Roman Farm Management | Page 5

to write the Georgics.
His father was, it is true, a farmer, but apparently in a small way and
unsuccessful, for he had to eke out a frugal livelihood by keeping bees
and serving as the hireling deputy of a viator or constable. This type of
farmer persists and may be recognized in any rural community: but the
agricultural colleges do not enlist such men into their faculties. So it is
possible that Virgil owed little agricultural knowledge to his father's
precepts or example. Virgil perhaps had tended his father's flock, as he
pictures himself doing under the guise of Tityrus; certainly he spent
many hours of youth "patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" steeping his
Celtic soul with the beauty and the melancholy poetry of the Lombard
landscape: and so he came to know and to love bird and flower and the
external aspects of
wheat and woodland tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd,
but it does not appear that he ever followed the plough, or, what is
more important, ever laid off a ploughgate. As a poet of nature no one
was ever better equipped (the highest testimony is that of Tennyson),
but when it came to writing poetry around the art of farm management
it was necessary for him to turn to books for his facts. He
acknowledges (Geo. I, 176) his obligation only to veterum praecepta
without naming them, but as M. Gaston Boissier says he was evidently
referring to Varro "le plus moderne de tous les anciens."[7] Virgil
evidently regarded Varro's treatise as a solid foundation for his poem
and he used it freely, just as he drew on Hesiod for literary inspiration,

on Lucretius for imaginative philosophy, and on Mago and Cato and
the two Sasernas for local colour.
Virgil probably had also the advantage of personal contact with Varro
during the seven years he was composing and polishing the Georgics.
He spent them largely at Naples (Geo. IV, 563) and Varro was then
established in retirement at Cumae: thus they were neighbours, and,
although they belonged to different political parties, the young poet
must have known and visited the old polymath; there was every reason
for him to have taken advantage of the opportunity. Whatever
justification there may be for this conjecture, the fact remains that
Varro is in the background every where throughout the Georgics, as the
"deadly parallel" in the appended note will indicate. This is perhaps the
most interesting thing about Varro's treatise: instructive and
entertaining as it is to the farmer, in the large sense of the effect of
literature on mankind, Virgil gave it wings--the useful cart horse
became Pegasus.
As a consequence of the chorus of praise of the Georgics, there have
been those, in all ages, who have sneered at Virgil's farming. The first
such advocatus diaboli was Seneca, who, writing to Lucilius (Ep. 86)
from the farm house of Scipio Africanus, fell foul of the advice (Geo, I,
216) to plant both beans and millet in the spring, saying that he had just
seen at the end of June beans gathered and millet sowed on the same
day: from which he generalized that Virgil disregarded the truth to turn
a graceful verse, and sought rather to delight his reader than to instruct
the husbandman. This kind of cheap criticism does not increase our
respect for Nero's philosophic minister.[8] Whatever may have been
Virgil's mistakes, every farmer of sentiment should thank God that one
of the greatest poems in any language contains as much as it does of a
sound tradition of the practical side of his art, and here is where Varro
is entitled to the appreciation which is always due the schoolmaster of a
genius.

NOTE ON THE OBLIGATION OF VIRGIL TO VARRO
At the beginning of the first Georgic (1-5) Virgil lays out the scope of
the poem as dealing with three subjects, agriculture, the care of live
stock and the husbandry of bees. This was Varro's plan (R.R. I, I, 2, and
I, 2 passim) except that under the third head Varro included, with bees,

all the other kinds of stock which were usually kept at a Roman
steading. Varro asserts that his was the first scientific classification of
the subject ever made. Virgil (G. I, 5-13) begins too with the invocation
of the Sun and the Moon and certain rural deities, as did Varro (R.R. I,
I, 4). The passages should be compared for, as M. Gaston Boissier has
pointed out, the difference in the point of view of the two men is here
illustrated by the fact that Varro appeals to purely Roman deities, while
Virgil invokes the literary gods of Greece. Following the Georgics
through, one who has studied Varro will note other passages for which
a suggestion may