Virgil's list of the qualities that are desirable in a brood cow corresponds closely to those in Varro's De re rustica and in the texts which, though later, can be plausibly taken as evidence of an existing tradition. Yet, there is one exception, and it is an exception to which the poet carefully draws attention. Varro's, Columella's and Palladius’ ideal cows all share with Virgil's and with each other hairy ears, very long dewlaps and tail, and other features.Footnote ¹ However, whereas they all have narrow hooves (ungulis breuibus, Palladius), moderate at most (ungulis modicis, Columella), and certainly not broad (pedibus non latis, Varro), Virgil's cow emphatically has big feet (Verg. G. 3.51–9):

Few readers who have sampled the density of Virgil's intertextuality, the cura with which he selects individual words, or the polyphonic meanings at play in every line of the Georgics would be tempted to ascribe any such divergence from the technical tradition to carelessness or indifference. However, even if any were inclined to do so elsewhere, the enjambed phrase pes etiam draws emphatic attention to this dissent: ‘you may, from your familiarity with the tradition, expect the feet to be an exception, but no, they too should be large’.Footnote ³ The reader is thus positively invited to look for an explanation.

Scholars have tended to ignore or avoid the divergence. When attempts to account for it have been made, they are far from convincing.Footnote ⁴ Heyne's comparison with the Geoponica's ‘fatter rather than longer legs’ (σκέλη … παχύτεϱα μᾶλλον ἢ μακϱότεϱα, Geop. 17.2.1) both overstretches the semantic range of pes and offers a false equivalence between Virgil's totalizing magna and the Geoponica's precise distinction between girth and extension.Footnote ⁵ Erren's suggestion that magnus here means rectus and refers to the foot's upright posture smacks of special pleading.Footnote ⁶ Mynors's declaration that Virgil ‘is not writing a treatise but drawing a word-picture; and that picture would be spoilt by small feet’ is an egregious example of the sort of arbitrary, ex cathedra pronouncement which just occasionally blemishes his otherwise magisterial commentary.Footnote ⁷ This article will argue that the solution is rather to be found by considering three factors and their intersection: the preoccupation of Georgics 3 (and also, of course, parts of Book 4) with the dangers, the necessity and the proper regulation of amor; the poem's wider self-consciousness about its own generic status and the ideological implications of that status; and Hinds's playfully hyperbolic claim that ‘Latin poets are always ready for any wordplay involving human and metrical feet’.Footnote ⁸

Play on the double senses of πούς and pes as physical and metrical feet was pervasive in Greek poetry, perhaps as early as Pindar and certainly by the Hellenistic period, but it was especially common among the Romans.Footnote ⁹ Although it is particularly associated with the ludic self-consciousness of Ovid, it is already to be found in what may have been the first Latin hexameter, as Ennius, at the start of his epic Annales, marked his metrical innovation in abandoning Saturnians by invoking ‘the Muses who strike great Olympus with [their] feet’ (Musae quae pedibus magnum pulsatis Olympum).Footnote ¹⁰ Numerous examples have been noted in other texts which predate the Georgics, such as Catullus’ Carmina and Horace's Epodes, as well as in those composed contemporaneously or very soon afterwards, such as Tibullus’ first book of elegies.Footnote ¹¹ Henkel has even argued that Virgil himself, at G. 2.23, makes the shoots (plantae) of propagated plants ‘stand for the suppressed doublet of anatomical and metrical “feet” (pedes)’, alluding in turn to Lycoris’ tenerae plantae at Ecl. 10.49 and perhaps to a further, Gallan passage behind it.Footnote ¹² In terms both of chronology and of practice, then, there is every reason to entertain the possibility of a Virgilian foot pun at G. 3.55.

The nature of foot puns varies considerably. They include those which broadly evoke the notion of poetry in general, as when Catullus mocks a rival for suffering from podagra, both gout in his physical feet and ineptitude with metrical feet.Footnote ¹³ Others evoke a specific metre, with its generic and ideological associations, as with the personification of Elegy whom Ovid describes as having one foot longer than the other.Footnote ¹⁴ Although this example might seem to privilege the poetic metaphor to the exclusion of the literal referent, in fact Elegy is depicted in physical terms which assimilate her to the genre's archetypal puella as well as to the genre itself, while the poet's choice, like that of the Prodican Hercules he is burlesquing, is on one level an ethical one, between tragic seriousness and elegiac nequitia.Footnote ¹⁵ Such careful balancing of the poetic, the ideological and the physical is also a feature of Horace's foot pun in Epod. 11. There the poet's ‘uncertain foot’ (incerto pede) signifies simultaneously his lack of physical and emotional self-control, the metrical ambiguity of the elegiambus, and the generic and ideological tension that ambiguity produces between iambic hypermasculine aggression and elegiac effeminate aporia.Footnote ¹⁶ It is this sort of significance which the big foot of Virgil's cow carries, rejecting the elegiac metre, the elegiac genre, the elegiac ideal of female beauty and the elegiac conception of love.

The largeness of the cow's feet also fits into a wider system of imagery whereby epic is conceptualized as big and elegy as small.Footnote ¹⁷ This imagery of size is combined with that of feet elsewhere and in a manner strikingly similar to the passage under discussion. Horace's revelation that the superficially attractive matrona has big feet is part of Sat. 1.2's metapoetic subtext, reifying the corporeal metaphors of literary criticism, that ‘[t]he perfect lover … is also the perfect poem’.Footnote ¹⁸ Here, it is big-footed epic and the aristocratic Ennian women who embody it that are rejected, though the privileged other pole of the antithesis is Callimachean rather than elegiac poetics and ideology.Footnote ¹⁹ The contrast between the feet of an epic figure and the constraints of elegiac metrical and generic form can perhaps best be paralleled by the moment in Ovid's Fasti when Hercules tries to put on Omphale's sandals and his ‘big feet burst the small bonds’ (scindebant magni uincula parua pedes, Ov. Fast. 2.324). As Robinson puts it, ‘the epic (hexameter) feet of Hercules can barely be contained in the dainty elegiac receptacle’.Footnote ²⁰ Tibullus paints a similar picture of Marathus striving to be the quintessential elegiac puer delicatus by vainly making ‘a tight strap bunch his squashed feet’ (ansaque compressos colligat arta pedes, Tib. 1.8.14).Footnote ²¹ Both Hercules and Marathus try to become elegiac by artificially making their feet small, but in the process they reassert the unelegiac—and, in Hercules’ case at least, positively epic—connotations of big feet. A similar dynamic is at work in Virgil's depiction of the cow. Its feet are to be the big (hexameter) feet of epic and didactic, but the carefully specified pes etiam puts, if anything, even more emphasis on their not being the small feet of elegy.Footnote ²² This is no mere donnish play with genre. In not being elegiac, Virgil's cow is not the object or provoker of destructively obsessive sexual desire, but rather embodies an antithesis of the genre, of its emblematic puella and of the world-view both represent. As such, she is also related—as their antithesis—to the neoteric Lesbia and the elegiac Cynthia, whose bodies (including, but by no means limited to, their feet) Papanghelis and Keith have shown to be analogues of Catullan, Propertian and Ovidian poetics and sexual politics.Footnote ²³

Before situating the unelegiac nature of Virgil's cow within the Georgics’ treatment of amor, it is worth acknowledging that a metapoetic (or metametrical) reading of this passage will inevitably be met with scepticism by some readers. However, such readers are likely to feel the same scepticism towards most foot puns in Graeco-Roman literature and many metapoetic passages in the Georgics. The cow's big, hexametric feet stand or fall with a large number of similar, widely (though not, of course, universally) accepted interpretations, and are better justified than many. While some foot puns occur in a more or less explicitly metapoetic context, as is the case with Ennius’ Muses or Ovid's Elegy, the majority do not. Catullus’ gouty lecher, Tibullus’ toe-pinching Marathus, Ovid's sandal-bursting Hercules and even Horace's lovelorn iambist, like Virgil's ugly cow, all require the reader to pick up subtle cues, to think beyond the explicit surface of the surrounding context, and to take into account the poet's wider metapoetic practice.

Metapoetics is central to the didactic project of the Georgics, but Virgil's practice is neither uniform nor always explicit.Footnote ²⁴ For example, convincing arguments have been put forward for taking the grafting in Book 2 as a metaphor for allusion, the integration of an alien text into the host, and for a wider metapoetic reading of the whole section on arboriculture.Footnote ²⁵ Such arguments rely on no explicit statements by the poet but rather on the established traditions of metapoetic imagery.Footnote ²⁶ Few metapoetic images, as we have seen, are more established than the foot pun. It also fits closely with Virgil's particular fondness for literalizing, or perhaps re-literalizing, the metaphors of literary criticism.Footnote ²⁷ Physical foot becomes metrical foot and comes full circle back to becoming a cow's hoof. Even the Georgics’ most universally acknowledged metapoetic image, the temple in the proem to Book 3, derives much of its allegorical status from intertextual engagement with Pindar, Callimachus and the wider tradition of metapoetic buildings.Footnote ²⁸ The explicit discussion of poetic subject-matter (cui non dictus Hylas puer … G. 3.6) transitions into the extended sporting and architectural metaphor, which almost seems to leave poetry behind and take on a life of its own, blurring the line between poetic temple and actual temple, encouraging the reader to be more sensitive to the potential for objects that make coherent sense when read literally to have an additional metapoetic significance. The composition of Book 3 itself is allegorized, as Virgil exploits the poeta creator topos to obliterate the distinction between hunting in virgin forests and writing on unhackneyed subject-matter.Footnote ²⁹ It is in the lines immediately following this that the reader, primed for maximum sensitivity to metapoetic readings, encounters the ugly cow and is invited by Virgil's explicit departure from the technical tradition to look for a special reason for her big feet.

Turning to the cow's place in the wider poem, it is well known that amor is a potentially destructive force in the world of the Georgics. It is of course necessary for the procreation of animals and, as such, an object of the farmer's cura, so that the elderly stallion's being ‘torpid towards sex’ (frigidus in Venerem, 3.97) is as important a reason for either expelling or secluding him (abde domo, 3.96, is notoriously ambiguous) as his uselessness for work and war. Moreover, as Knox has observed, ‘under some circumstances the suppression of amor can be at least as disastrous as indulgence’.Footnote ³⁰ However, the uncontrolled sexual passion associated with the poetics and the ideology of Hellenistic epigram, neoteric love poetry and the incipient tradition of erotic elegy is always ruinous. Already in Lucretius’ diatribe against obsessive sexual desire, there is a correlation between an attack on love and an attack on the love poetry which symbolizes, depicts and perpetuates it.Footnote ³¹ Similarly in the Georgics, obsessive love is associated with elegy, be it the formosa iuuenca (Verg. G. 3.219) who drives the rival bulls to fight, or the very Gallan figure of Orpheus.Footnote ³² In this world, where sex is a necessity but desire a danger, the cow, whose ugly face distances her from the elegiac puella as her large feet distance her from the elegiac genre, is the embodiment of an unexpected ideal.Footnote ³³

It is striking how closely this reading of Virgil's cow corresponds to that of Ross, even though he makes no gesture towards genre or metapoetics:

The contrast with the crypto-elegiac heifer who provokes the battle of the bulls later in Georgics 3 has already been made. Ross's invocation of the Sabine women suggests a parallel with later contrasts between the seuera mater or montana uxor and the culta puella, such as those made in Hor. Carm. 3.6.17–44 and Juv. 6.5–8. There too, sexual politics is reinforced by generic play, since both texts construct the immoral female (and bad mother) as a distinctively elegiac figure, implicitly in Horace, explicitly in Juvenal.Footnote ³⁵ Although Virgil's ugly cow is paralleled with a Sabellian seuera mater and his formosa iuuenca with an elegiac puella,Footnote ³⁶ this does not mean that these animals should be reductively read as merely metaphorical women. Certainly allegory is one of the modes in which Virgil invites his reader to interpret the Georgics, but it remains in tension with a wider conception of the similarities between human and animal. As Nappa puts it,

The human elegiac lover is an animal among animals, like the unnamed Leander of the genus iuuenis in the catalogue of beasts susceptible to love (3.258). Virgil's ugly, unelegiac cow, like his Io, is both cow and woman.Footnote ³⁸