on to talk about sort of signs in the heavens, which is partly these are the signs that tell you that it's time to plow. which is very much the tradition leading back to Hesiod. But he also then moves into, these are the ominous signs that society is falling apart and things are going wrong. And the conclusion of the book is then a sort of a hope

that Caesar, which is how he refers throughout the poem to the man we call Octavian and Augustus, the hope that Caesar is going to make things all right again. Thank you. Diana, it's fascinating as why he chose an epic form. to talk about agriculture, which most people think he's not epic, but he wants it to be epic, he makes it epic. Can you develop that? I think that choosing the epic examiner is marking the poem out

as being something that he wants to speak to a political audience and to an audience that is looking for answers, that is looking for something rooted in tradition, but something that is also taking that tradition, the epic examiner, and remaking it for a new Roman age when answers are required, I suppose, in many respects. But he's not the first Roman to write Latin in the epic hexameter. The most famous poem that he would have been thinking about, perhaps, in Latin, is the Ennis Anale.

So that was the school text of his day. So that's written in hexameter. So when Virgil is thinking about how to speak to an audience that will understand the epic hexameter in Latin to be, saying something monumental, something that is epochal, something that is giving them lessons that they can learn from, then the epic hexameter already has form in Latin. And I think that that must play a part in his decision to use it, that it's both tying him back to the Homeric tradition, the Hesiodic tradition, as Catherine was saying, to the great intellectual world of the Mediterranean. The Romans are increasingly becoming alert to. But it's also rooting it in something

that has a powerful voice within his own culture. And so I think it speaks both to that sense of farming changing, of literate culture changing, and of society changing. And the epic hexameter allows him to very quickly, from the first line of the poem, his audience, to recognise that he's speaking to those different powerful needs in Roman society. And also the subject itself lends itself to mythology. Absolutely, absolutely, yes.

I mean, it's a poem. It's interesting in that mythology doesn't feature in terms of big set pieces for much of the four books. Very famously in book four, there is a very long story within a story where Aristides, the farmer, loses his bees, they die, and he doesn't know how to get them back. And within that narrative, Aristeas has to engage with a figure with Homeric mythological roots, Proteus, who's famous from the Odyssey. and Proteus then tells the story Proteus is a shape-changing God and if you catch him then he has to tell you the truth

so after a struggle Proteus is caught and he tells the story of Orpheus and Eurideke are about to get married when Aristeus happens upon Eurideke and basically tries to rape her it's a horrendous story on any day and she flees

and unfortunately in her flight she's bitten by a snake and dies so she is plunged into the underworld and Orpheus is driven insane with distress and in his distress he is through the power of his music he is able to enter the underworld to bring her back and he gets permission to bring her back with him

so long as he doesn't look backwards at her as she follows him out of the underworld but in a moment of, as Virgil I think is unusual in saying this is a moment of madness overcomes him and he looks back he just can't control himself And, of course, he breaks the rules. So she is brought back to the underworld. So he then goes back into the upper world

and continues to be driven mad by his grief. And I guess the guilt as well at having caused the final death of his seem to be a bride. And eventually he is torn into pieces. And that's the biggest set piece, mythological excursis in the whole poem. It seems to be odd in a book about ragged crossy, doesn't it? It is.

So why did he put that there? What it gives us is a man Orpheus, a mythological figure, who is very, very empathetically aligned with nature, somebody who is who feels very deeply, who is an artist, who is somebody who's engaging on an intellectual and on a musical, the senses are very much engaged in the descriptions of Orpheus level with nature. And he is a, you could say, a counterpoint to Aristides,

who's the other figure in book, who is the rational person, the person who looks for a plan to follow in order to solve his problems. So the tragedy of Orpheus gives one a bigger counterpoint in terms of the narrative. We start with that big question of how do we make sense of everything. We move through this sort of rhythm, as Neville was mentioning, of crises followed by resolutions. Orpheus gives us an example of what happens if you fail to follow reason effectively and if you allow your emotions to overcome you. And of course, this is what happens in Civil War.

That was the time of immense emotional, passionate belief in different ideological, political positions. What happens? You have devastation. You have a civilisation almost brought to collapse. So Orpheus is perhaps the ultimate example of that feeling, emotional person who fails to see what reason can actually bring to you. I totally agree with everything Diana said there.

But the question that you were, asking was what it adds to agriculture. And I just wonder if we could like flip it around a little bit because it's still an epic kind of poem. Hexameter means that we're still in that mode. And what we've got there is an underworld scene, which is what you might expect to have in an epic poem. But also epic poetry is still about agriculture.

You know, it's not a different sort of thing. We're talking about the bit that comes before. So the war that comes before the bit where you are, actually plough the land afterwards. It's part of the same story overall. So in that sense, I think that the Orpheusmith fits in with the Georgics as an epic-y kind of poem, but it also is talking about life and death. And that's exactly what war and agriculture is all about, seasonality cycles.

It's worth spending a minute thinking about the passage towards the end of book one of the Georgics. It comes after we've had all of the description of the omens that occurred when Caesar was about to be killed. And what we have is this image of a farmer in the future ploughing the land. And out of the land comes these javelins and helmets corroded by rust and these gigantic bones. And the farmer looks at them and marvels. He wonders. And in that marvelling, you get the sense that he has no idea why they're there. And it's this brilliant moment that completely undermines all of the Civil War.

All of this death and destruction that's occurred at some future point in time will be unknown and unremembered. And we see that in the Georgics, these bones, people are bigger and better in the ancient world. And so they're just unremembered. And I think that's such an evocative moment. It's one that's picked up in the English Civil Wars. it's picked up by English literature later on, a lot as this kind of powerful moment of reflection on what war really might be, what might mean in the future.

And what about the bees, Neville Morley? Can you bring us in on the bees in Book 4? Why are they there in the final book? And what do they signify? Well, there's a long ancient tradition of recognising the complexity of the beehive. This is a social animal, which is not something you expect. there are questions as to how far are they actually rational, do they have language and so forth. And it's a very easy step, which lots of classical authors take, of seeing the beehive as in some way analogous to human society.

The question is simply, okay, how exactly do you do that? So Virgil does this. In a sense, you could say he anthropomorphises them a bit, but he sees division of labour, he sees that there are labour of bees, there are bees, there are bees, he says who are appointed centuries by lot. There are bees who stay back in the hive, who are the town planners and so forth. And they're the queen and there are drones, yeah. Well, he sees there to be a king.

Almost all ancient authors, there is one exception, Xenophon, think that the head of the hive is a king. But the really interesting thing for me, in Virgil's account of bees, is the way he interprets swarming. So, you know, for us, this is when the hive has

got to the point of sending out a new colony, the bees produce some new queens and the old queen heads off with a load of bees in order to found a new hive. For Virgil, this is civil war. I mean, it gives no question about this at all. This is, the bees have become agitated,

they are being sort of stirred up by mob violence, they go out and have a battle. And this is described in entire, epic language about the two sides drawing up their ranks against one another. And you have to think, well, you know, civil war at this time, how can this not have the all sorts of, you know, powerful, troubling contemporary overtone? You know, Octavian has barely seen off the last of his rivals. I think it's said that, you know, Virgil reads him the poem when he's returned from defeating Mark Antony in the East.

Now, with the bees, Virgil says, the beekeeper now intervenes. The beekeeper can calm the bees by sprinkling dust over them, and he deals with the rival kings by picking out the weakest and killing him. But of course, that immediately raises the question, what do you do with the humans? Do you trust that Jupiter is going to come along and calm everything down? Or do you assume that, okay, humans just have to go the long way round? They just have to fight it out and kill one another. And you can almost say, okay, who is going to tear the wings off Caesar to stop him gadding off on foreign adventures and unsettling society? So it's a very ambiguous analogy. We're not given a direct lesson, but the parallels of Rome being torn about by rival kings and their factions and this image of the beehive and the threat to the beehive if the beekeeper doesn't control it. It's simply suggestive. You can't really imagine a Roman audience reading this and not thinking, well, if nothing else, what's going on here? What's the message?

Lucretius makes a very strong appearance as well. Can you tell the listeners why Lucretius is so important to Virgil at this point and what his essential contribution is? So Lucretius is a philosopher poet who has just written the Dererum Natura, so on the nature of things, on the nature of the universe. It's an epicurean poem that's incredibly influential over a lot of the Roman authors in the first century BC,

and it's also in hexameter. What is seeking out for, though? What's the Virgil's seeking out for? By using Lucretius, he is seeking out to do what? So the Georgics fundamentally is an ethical text. How do we live? How do we live? Or how do we live well?

Are they different questions? Well, they are different questions. I think both questions, how do we live? what good and bad looks like, what right and wrong looks like, how do we live well, and how do we die, and how do we live with the knowledge of death ahead of us? Lucretius goes through everything. I mean, he has the atomic theory, first theory of evolution.

It's an amazing poem, absolutely amazing. Yeah, and you've got sections on the weather, the plague scene, and so many of those moments occur within the Georgians. So towards the end of book two of the Jerome Natura, Lucretia says that agriculture is getting worse and worse and worse because the earth is inevitably degenerating. So it's the outcome of atomic theory, everything's falling apart. And what we have at the end of book two of the Jerome Natura is the farmer,

with everything's a bit smaller, the crops are smaller. Virgil manages to take this poem that's so complex and fold parts of it into this poem. You know, we've talked about Virgil writing in Hexameter and acknowledging history, but I don't think we can forget that every one of Virgil's poems, all three of them, and possibly some more, but the three, the Eclogs, the Georgics and the Aeneid, they're all very radical poems.

They radicalise, they change the nature of the poetry that they're writing within the tradition. And he does that in relation to Lucretius as well. So at the very start of Lucretius, he references Homer and Ennis, and says poets lie about what happens in the underworld. So it's no surprise in the Georgics, we get this very big underworld scene, I think. If we're seeing the Georgics as a philosophical text, as well as a historical text,

and when we read the Georgics, it's not only a conversation about how you treat sheep scabies, though it's also that. It's a conversation about what does it mean to live a good life on this earth in relation to nature and your surroundings. But why does he see the relationship between humanity and nature? I think he explores that in a way that is indebted to Lucretius, as Catherine was saying very much.

But he is perhaps less, I don't know whether nihilistic is the right way of talking about Lucretius, who isn't entirely negative at all. But I think Virgil seems to see there as being more agency for humans in the relationship with nature, perhaps, than Lucretius does. he believes that if you can learn the right lessons and implement them correctly, and if you can understand them and implement them correctly, then it is possible to achieve a kind of a positive equilibrium with nature. And that that turning of the seasons, that balance in book four that we talked about

between the kind of the rational planning person versus perhaps the kind of the emotional, kind of person full of rage and passion that is obvious. That's him, I think, exploring, you know, is something that looks, like a positive equilibrium, where humans and nature, irrespective of the gods. Do they exist? Don't they exist? Sounds like words just to me. You could say that there's a lot, I think, in the Romantic movement that does evoke some of that. Neville, you want to come in.

I mean, so much of this is, I suppose, ambiguous, and we spend much of our time thinking, is this deliberately ambiguous? So there's a famous passage in the third book, where Virgil offers a sort of venet of two bulls, squaring up against one another in their sort of, you know, desperate wish to mate with this beautiful cow. And I mean, this is not just about bulls and how do you raise them. It's very easy to read it as a more general analogy, even of, you know, the power of erotic desire and its dangers and the possibility of conflict. It's something scholars have argued about at great length. The normal reading

is that Virgil actually seems to be, you know, quite sort of, you know, nervous. He's more focused on the destructive force of Eros. But it is actually ambiguous. And, you know, it's not clear what conclusions you might draw from this about what it is to be human other than we too are buffeted about by powerful appetites that we can't necessarily control. Scholars genuinely have lengthy debates about, you know, does this tell us something significant about Virgil's aversion to sex?

Or is it just intended to raise questions about animal appetites as opposed to the sort of the reasoning life? And essentially we end up, we've got this poem, this is what it says, we really are not sure what it's intended to mean at that sort of level. That's all true. I mean, there are some, like, you know, the horses, it does get quite exciting, I'd say, talking about love and sex there. But perhaps one of the most powerful moments in that book is when the bull dies at the end. So what we have is some of the most touching moments in the Georgics. And they're not focused around humans.

So that question you're asking about the relationship between humans and nature and humans and the divine, it's the animals that really get to revoke our sympathy. And we might perhaps just recall the line in book one on which I think, think a lot of that tension between humanity and nature hinges where he talks about labour improbus. So the line is labour omnia-weakit improbus. So there's an ambiguity. So unrelenting labour overcomes everything. But that overcomes can also be overwhelmed. You can see there just on a word how the meaning turns. So either through labour, we can overcome everything that we might want to,

or labour itself is the thing that will overwhelm us. And that I think summarises that relationship with nature very nicely. It's the thing you're working with. It's also the thing that's working against you. Now then, Diana, I want to get on to the Ineer, and the Inead is a great epic poem. It's supposed to match up to rival Homer. It starts with the burning of Troy,

and Anir's escaping from Troy, carrying his child on his shoulders and holding the hand of his father and he makes for Rome which he found and all sorts of escapades and not escapades, battles, the events go on, and it's a magnificent piece of work. How does that relate to the Georgics? And it's by, of course, Armand, Virgil.

I mean, it was really useful that Catherine mentioned that that key line in the Georgics about labour, I think, that the word labour crops up in the Georgics. And it's actually central in many ways to... Labour? Yes, labour. work and usually hard works and not a sort of a pleasant work which one might call otium, another Latin term, for the kind of work that you do when you are at leisure, the kind of intellectual work.

He is very focused on labor. So labor, the kind of the hard work of the land in particular, as we saw in the Georgics, is crucial. Digging ditches come into this. Digging ditches, managing your vines, pruning your trees in all of the kind of the manual labor and tending your animals when they're sick, very vivid. disgusting descriptions of the plague. But to connect that to the Aeneid, I mean, I think where I see the crucial connection there is,

the labor of Aeneas is to found Rome. So although it is not framed as agricultural labor, it is very much told us the story of a man who has a job. And his job is to fulfill the prophecies of Jupiter and the will of his mother Venus and to found what will become the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. And the word that's associated with that in the Aeneid is Pietas, so duty perhaps, or it's sometimes translated as piety. But I think that's too religious.

So Labour and Pietas, I think, are a really strong kind of binary that is linking the two poems. Was part of the inspiration for doing that to please his emperor, Augustus, to flatter him, really? But he was the end of the land, wasn't he? He was the end of... of all this labour. Absolutely, absolutely. And we can see Augustus or Octavian, as he was in the earlier part of the Georgics. We see references, as Catherine and Neville have mentioned in the Georgics. But the Aeneid is the poem where Augustus is kind of fully manifest as the promised leader who is going to make it possible for Rome to fulfil its destiny. Neville, have any idea how the Georgics was received at the time? And could you elasticate your answer so that it includes how the George's, and the Georgics are thought of today.

I mean, it's recognised as a great poem. It's recognised as, you know, part of this monumental sort of poetic production of Virgil. Very early on, there is debate as to, I suppose, is this just a poem for poetry? Is it in any sense an actual agricultural manual, which is a debate which in fact has continued through the millennia. On the one hand, there are, you know, Roman authors who evoke Virgil, perhaps, you know, in talking about sort of practical agriculture, perhaps simply to take something of his literary aura,

but still a sense that, you know, there is real farming in the Georgics, not just sort of philosophising and so forth, but also, I mean, Seneca. quite clearly says, you know, there is very little that is sort of real. This is all about poetry. And I suppose you could in a way say, you know, that sets the tone for the subsequent life of the Georgics. Virgil is the poet of the Latin-speaking West

all the way through the Middle Ages, though the Georgics is less prominent, above all, less prominent than the Ineared. The idea of the farmer's soldier is very, very powerful and persists right through, just to take a small somewhere through English history. It does in a way, though one of the interesting things about what Virgil does with this idea in the Georgics is actually to decouple the two ideas. It's something which is not very overt,

but if you look at Virgil's depiction of agriculture, it is an ideal of. of peace. It is an opposition to war. There is the aspiration towards this sort of life of solid virtuous work and contentment. You leave behind the luxurious, um, you know, sort of pleasant life of the city, but also you get away from civil war. You get away from political conflict. And indeed, Virgil claims that this is the original Roman life. This is what made Rome great. And the implication is, and then it somehow went wrong. And the coupling of agriculture and war is what has then eventually led Rome into civil war. So actually, the message of the Georgics is a subtle repudiation of the republican idea of the peasant soldier.

coming to the end of the program now. So could I ask you, does anything in the Georgics still have relevance for contemporary environmental thought? And there's a lot of it about concerning the use of the land, the place of the land, the relationship between humans and the rest of everything? Absolutely. I think that what we do get in the Georgics is a depiction of nature as the enemy. And that being something that we grapple with all the time, that conversation is still one that's very relevant today. Are we part of nature? Are we within it? Or are we somehow trying to control it and keep it under submission? And then I'd also say that the Georgics offers a way of thinking about how we might learn about the environment. So it is fundamentally

a didactic text. It's a teaching text. It's meant to teach you something. And the conversation in the ancient world is whether it actually teaches you to grow a field of wheat or whatever. But if we think of it as a text that's really trying to teach us how to think with the seasons, how to be in line with the environment, then it offers ways in to understanding what our place is and how agriculture fits within that. Dana, what's your take on that? I think there's something really interesting about the implacability of nature in the Georgics

that I think is important for how we conceptualise ourselves as the centre of the environment, whether for good or bad in the modern world. And I think that that kind of anthropocentrism that is very important, I think, in a lot of environmental and eco-critical thinking these days presupposes that we are the entities from which all change happens or through which all change is manifest in the environment.

And I think Virgil's centering of the power of nature and its unknowability in many respects is quite a welcome corrective in some senses. We are not actually able to change all of the things we might like to change. And when we think we are changing them for good reasons or with good ideas behind our interventions, sometimes it goes terribly wrong. So that sense that there is catastrophe lurking, even with very good intentions, and even when people think they are doing their best, is another very powerful lesson.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Catherine Earnshaw, Diana Spencer and Neville Morley, and to our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram. Next week, Louis XIV, 1638 to 1715, the Sun King. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we miss out that you wish we'd put in?

Diana, what about you? The thing that I think maybe we might have wanted to draw in, in particular in terms of the historical significance in his own time of Virgil's Georgics, is the opening of book three, if we're going to just think about some passages. And the opening of book three is interesting because it talks about a temple being built on a plane. And it talks about a temple being built which will monumentalize and historicize,

I suppose, the new order that is emerging under Augustus, although he doesn't mention him exactly as being the focus of this. And it comes after the end of book two, inevitably. The end of book two is starting to return us to time passing and the seasons changing and a kind of a piece emerging out of the strife and the conflict that the poem opened with.

So book three seems to be taking that that kind of idea of an idyllic passage of time emerging and I suppose concretising it into something that has a much more political focus and much more political agenda. But what he does then at the end of book three is remarkable in that he destabilises that very kind,

placid, politically stable opening, which seems to be suggesting an Italy that is unified and content under this new order. And he destabilises it by ending that poem with this absolutely catastrophic plague, which is not just catastrophic and horrendous because people lose their livelihoods, but through the description.

And I think we haven't probably said as much about Virgil as a descriptive author in the Georgics, maybe, as we might have done. but I think if anyone wants to see absolutely viscerally disgusting, horrific, grotesque description from classical antiquity, the end of book three of the Georgics, the manifestation of the plague in the animals, and how people catch the plague from the clothes that they make from the animal pelts and wool. And the contrast between this sense of order and decorum at the beginning of book three and the kind of the chaos that overtakes the farmers who thought they were doing the right thing at the end of book three.

that's a really powerful kind of seesaw image. What about you? I would say a bit more actually about the tradition of reception of the georgics. I think I said earlier, this really takes off in the Renaissance, and it's then we start getting an explosion of translations, an explosion of scholarly work on the Georgics, and people writing poems in imitation. And that's where we get sort of, you know,

all sorts of writing about country life and agriculture in Virgilian hexameters. In England, there's a particular impact from the translation of Virgil by John Dryden at the end of the 17th century, who does put in a certain element of what you might term, you know, the Virgilian sort of politics as well. So it's been suggested that, you know,

Dryden's translation uses the word peace 15 times and only one of those is actually a translation of the Latin Pax. All the rest of the time he's taking sort of words like leisure or tranquility

in the Latin and choosing to translate them as peace. And the suggestion that, you know, I'm Dryden by this point is effectively a sort of internal exile. He's refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs. he is also discontented or anxious about the political events of the whole century, so civil war and continuing wars,

and presents therefore the Georgics as a plea for true peace rather than the sort of peace produced by soldiers and politicians. And in the 18th century, I think we get something like 20 or more English translations of the Georgics, and there are translations in Europe as well. I think the interesting thing about this reception is you could arguably say it's got two strands. There's a very literary one, which is an interest in the language,

there's an interest in Virgil's poetry, so translating the Georgics becomes a bit of an artistic challenge. I mean, Catherine's written about, say, you know, sort of Percy Shelley doing a translation of a bit of the Georgics. but there is also an entirely down-to-earth tradition which takes it to be a serious agricultural manual. And there are gentlemen farmers in the 18th century quoting the Georgics to give authority to their ideas

about how you should farm. I mean, Jethro Tull denounces Virgil as being completely and utterly wrong. This is a terrible idea. But I think the interesting thing is, he thinks Virgil is wrong because Virgil is wrong, not because Virgil's writing a poem. He thinks this is something which you can take seriously

as agricultural advice. It's just rubbish. Rather than it's just a poem which has no relevance to anything today. And there is a whole series of people who take Virgil very, very seriously as a source of genuine technical knowledge. Like you're true, you mean?

Well, no, I really would not attempt to farm on the basis of Virgil's advice. We can think about some of the themes as being relevant. I'd say the conversation we had about labour, about Labour, is something that is very provocative to think with now. We still have a tendency, in part thanks to Virgil, I think that he is partly to blame for this, of seeing farmers as somehow being one man on his plough in a field

and forgetting the incredible amount of labour that goes into any farming endeavour. And I think that if we want to think more seriously about climate change and food security, then we have to become much more aware of what's actually happening in the agricultural industries. Well, I hope there's some very good stuff that. Yeah, absolutely. BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. Hi, I'm Ryland, and I'm here to talk about men.

because in recent years we have all seen the man in Britain undergo radical change as the rule book has been well and truly ripped apart. So I'm going to talk to a range of prominent figures and celebs who have each got their own diverse and contrast intakes on what it means to be a man today. I want to prize open the fault lines of modern masculinity and get to grips with the changing landscape and try to get some answers so that we can pass them on to the next generation.

This is Ryland, How to Be a Man, from BBC Radio 4. Listen on BBC Sounds.