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The Fourth Georgic, Virgil, and Rome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Jasper Griffin
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Extract

Never were more prophetic words penned than these of Friedrich Klingner. Many and various have been the interpretations put forth since then, and some of them have been very strange indeed. The reader who has duly confronted Coleman, Otis, Segal, Bradley, Wender, Wilkinson, Wankenne, Coleiro, Hardie, Joudoux, Wormell, Otis again, Parry, Putnam, Cova, Chomarat, and Stehle, feels dismay; perhaps despair. For some, the point of the Aristaeus and Orpheus episodes is political propaganda (so Coleiro: Gallus could have survived had he humbled himself like Aristaeus, the moral being the duty of subordination to the Princeps; so, rather differently, Joudoux: the poem is propaganda for the supremacy of Octavian, in terms of the threefold Indo-European structure ofDumezil). For others, it is moral (so, for instance, Wender: Orpheus turned away from the hard and morally ambiguous farmer's life, as lived by Aristaeus; Aristaeus gets bugonia as his reward, while Orpheus is dismembered and scattered in order to fertilize the earth); or religious (so Chomarat: the experience of Aristaeus is presented under the schema of initiation into a mystery religion); or political and moral (so Wormell and Otis: Aristaeus ‘stands for the sinful self-destruction, atonement and revival of the Roman people’; life emerges from death, ‘in political terms, the Augustan restoration from the anarchy of civil war’; ‘Aristaeus, it is to be presumed [sic], was induced to heed the lesson’).

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Research Article
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Greece & Rome , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , April 1979, pp. 61 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1979

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References

1. Coleman, R., A 83 (1962). 55–71Google Scholar; Otis, Brooks, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry (Oxford, 1963)Google Scholar; Segal, C., AJP 87 (1966), 307–25Google Scholar; Bradley, A., Anon 8 (1969), 347–58Google Scholar; Wender, D. S., AJP 90 (1969), 424–36Google Scholar; Wilkinson, L. P., The Georgics of Virgil (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar; Wenkenne, A., , S. J., LEC 38 (1970), 18–29Google Scholar; Coleiro, E. in Vergiliana, ed. Bardon, and Verdière, (Leiden, 1971), pp. 113–23Google Scholar; Hardie, Colin, The Georgics: A Transitional Poem (3rd Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture, 1971)Google Scholar; Joudoux, R., Bull. Ass. G. Budè 1971, 67–82Google Scholar; Wormell, D. E. W. in Vergiliana (1971), pp. 429–35Google Scholar; Otis, Brooks, Phoenix 26 (1972), 40–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parry, Adam, Arethusa 5 (1972), 35–52Google Scholar; M. C. J. Putnam, ib. 53–70; Cova, P.V., Bull. Stud. hat. 3 (1973), 281–303Google Scholar; Chomarat, J., REL 52 (1974), 185–207Google Scholar; Stehle, E. M., TAPA 104 (1974), 347–69Google Scholar.

2. See already Scazzoso, P., Paideia 11 (1956), 25–8Google Scholar.

3. Castigiioni, L., Lezioni intorno alle Georgiche (Milan, 1947), p. 185Google Scholar.

4. So for Bovie, S. P., AJP 77 (1956), 355Google Scholar, Aristaeus is ‘a silhouette of the Roman practical man’–whose characteristic utterance, it seems is in the plangent tones of 321 ff.: ‘mater, Cyrene mater…’

5. This old view still has its supporters. Sellar, W. Y., Virgil3, p. 251Google Scholar: ‘It must be difficult for anyone who is penetrated by the prevailing sentiment of the Georgics to reach this point in the poem (sc. 4.315) without a strong feeling of regret that the jealousy of Augustus had interfered with its original conclusion.’ Conway, R. S., Proc. Class. Ass. 25 (1928), 31Google Scholar: ‘Yet no one who approaches the Fourth Book of the Georgics with an open mind, after reading the others, can possibly doubt that there must be some reason for the startling break in the middle of that Book.’ Schmidt, Magdalena, Die Komposition von Vergils Georgica (Paderborn, 1930), pp. 173–7Google Scholar: ‘So störend für den Genuss der künstlerischen Einheit und Feinheit der Georgica ist … die Eindichtung eines diesem Epyllion wie den Georgica überhaupt wesensfremdes Trauergedichtes … Wie kommt Vergil aber zu dieser Geschmacklosigkeit der Komposition?’ Not many scholars now would actually deplore the insertion of this uniquely beautiful piece of poetry; but Coleiro (see note 1) apologizes for its feebleness with the argument that Virgil naturally found it distasteful to have to suppress his laudes Galli and replace them with an apologia for his disgrace and death.

6. A fuller one: Cova, pp. 290 ff.

7. Wilkinson, p. 120.

8. A couple of passages which seem to me to succeed in the difficult attempt to describe Virgil's technique: ‘eine neue Art dichterischer Darstellung, bei der in einem beschrankten, unmittelbar dargestellten Gegenstande ein grösserer, der jenen umgreift, mit gegenwärtig wird und dem kleinen Bedeutsamkeit gibt’–,Klingner, , Römiscbe Geisteswelt 4, p. 287Google Scholar; see also p. 303. ‘Das Ganze gerät ins Schwanken, und in den wallenden Nebeln, die der Dichter über seine Bilder breitet, taucht in schattenhaften Umrissen eine zweite Welt auf, die näher zu dem Leben des Dichters gehört’– Latte, K., Antike und Abendland 4 (1954), 157Google Scholar; cf. 161 (= Kleine Schrfiten, pp. 860, 864). ‘Die Eigenart der vergilischen Poesie, … hinter Bildern und Gleichnissen das den Dichter eigentlich Berührende zu verstecken oder es durch diese auszudrücken’–Dahlmann, H., Abb. Ak. Mainz 1954, 10, 4Google Scholar.

9. See Dahlmann, 6 (but Klingner was right to reject Dahlmann's idea that the bees are expounded in the regular form of an ethnographical ἔκιρρασις: Virgil, p. 310 n. 1); Maguinness, W. S., Bull. Ass. G. Budé (1962), 443Google Scholar; Servius in G. 4.219; RE s.v. Biene, 446.19 ff. The general point is an obvious one, and I have not laboured it. ‘Haec ut hominum civitates, quod hie est et rex et imperium et societas’, Varro, R.R. 3.16.5.

10. See Oppermann, H., Wege zu Vergil (Darmstadt, 1963), p. 123Google Scholar: ‘Im Bienenstaat kehrt die römische res publica wieder.’

11. ‘Es handelt sich um ein Gefüge schlechthinniger, absoluter Vorbildlichkeit, das dem absolut Gültigen, Vernünftigen, Richtigen entspricht’ (p. 13).

12. ‘… Das zierliche Musterbild eines zierlich geordneten natürlichen Idealstaats’, Hellas und Hesperien2 (Zürich, 1974), p. 716Google Scholar.

13. In Vergiliana, p. 429.

14. ‘L'aspiration à une societé de règie et de travail sous un chef bien-aimé, conclusion virgilienne d'un labeur de dix ans’, Bayet, J., RPh 4 (1930), 247Google Scholar = Mélanges de littérature latine (Rome, 1967), p. 241Google Scholar.

15. The technical writers know of this dust as only one of a number of ways of settling bees: Varro R.R. 3.16.30, Pliny N.H. 11.58. Virgil's phrasing is designedly pregnant; compare Lucan on the impromptu burial of Pompey, 8.867:

pulveris exigui sparget non longa vetustas

congeriem, bustumque cadet…

16. Klinger, , Virgil, p. 314Google Scholar: ‘Zugleich kommt der Ubermut des gliickseligen Spielens…’

17. Arethusa 5 (1972), 43Google Scholar. See also Otis, , Phoenix 26 (1972), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘The co-operative state is of course one aspect of reality—Roman and human as well as animal and natural reality—but it is not the whole.’

18. ‘Musaeo melle’, Lucr. 4.22; ‘ego apis Matinae more modoque …’, Hor. C. 4.2.27; ‘poetica mella’, Hor. Epp. 1.19.44; Plato, , Ion 534bGoogle Scholar; RE s.v. Biene, 447.40, ‘Daher wurden auch Dichter, Redner, Philosophen, u.s.w., mit den Bienen in Beziehunggebracht’; Cook, A. B., JHS 15 (1895), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Zeus (Cambridge, i.1914), 443Google Scholar; ⋯σ⋯μαινε γ⋯ρ τ⋯ μ⋯λι τ⋯ν εὐ⋯πειαν τ⋯ς σορ⋯ας, Artemidorus, Oneir. 5.83; πλ⋯ρ⋯ς τοι μ⋯λιτος τ⋯ καλ⋯ν στ⋯μα, Θὑρσι, γ⋯νοιτο, Theocr. 1.146, and Gow ad loc; Usener, H., RM 57 (1902) 177 ffGoogle Scholar. = Kleine Schriften (Leipzig and Berlin, 1912), 4 pp. 398 ff., esp. 400 fGoogle Scholar.

19. Contrast the beautiful line, admired by G. K. Chesterton, in the description of bees in King Henry V 1.2:

Others like soldiers, armed in their stings,

Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;

Which pillage they with merry march bring home

To the tent-royal of their emperor:

Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing masons building roofs of gold …

Dover Wilson, in his note ad loc, suggests that Shakespeare drew this touch from the commentary on the fourth Georgic by Willichius, (Venice 1543)Google Scholar, who adds to Virgil's list of functions: ‘Aliae σειρ⋯νες sunt.’ The addition, and the way Shakespeare seizes on it, show what a noticeable gap Virgil left.

20. Those who, like Wankenne, , LEC 38 (1970), 25 f.Google Scholar, talk of Aristaeus and Orpheus as ‘two shepherds’, are on the wrong track.

21. This view is already implicit in Porcius Licinus, fr. 1 Morel, Poenico hello secundo… Cf. now Funke, H., RM 120 (1977), 168Google Scholar.

22. See Norden, E., Kleine Schriften, pp. 400 ff.Google Scholar, and, e.g., Fleischer, U., Hermes 88 (1960), 327Google Scholar, Wilkinson, p. 172.

23. Some salubrious reservations on this word are expressed by Galinsky, G. Karl, Ovid's Metamorphoses (Oxford, 1975), pp. 210–17Google Scholar. Also Clarke, W. M. in CJ 72 (1977), 322Google Scholar: ‘One of the most amazing trends in recent literary criticism of ancient literature— the attempt to describe Vergil and Ovid as anti-Augustan, anti-establishment radicals, ideologically opposed to a proto-fascist dictator … there is virtually no hard evidence to support it …’

24. See the masterly article by Clausen, Wendell, HSCP 68 (1964), 139–47Google Scholar, reprinted in Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. S. Commager (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966). Suggestive but more vulnerable is Adam Parry's ‘The two voices of Virgil's Aeneid’, reprinted in the same volume from Arion 2 (1963); see also, in the same book, Brooks, R. A., ‘Discolor Aura’, from AJP 74 (1953), 260–80Google Scholar.

25. The discussion of the passage by Otis, pp. 313 ff., is flawed by his adoption of the bad reading pacisque, ‘the habit of peace’. See Fraenkel, Eduard, Mus. Helv. 19 (1962), 133Google Scholar = Kleine Beiträge (Rome, 1964), 2. p. 143Google Scholar.

26. Macrob, . Sat. 5.17.1–2Google Scholar: ‘Quid Vergilio contulerit Homerus hinc maxime liquet quod, ubi rerum necessitas exegit a Marone dispositionem inchoandi belli, quam non habuit Homerus … laboravit ad rei novae partum. Cervum fortuito saucium fecit causam tumultus. Sed ubi vidit hoc leve nimisque puerile, dolorem auxit agrestium …’ Probus as the likely source: Norden, , Ennius und Vergilius (Leipzig and Berlin, 1915), pp. 4 ffGoogle Scholar. With Macrobius' ‘cervum fortuito saucium’, compare Denniston, J. D. and Page, D., Aeschylus, Agamemnon (Oxford, 1957), p. xxvGoogle Scholar on the portent at Aulis: ‘the poet tells us in plain language [sic] that Artemis was enraged because eagles, sent by Zeus to be an encouraging portent, happened [sic] to devour a hare together with its unborn young. …’ The ways of poets do not change. Nor do those of commentators …

27. Fraenkel, , JRS 35 (1945), 5Google Scholar = Kleine Beiträge 2. p. 153.

28. Klingner, , Virgil, p. 511Google Scholar. Heyne was gravely dissatisfied with Virgil here, (‘Nolo defendere poetam’), as were many earlier scholars. Conington gives a strikingly tepid defence: ‘Some have objected to the incident of the stag as too trival, as if there were anything unnatural in a small spark causing a large train to explode, or as if the contrast itself were not an element of greatness.’ The first point—a mere naturalistic defence of plausibility—is flat; the second, I confess, I can make nothing of.

29. Virgils epische Technik3 (Leipzig, 1914), p. 190Google Scholar. Heinze was sufficiently in the grip of the hostile tradition about the episode to say that Silvia's distress over the death of her stag can only be understood in the light of an hypothetical Hellenistic poem about Cuparissus—surely a severe criticism of Virgil. But his main point, that nobody is to blame, is, of course, an important one.

30. Virgil, p. 513.

31. Wimmel, W., Hirtenkrieg und arkadisches Rom (Munich, 1973), pp. 48 and 118 ff.Google Scholar: ‘ein bukolischer Kriegsanfang.’

32. ‘Some personal experience must lie behind both this passage and VII.483 ff.’, is Austin's not very helpful comment. Viktor Pöschl surprisingly does not mention the stag of Silvia in his treatment of 4.68 ff. (Die Dichtkunst Virgils (Wiesbaden, 1950), pp. 131Google Scholar ff. = The Art of Vergil (Michigan, 1962), pp. 80Google Scholar ff.). The discussion in Raabe, H., Plurima Mortis Imago, Zetemata 59 (Munich, 1974), p. 56Google Scholar, ignores this question.

33. It is a commonplace of Virgilian criticism to say that he was working his way towards the solutions eventually found in his epic. See, e.g., Dahlmann, 13, Hardie, pp. 27 ff., Segal, 321: ‘In the Fourth Georgic Virgil is already dealing with some of the issues of the Aeneid.’ The end of Segal's article (I am unable to agree with most of it) seems to me to be nearer the truth than most recent work which I have read.

34. The well-known problem of the apparently contradictory attitudes expressed at the end of the second Georgic towards the greatness of Rome and rustic life (contrast the philosophical ⋯rαραξ⋯α of 490–9 with the patriotism 535–5), is surely connected with this uncertainty. See most recently Clay, J. S., Philologus 120 (1976), 232 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Polybius was impressed by this extremely Roman habit, 6.65.5: κα⋯ μ⋯ν ⋯ρξὰς ἔξοντες ἔνιοι τοὐς ἰδ⋯ους υἱοὐς παρ⋯ π⋯ν ἔψος ἢ ν⋯μον ⋯π⋯κτεαν, πλε⋯ονος ποιοὑμενοι τ⋯ τ⋯ς πατρ⋯δος συμψ⋯ρον τ⋯σ κατ⋯ ψὑσιν ο⋯κει⋯τητος πρ⋯ς τοὐς ⋯ναγκαιοτ⋯τους. πολλ⋯ μ⋯ν οὖν τοια⋯τα κα⋯ περ⋯ πολλ⋯ν ἱστορεῖται παρ⋯ 'ρωμα⋯οις… Polybius accepts this as part of the σπουδ⋯ το⋯ πολιτεὑματος of the Roman citizen; no hint of moral ambiguity.

36. ‘So verstanden sind die Verse ein schönes Monument fur den Dichter, der sein weiches Empfinden mit der Bewunderung für die starre Grossartigkeit der alten “fortia facta” harmonisch zu vereinigen wusste.’

37. In the Aeneid, bees appear as the subject-matter of two similes. At 1.430–6 Aeneas sees the Carthaginians hard at work on the construction of their new city, like bees busy with the care of their home and their young—a poignant contrast with the homeless Trojans and their enforced idleness. At 6.707—9 he sees the unborn souls of all nations, ‘like bees in a flowery meadow on a fine summer day, busy with their pursuits and humming cheerfully’ (Austin ad loc); he marvels that they can wish to be born into the human world of pain—‘quae lucis miseris tarn dira cupido?’ In both passages Virgil finds it natural to compare bees with men, and his picture of them as industrious, and also as oblivious of the sorrows of human life, certainly does not conflict with my interpretation of them in the fourth Georgic.

38. Cf. Buchheit, V., Vergil über die Sendung Roms (Heidelberg, 1963), pp. 151 ff.Google Scholar, Galinsky, G. K., Aeneas, Sicily and Rome (Princeton, 1969), p. 98 n. 4Google Scholar.

39. Adam Parry was therefore misleading to say that ‘the song becomes the condition for the recreation of life’ (p. 52). Not Orpheus but Aristaeus recreates the bees; song does not set free the half-regained Eurydice. This central fact seems to me to rule out his interpretation of the poem, seductive and powerful as it is.

40. ‘Der ganze Abschnitt ist auf tragisches Ethos gestimmt; Zartheit des Gefühls und seelenvolle Ergriffenheit: συμπ⋯σξει ⋯ ποιητ⋯ς τοῖς προσώποις. Die Worttonsprache, das Malerische und die Schwermut der Rhythmen lasst sich nicht beschreiben …’, Norden, , Kleine Scbriften, p. 509Google Scholar.

41. Bovie, S. P., AJP 77 (1956), 347Google Scholar.

42. Otis, , Phoenix 26 (1972), 45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. I think it is much underestimated by Buchheit, V., Der Anspruch des Dichters (Darmstadt, 1972), pp. 174 ffGoogle Scholar., who takes it that the poet is making a serious claim for the importance of Geisf. ‘Somit versteht Vergil sein Werk als Beitrag zur Verwirklichung der aetas aurea Augusti und sieht die gemeinsame Aufgabe nun erftüllt. Daraus resultiert der Anspruch des Dichters’ (p. 181). The actual wording of the lines, it seems to me, is incompatible with so straight-forward an interpretation.

44. Norden, in SB Berlin (1934)Google Scholar = Kleine Schriften, pp. 468–532.

45. CQ 27 (1933), 36–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Otis, , Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, pp. 408 ffGoogle Scholar.

47. ‘The over-riding objection’, according to Anderson and Wilkinson.

48. Wilkinson, p. 69.

49. Syme, R., The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), p. 309 n. 2Google Scholar.

50. Fraenkel, , JRS 42 (1952), 7Google Scholar = Kleine Beiträge 2. p. 193.

51. Pollio to Cicero, ad fam. 10.32.5: ‘Gallum Cornelium, familiarem meum…’

52. Quoted from Syme, , op. cit., p. 482Google Scholar; cf. ibid., p. 320, ‘Pollio … was preserved as a kind of privileged nuisance’.

53. Seneca, , de Ira 3.23.4–8Google Scholar = 88 FGH T3.

54. Suet, . Aug. 66.2Google Scholar.

55. Otis, , op. cit., pp. 412 fGoogle Scholar.; Wilkinson, , Georgics, pp. 111 fGoogle Scholar.

56. I am grateful to Professor E. J. Kenney and Mr. R. O. A. M. Lyne for their helpful criticisms of this paper.