A 2000-line farming manual in verse, coming at you from the year 29 B.C. Spenser famously called it “the best poem, by the best poet,” yet the task of copying it is reportedly punishment for British public school boys.
The Georgics–sublime or utterly dull? The idea of a verse-manual is intriguing, because its two modes (the documentary/didactic and the poetic) seem inherently contradictory. Why would such a project ever be undertaken? Was it in order to cast necessary knowledge in hexameters, so as to embed it in the cultural memory?
If the project was indeed commissioned by Maecenas, this may have been what Virgil’s patron had in mind. The introduction to David R. Slavitt’s translation suggests that Maecenas may have been looking for something more like a propaganda piece that would convince Romans to leave the city and return to the countryside.
In fact, as I learned from this excellent podcast interview with the poet David Ferry and the classicist Richard Thomas, the Georgics was probably not, even in its time, a functional manual. Farmers who could read Latin would sooner have resorted to manuals in prose. And, as Thomas notes, modern attempts at farming according to the Georgics have failed completely. When tried in the world, the poem’s testimony is not reliable.
In making the Georgics understandable as a project, Ferry and Thomas sensibly emphasize mythological passages in which Virgil alludes to a time before men needed to farm, when the earth was benevolent. Virgil frames the poem in contrast to this time before “Jupiter himself ordained that the way should not be easy,” creating a vision of life after a fall when knowledge of cultivation became necessary for bare survival — when “everything was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need.”
But alongside the passages that place the earth and human toil in a mythic context, there are also long and often beautiful passages describing nature’s variety and precise (if perhaps inaccurate) advice on the best to cultivate the land and its creatures. In these passages the documentary mode is in play. An example, from Ferry’s very readable translation:
We turn now to the subject of the nature
Of different kinds of soil, their strengths, their color,
What each of them is best at bringing forth.
First of all, where the ground’s intractable
And the hills unwelcoming, with thorns in the fields,
The earth a thin white clay, with a lot of gravel,
Such a terrain is pleased with Minerva’s grove
Of hardy tenacious long-lived olive trees.
It’s typical of such places that you’ll find
A plethora of oleasters thriving,
And their wild berries scattered everywhere.
The manual form gives Virgil many such opportunities to sing “the facts.” When I came to the line, “that man is blessed who has learned the causes of things,” it seemed clear and that Virgil’s subject is the body of agricultural knowledge, not nature. It’s knowledge to which he gives structure and flesh, and it’s knowledge to which he lends context in the mythic passages.
The documentary aspect of the Georgics provides a poetic kind of access to the prevalent understanding of nature. It does so by rendering knowledge itself in exquisite detail, and by showing it in the context of life in his time. He shows what was known and how it mattered. This is where the documentary and the poetic work together.