Eclogues and Georgics

Summary

Before the Aeneid, Virgil made his name with two books of poems about the countryside. The Eclogues (also called Bucolics), ten short pastoral poems written about 42-38 BC, adapt the Greek idylls of Theocritus to Italy in a time of civil war. The Georgics, four books on farming completed about 29 BC, take the form of a didactic poem in the tradition of Hesiod's Works and Days and Lucretius, but they are as much about labour, loss and the order of the world as about crops and cattle. The Eclogues are dialogues and songs of shepherds. The first sets two herdsmen side by side: Tityrus, who has kept his land through the favour of a young 'god' in Rome, and Meliboeus, driven into exile by the confiscations that rewarded veterans after Philippi. The ninth returns to the same evictions. Others are singing contests (3, 7), laments for love (2, 8, 10) and a dirge and apotheosis for the dead shepherd Daphnis (5). Eclogue 6 has Silenus sing the creation of the world and old myths. Eclogue 4 announces that 'the last age by Cumae's Sibyl sung' has come and that the birth of a child will bring back the golden age; Christian readers from Constantine and Augustine through Dante read it as a pagan prophecy of Christ. The tenth ends with the poet Gallus conceding that love conquers all. The Georgics are addressed to Maecenas. Book I treats ploughing, the seasons and the weather signs, explains that Jupiter ended the easy age of Saturn so that 'toil conquered all', and closes with the portents after Julius Caesar's murder and a prayer for Rome. Book II, on trees and vines, contains the praise of Italy and the famous blessing on farmers who live far from war, set beside the blessing on the philosopher who understands the causes of things. Book III, on cattle and horses, ends with a terrible plague among the herds of Noricum. Book IV turns to bees, a model commonwealth, and closes with the story of Aristaeus, who loses his bees, learns from Proteus that he has offended Orpheus by causing Eurydice's death, and regains them from the carcasses of sacrificed oxen. Orpheus's descent to the underworld and his second loss of Eurydice lie at the poem's centre. Both books suit grades 9-12, the Georgics especially for students who work with land or animals. They teach the dignity and hardship of work, the fragility of peace, and the ancient longing for a renewed world. The library attaches James Rhoades's verse translation of both works.

Plot or Argument

• Eclogues 1 and 9: the confiscations

  Meliboeus, leaving his farm, meets Tityrus reclining under a beech, who owes his security to a young benefactor at Rome. In Eclogue 9 Lycidas and Moeris, walking to town, recall how even the poet Menalcas could not save his land with songs.

• Eclogues 2, 3, 7 and 8: love songs and contests

  Corydon pines for Alexis; Menalcas and Damoetas, then Corydon and Thyrsis, compete in alternating verses before a judge; Damon and Alphesiboeus sing of a lover's despair and of a woman's love charm.

• Eclogue 4: the child and the golden age

  Addressed to the consul Pollio, the poem announces the return of Justice and Saturn's reign at the birth of a boy, under whom the earth will bear without labour and the traces of guilt will be erased.

• Eclogues 5, 6 and 10: Daphnis, Silenus and Gallus

  Mopsus laments Daphnis and Menalcas sings his welcome among the gods. Two boys bind Silenus, who sings of the world's beginning and of mythical loves. The last eclogue shows the poet-soldier Gallus dying of love in Arcadia.

• Georgic I: the plough and the signs of heaven

  After invoking the rural gods and Octavian, Virgil teaches when and how to plough, the calendar of stars, and the weather signs. Jupiter's ending of the golden age makes labour the human condition. The book ends with the portents at Caesar's death and the image of a world at war, like a chariot out of control.

• Georgic II: trees, vines and the praise of country life

  Grafting, soils and the care of vines lead to the praise of Italy, the description of spring, and the closing contrast of the anxious city with the happy farmer, along with the poet's own wish to know the causes of things.

• Georgic III: herds, love and plague

  The breeding of horses and cattle, the madness of animal desire, the care of sheep and goats, and remedies for disease. The book ends with the plague of Noricum, which destroys whole herds and defeats every healer.

• Georgic IV: the bees, Aristaeus and Orpheus

  The hive, its site, its king, its wars and its tireless commonwealth. When Aristaeus's bees die, his mother Cyrene sends him to bind Proteus, who tells of Orpheus's descent for Eurydice and his loss of her at the threshold. Aristaeus makes atonement, and bees swarm from the oxen's bodies. A brief epilogue signs the work: Virgil, 'of sweet Parthenope', sang while Caesar thundered by the Euphrates.

Characters

• Tityrus and Meliboeus, herdsmen of Eclogue 1

  One protected by a patron in Rome, one evicted, they embody the good fortune and the suffering of the land confiscations.

• Daphnis, legendary shepherd

  The dead herdsman of Sicilian pastoral, mourned and deified in Eclogue 5.

• Silenus, woodland god

  Drunken and wise, he sings a cosmogony and old myths in Eclogue 6.

• Gallus, poet and friend

  Cornelius Gallus, the love-elegist and soldier, presented in Eclogue 10 as dying of love among Arcadian shepherds.

• Maecenas, patron

  Octavian's adviser and the dedicatee of the Georgics, addressed at the start of each book.

• Aristaeus, beekeeper

  Son of the nymph Cyrene, who loses his bees for causing Eurydice's death and recovers them by sacrifice.

• Proteus, sea-god and seer

  The shape-shifting old man of the sea who, once bound, reveals the cause of Aristaeus's loss.

• Orpheus and Eurydice, poet and wife

  Orpheus wins Eurydice back from the dead by song and loses her by looking back, then mourns until the Thracian women tear him apart.

Lessons

• Pastoral song in a time of eviction

  The Eclogues open not with idyllic ease but with an eviction. Meliboeus must leave his fields while Tityrus plays in the shade, and in Eclogue 9 songs cannot save a farm from soldiers. Virgil uses the pastoral convention of leisurely shepherds to register the cost of civil war on ordinary people. Students can see how a poet under patronage speaks gratitude and grief at once.

  • How does Tityrus explain his good fortune? What does Meliboeus's reply suggest about it?
  • Why might Virgil set real political events in an imaginary world of singing shepherds?
  • Meliboeus ends by offering Tityrus's hospitality for one night. What does that ending say about the two men's situations?

• The Fourth Eclogue and its Christian readers

  Virgil's poem of a child whose birth restores the golden age was almost certainly written for a Roman occasion, probably connected with Pollio's consulship in 40 BC and the peace of Brundisium; scholars still debate which child was meant. From the fourth century, Christians read it as an unconscious prophecy of Christ, and this reading helps explain Virgil's place as Dante's guide. The lesson is to hold the poem's original setting and its later Christian reception side by side without confusing them.

  • List the features of the coming age in the poem. Which resemble Isaiah 11 and which do not?
  • What is gained and what is lost when later readers find Christian meaning in a pagan poem?
  • Why might Virgil's longing for renewal have seemed to Christians like the preparation Paul describes in Acts 17:27?

• Toil conquered all: work after the golden age

  In Georgic I Virgil explains that Jupiter ended the easy age of Saturn and hid fire and honey so that need would sharpen human skill: 'toil conquered all, / Remorseless toil'. The Georgics treat labour as hard, endless and yet ennobling, and the farmer's wisdom as a form of piety toward the gods and the land. Christian readers can compare this with Genesis 3, where toil follows the Fall, and with the dignity Scripture gives to faithful work.

  • Why, according to Virgil, did Jupiter make farming hard? Is it a punishment, a gift, or both?
  • Compare Virgil's account with Genesis 3:17-19. What is similar and what is different?
  • Find one practical instruction in the Georgics that still holds today. Why does Virgil include such details in a poem?

• Orpheus, Aristaeus and the recovery of what is lost

  The Georgics end with two stories nested together. Aristaeus loses his bees through a fault he did not know he had committed, learns its cause, makes atonement and receives new life from death. Orpheus loses Eurydice twice, the second time through a moment of love and impatience, and cannot recover her. The contrast between the practical man who obeys and the poet who cannot help looking back has been read in many ways; it closes a poem about work with a meditation on art, grief and renewal.

  • Why does Aristaeus succeed where Orpheus fails?
  • What does the birth of bees from the sacrificed oxen suggest about death and new life?
  • Is Orpheus to blame for looking back? How does Virgil's narrator judge him?

Context

Virgil grew up near Mantua in Cisalpine Gaul and lived through the collapse of the Roman Republic: Caesar's civil war, his assassination in 44 BC, the defeat of the assassins at Philippi in 42 BC, and the long struggle between Octavian and Antony that ended at Actium in 31 BC. After Philippi, land in northern Italy was confiscated to settle veterans, the background of Eclogues 1 and 9. The Georgics were written in the 30s, as Octavian consolidated power, under the patronage of Maecenas, and their hopes for peace and the restoration of Italian farming match themes of the new regime.

Composition

The Eclogues were probably composed between about 42 and 38 BC and published as a book; their exact order of composition is uncertain. The ancient biographies say the Georgics took seven years and were read to Octavian in 29 BC, after his return from the East, which agrees with the epilogue's reference to Caesar on the Euphrates. The ancient claim that the end of Georgic IV originally praised Gallus and was replaced by the Aristaeus story after Gallus's disgrace (26 BC) is reported by Servius but doubted by many scholars. The library's translation is by James Rhoades.

Reception

Both books were school texts in antiquity and remained so through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Constantine's Oration to the Saints (as reported by Eusebius) and Augustine both cite the Fourth Eclogue as a prophecy, and the Eclogues founded the European pastoral tradition from Petrarch and Spenser to Milton's Lycidas. The Georgics shaped agricultural and landscape poetry, notably in Dryden's translation (1697) and in eighteenth-century English georgic verse.

Comparisons

• The Aeneid

  The epilogue to the Georgics looks back to the Eclogues, and the Aeneid's opening lines (in some ancient texts) looked back to both, presenting Virgil's career as a rise from pastoral to farming to war. Themes carry through: the Georgics' praise of Italy and grief over civil war become the Aeneid's founding of Rome and its cost, and Orpheus's failed rescue of Eurydice is echoed in Aeneas's loss of Creusa and his visit to the underworld in Book 6.

• Metamorphoses

  Ovid tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice again in Metamorphoses 10-11, written a generation after the Georgics and clearly in dialogue with them. Ovid's version is quicker, wittier and more interested in Orpheus's songs than in the grief that dominates Virgil's. Comparing the two is a classic exercise in how a later poet rewrites an earlier one.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Georgic III contains one of the great descriptions of epidemic disease in Latin literature: the cattle plague of Noricum, in which herds die of thirst, fever and a 'watery flux', sacrifices fail, the famous healers Chiron and Melampus are helpless, and men who touch the infected fleeces break out in blisters. Virgil draws on Lucretius's account of the plague of Athens, and the passage was in turn a model for later plague writing. The same book gives practical veterinary advice, including bleeding a fevered sheep from a vein in the hoof, and Georgic IV describes the signs of disease in a hive. Virgil's account is poetic and literary; identifying the Noricum plague with a specific animal disease is speculation.

• Georgic III, the sickness of flocks

  Virgil promises to teach 'the causes and the signs' of sickness and prescribes washing, ointments, lancing sores, and drawing blood from the hoof to relieve fever.

  Ancient Medicine Bloodletting Fever Infection
• Georgic III, the plague of Noricum

  The closing narrative of a cattle plague that taints pastures, defeats all remedies and the healers Chiron and Melampus, and passes to men who handle the infected wool.

  Plague Epidemic Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• Georgic III, life's best hours

  The lament that youth flies first and is succeeded by disease, old age, suffering and death, applied to herds and to mortals.

  Aging Senescence
• Georgic IV, disease in the hive

  The signs of sickness among bees (changed colour, leanness, the carrying out of the dead, a long-drawn hum) and the remedies of smoke, honey and herbs.

  Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write a short eclogue in which two people of your own time, one who has kept a home and one who has lost it, meet and talk.

• Essay

  Virgil blesses both the philosopher who knows the causes of things and the farmer who knows the rural gods. Write an essay on which blessing you think he finally prefers, and why.

• Classroom

  Keep a 'georgic journal' for two weeks, recording weather signs, the state of a garden or animal, and the work done each day, and compare it with Georgic I.

• Fiction

  Retell the story of Aristaeus and Proteus from the point of view of Cyrene, his mother.

Further Reading

• Idylls, Theocritus

  The Greek pastoral poems Virgil adapted in the Eclogues.

• Works and Days, Hesiod

  The archaic farming poem Virgil names as his model for the Georgics.

• On the Nature of Things, Book VI, Lucretius

  Lucretius's account of the plague of Athens, the chief model for the plague of Noricum.

• Virgil's Georgics: A New Interpretation, Gary B. Miles

  A study of the poem's tensions between hope and pessimism about human labour.

• The Georgics of Virgil, John Dryden (trans.)

  Dryden's 1697 verse translation, itself a landmark of English poetry.