As evening falls at the end of the Eclogues we come out of the shade of the pastoral world, a shade harmful to crops (Ecl. 10.76) and ‘rise’ (Ecl. 10.75 surgamus) with the poet to the higher subject matter of a didactic poem; the reader, instead of eavesdropping on the self-enclosed world of fictional shepherds singing to each other, is now the addressee of instructions by the poet that aim at results in the world outside the poem. We remain in the countryside, but now as the setting not for the leisurely pastimes of musical shepherds, but for the laborious annual round of the farmer. As in the Eclogues the countryside is at the mercy of individuals and events in the larger world; as in Eclogue 1 that dependence is soon focused on the great man in Rome, now named as (Octavian) Caesar, whose prospective divinity is framed in grandiosely cosmic terms, the reward for a heroism that far outreaches the simple benefaction for which the iuuenis of Eclogue 1 is magnified as a god by Tityrus. Octavian enters the Georgics from a world of epic journeying and struggle, to whose literal presence we are intermittently recalled from our work on the land, but which is also figuratively present within the world of the farmer, who has his own paths to follow and battles to fight. The poem’s final image of Octavian ‘thundering’ in battle in the distant east (4.560–2) is a suitable advertisement of the full-dress epic on Octavian’s legendary ancestor that is to follow.