CHAPTER THREE DIDACTIC PARADOX: THE GEORG/CS In the ebullient climax to the Laudes lta/iae of Georgie 2, one of the poem's most emotive, rhetorically insistent passages, Virgil articulates his conception of the Georgics and of himself as the Georgics' singer: salue, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus, magna uirum; tibi res antiquae laudis et artis ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontis, Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen. (G. 2. 173-76) Hail, great mother of crops, land of Saturn, Great mother of men; for you I attempt the theme Of ancient glory and art, I dare to unseal the holy springs And sing through Roman towns an Ascraean song. The Georgics is Virgil's proclaimed 'Ascraean song', the poet its 'Ascraean' singer. The mantle of Hesiod, the accolade of didacticism, is fervently and pointedly claimed. The fonnal debt to the Works and Days, a conspicuous model for the Georgics (especially of course for Book l}, needs no comment. What requires comment is the substantial debt, which the fonnal debt reflects, the debt to Hesiodic didacticism in the moral, philosophical, spiritual, not simply technically instructive sense. 1 Patently not a verse-treatise on farm husbandry (its status as a practical handbook is undennined by its immense and odd selectivity, its literary sophistication, and its anachronistic focus on the yeoman-fanner - the co/onus), 2 the poem even in its so-called technically georgic sections is never simply agronomic in intent, but directed to a sphere of 1 C. Day Lewis, The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil (Oxford 1966), translating Ascraeum carmen as ·a rural theme' (p. 74), not only misses the point but dangerously misleads. 2 Virgil's exclusive concern with the yeoman-farmer is clearly at odds with the agricultural norm of contemporary rural Italy, viz. the prevalence of latifundia, immense estates run by slaves. There is in fact no reference to slavery in the whole of the Georgics, which as L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cambridge 1969) 53, points out was ·casually assumed by Hesiod and was the sine qua non of Varro's treatise'. Even Cato's De Agri Cultura, written presumably in the first half of the second century B. C., was expressly addressed to absentee landlords. On the enormous selectivity of the Georgics - nothing on pigs, donkeys, poultry, etc., in contrast to the works of Varro and Columella -and the resulting vitiation of its practical utility, see Wilkinson, 52 ff., and B. Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford 1964) 147 f. Contrast H. H. Scullard'sjudgment on the Georgics: 'A didactic poem ... giving practical advice to farmers on the cultivation of crops' (From the Gracchi to Nero, 2nd ed. [London 1963) 245) - quoted also by Wilkinson. Seneca's famous remark gainsays the handbook thesis: nee agricolas docere uoluit, sed legentes delectare ('he intended not to instruct farmers but to delight readers', Ep. Mor. 86.15). DIDACTIC PARADOX: THE GEORGICS 37 instruction larger and more significant: the constituents of nature, animality and existence as relevant to and experienced by 'suffering humanity', miseri mortales (cf G. 3.66). 3 As in Hesiod, so in the Georgics didacticism about agriculture proves metaphor for didacticism about man. 4 Didacticism and the 'Eclogues' 5 The Georgics' debt is not to Hesiod alone. Practical debts are owed to Aratus, Varro of Reate, Nicander, and manifold technical sources; substantial debts to the anthropocentric physical poem of Virgil's great Roman predecessor, Lucretius, to whom, concerned like Virgil with the analysis of man's context and with the moral imperatives it enjoins, pervasive verbal, thematic and formal allusion is made. 6 But Hesiod is the poem's proclaimed and cardinal model, his Ascraean song a paradigm for Virgil's own. He occupies a position at the centre of Virgil's poetics not only expressly noted but not new. It has its origins in earlier, intricate meditation. In the Eclogues Virgil had cast his poetic vocation in the Hesiodic as well as the Callimachean-Theocritean mould (esp. E. 5.88: £. 6.1-8) and had set up the ideal of the poet-teacher, the poet of moral and spiritual force, the singer whose 'divine song', diuinum carmen (E. 6.67 - cf E. 3.37; E. 5.4_5; E. 10.17) - index, like Hesiod's 'divine voice' (au<>iJv 0fomv, Theog. 3lf.), of divine and universal knowledge - had ability to effect not only imaginative and aesthetic enrichment but spiritual sustenance, even rebirth. The Eclogues' ideal is one of 3 Cf G. B. Miles, Virgil's Georgics: A New Interpretation (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1980) 63, who sees the Georgics as offering · a commentary on different notions of the human condition'; and M. C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics (Princeton N.J. 1979) 15: 'What purports to offer a methodology to cope with the external world is actually one grand trope for life itself. For Otis [2] too the Georgics is no verse-treatise on agriculture: 'It is, when properly interpreted, a continuous whole concerned with the most central and serious themes of Augustan Rome' (p. 145). 4 Wilkinson's contention [2] 11 that 'the chief raison d'etre' of the poem is description ignores the Ascraeum carmen claim, posits an unexplained change in Virgil's poetic direction after the Eclogues and (this is the most serious charge) misses the thematically organic quality of the poem, the pervasive, syntactical nature of its moral, intellectual, and existential concerns. 5 A more detailed discussion of Virgil's attitude to poetry and politics in the Eclogues is to be found in the preceding chapter. 6 The influence of Lucretius - both formal and substantive - upon the Georgics, personally acknowledged by Virgil in the finale to Georgie 2 (G. 2.475 ff.) and apparent to all, is immense. Anyone who needs reminding of this has only to read W. Y. Sellar's long chapter on the subject, The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil (3rd ed. Oxford 1897) 199-260. See also more recently W.R. Nethercut, 'Vergil's De Rerum Natura', Ramus 2 (1973) 41-52. Virgil, however, clearly intends the Hesiodic allegiance to be of c:special importance; hence his proclamation of the Georgics as Ascraeum carmen. The explanation is to be found not only in the formal and substantive influence of Hesiod on the poem but in the role of Hesiod in Virgil's poetic ideology. Servi us, of course, saw Hesiod as the main formal influence on the Georgics, which he compared to Homer's influence on the Aeneid and Theocritus' on the Eclogues (Comm. in Verg. Georg. Proem.). On Virgil's literary predecessors and debts generally, see Wilkinson (2] 56-68 and 223 IT. .