Prose into Poetry: Tradition and Meaning in Virgil's Georgics

Abstract

T is difficult fully to appreciate the audacity of Virgil's enterprise in writing the Georgics. A new poet of the second generation, heir to the urbane attitudes and refined poetics of Callimachus and Catullus, he set out to produce a poem which at least purported to teach subjects completely alien to the higher literary tradition which was his heritage: sheep-dipping, soil-testing, irrigation, and manuring were to provide the terms and the metaphors for issues ultimately not dissimilar to those which had concerned him in the Eclogues and which would continue to occupy him in the Aeneid. Virgil knew and did not know the countryside, much as the naturewalker or even the kitchen vegetable-gardener knows and does not know the realities of dendrology and horticulture. Love of or empathy with the country is not equivalent to knowledge, and we should be careful of romanticizing or idealizing.' By Virgil's day Roman agriculture had become a science, many of its precepts not essentially unlike those of today:2 through observation and experiment the Romans knew that graft compatibility depended at least on stock and scion being intrafamilial, and preferably intrageneric; somehow they had hit upon the fact that the rotation of wheat crops with legumes brought about what we know as nitrogen-fixation and revitalized the soil; and they knew that some trees were better propagated from seed, others through

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