The speaker of the Dirae curses the farm which he is forced to abandon (15–19):

The passage as a whole is relatively well preserved, with no essential discrepancies among the manuscripts, but line 15 offers some difficulties. First, it is not immediately clear how to interpret the second-person verb form condatis. It may initially seem natural to take it to refer to the speaker's successors as workers on the farm, but these are not addressed in the plural elsewhere. The only possible exception occurs at line 9 (it will be useful to have the whole passage quoted, 9–13):

Here, too, it may initially appear reasonable to see in uobis the same group of people, but there is little doubt that it must refer to senis nostri felicia rura, which can hardly be anything but a vocative (cf. 33 ueteris domini felicia ligna, likewise a vocative).Footnote ¹ If condatis does not refer to people, one may be tempted to accept the humanist conjecture sulci and construe the verb as addressed to the furrows.Footnote ² Yet I rather doubt that an address to the farm (or to the grove, as at line 33, or to the springs and the fields, as at line 90) can justify apostrophizing something as technical and down-to-earth as furrows. I think Fraenkel is right to insist on relating condatis to the same vocative as uobis, that is, rura.Footnote ³ This interpretation is supported by the fact that the two stanzas are closely analogous (as we soon shall see in greater detail).

The second difficulty is more substantial. As has been highlighted by Thomas, effetas auenas, ‘exhausted oats’, is an impossible expression, since ‘effetus describes the producer, not the product – the bough of a tree, a woman's body, frequently the soil’.Footnote ⁴ Kenney's aristas for auenas does not solve the problem (of course, it never was intended to).Footnote ⁵ Thomas himself initially conjectured effetis Cererem sulcis condatis auena, ‘[m]ay you plant your grain in furrows exhausted by an oat crop (i.e. fail to rotate your crops)’; but eventually he preferred Shackleton Bailey's suggestion: effetis Cereris sulcis condatis auenas, ‘[m]ay you plant oats in your furrows [which will therefore be] exhausted of grain (i.e., will be unable to produce it)’.Footnote ⁶ At first glance both versions may appear to make some sort of sense, but on closer scrutiny the situations they imply turn out to be rather difficult to imagine. It may be true that ‘oats are a crop which bleeds nitrogen from the soil and leads precisely to its (the soil's) being effetus’,Footnote ⁷ but why plant oats in the first place? Why should the new owners do so now (Shackleton Bailey's scenario)? Why should the old owners have done so before (Thomas's scenario)? Even if we take condatis to refer to rura rather than to the new owners, as I think we should (sulcis condatis will then mean something like ‘may you receive in your furrows’), the same questions still apply. How has the soil come to be exhausted by oats (Thomas's scenario)? Why should it be cropped with oats now (Shackleton Bailey's scenario)? I am sure it is not impossible to come up with some sort of explanation;Footnote ⁸ but this will not do, since, as the line's context shows, we need a straightforward answer.

As we can easily see, both stanzas repeatedly express, for the most part in the most straightforward terms, the very simple idea that the farm should fail to produce its expected product. Apart from line 15, the only difficult line is 9 impia Trinacriae sterilescant gaudia uobis, but it is almost certainly corrupt. Giardina's pinguia … praedia (‘fertile lands’) for impia … gaudia is I think a plausible correction: the former error will have been fairly easy if we assume pingia as a starting pointFootnote ⁹ (line-initial P → I, ın → m, g → p), especially after impia in line 3; the latter may have involved prandia as an intermediate step (and, again, confusion of p and g?).Footnote ¹⁰ Yet even if we keep the transmitted text, its difficulty only concerns the subject (which must refer to the farm as a whole, in one way or another), whereas the predicate is absolutely unambiguous (‘may it become fruitless’). After this general reference, the two stanzas list the individual domains in which the farm's fertility should fail, in exactly the same order. (1) Fields: 10–11 nec fecunda … | semina parturiant segetes, 15 effetas Cereris sulcis condatis auenas. (2) Pastures: 11 non pascua colles, 16 pallida flauescant aestu sitientia prata. (3) Orchards: 12 non arbusta nouas fruges, non pampinus uuas, 17 immatura cadant ramis pendentia mala. (4) Forests: 13 ipsae non siluae frondes, 18 desint et siluis frondes. (5) Springs: 13 non flumina montes, 18 et fontibus umor. This shows that line 15 should be saying, more or less, ‘may the fields fail to produce grain’. Lines 10–11 may indicate the manner in which this should happen: seeds are sown (fecunda … semina), but produce no crops (nec … parturiant segetes).

How, then, can line 15 effetas Cereris sulcis condatis auenas be emended? It seems clear that, if it is to fit its context, the line should be saying simply ‘may the fields fail to produce wheat’ rather than ‘may the fields produce oats instead of wheat’. In fact, auenas may also be objectionable for another reason: the word is used twice in close proximity, at lines 7 and 19, to refer to the panpipes.Footnote ¹¹ Assuming sulcis condatis is sound, we should probably aim to restore a text saying something like ‘may you receive wheat seeds in sterile furrows [so that they produce no harvest]’. In other words, condatis should have as its direct object a word denoting wheat, whereas effetas should define a word referring to the soil. One conceivable line of correction would be to adopt Thomas's effetis and to replace auenas with a word referring to wheat. Kenney's aristas does refer to wheat; yet although ears of wheat can be cropped, they cannot be sown. I fail to think of any more suitable replacement for auenas along these lines.

Another option is to adopt Thomas's Cererem and to replace auenas with a word that would develop the notion of barren soil. I propose effetae Cererem sulcis condatis harenae, ‘may you bury wheat in furrows of sterile sand’.Footnote ¹² We may note that Virgil uses harena, ‘sandy soil’, twice in contexts that speak of ploughing and sowing. In one he instructs that sandy soil should be ploughed later than rich soil is normally ploughed, so that it does not get dried up (G. 1.70 sterilem exiguus ne deserat umor harenam). In the other he describes how the piles of sandy soil should be levelled over the seeds after sowing (G. 1.105 cumulosque ruit male pinguis harenae). It is worth noting that harena is in both cases defined by an epithet roughly synonymous to effetus: sterilis or male pinguis. In addition, sulcis … harenae, ‘furrows of sand’, can be compared with cumulos … harenae, ‘piles of sand’ (these are, of course, the ridges of the furrows). The corruption is easy to explain: first, (h)arenae became auenae, no doubt under the influence of line 7 auena; then, effetae … auenae was construed as a direct object with condatis (for what else could it be?) and was accordingly ‘corrected’ to effetas … auenas; finally, since this made Cererem superfluous, it had to be changed to Cereris, to create at least some semblance of sense and grammar.