These are fruitful years for the Georgics. Scholarship on Virgil's middle poem has flourished in the last few decades, as critics have re-examined it through poetic, political, philosophical and pedagogical lenses. This volume springs from a conference held at UCL in 2014; it is a welcome addition to the field, reaping a rich harvest from existing scholarship while sowing the seeds of fresh approaches.
The editors group the volume's thirteen contributions into five sections: poetics and narrative, religion and philosophy, history and socio-politics, ancient responses, and (early) modern receptions. They themselves deftly survey the lie of the critical land and advertise their wares in a succinct yet detailed introduction. While the chapters certainly deliver the interpretative variety promised by the title's plurals, they are united by scrupulous attention to the nature of Virgil's didaxis, an interest in planting the Georgics firmly in the literary, philosophical and socio-political context of the early principate and a commitment to untangling the poem's complex self-reflexivity across its authorial voice and narration. They share, too, a post-Batstonian understanding of the Georgics not so much as a lesson in the impossibility of stable meaning, but as a poem openly wrestling with the looming threat of poetic inefficacy or didactic failure. Most chapters are short: admirable brevity, perhaps, but many of the chapters, particularly in the rewarding middle sections of the book, seem to cut off prematurely before finding room to blossom fully. Weaker chapters tend towards undifferentiated catalogues and low-stakes pay-offs; the most compelling contributions, by contrast, begin from relatively small subjects — the embroidered barbarians on Virgil's stage curtains, a seven-stanza fragment of translation by Shelley — and let broader considerations emerge organically.
Carefully grafting modern narratological theory to Virgilian didaxis, Robert Cowan homes in on the gulf between Virgil's assumed or ideal ‘you’ and the actual reader of the Georgics: a site of friction which increasingly accentuates the poem's preoccupation with problems of contingency, autonomy and determinism, narrative as much as historical. Stephen Heyworth offers two learned notes disambiguating the technical meaning of G. 1.108–9 (fields irrigated at the merest quirk of the boss's eyebrow) and 47–9 (cycles of ploughing, harvesting and fallow seasons), with metapoetic significance for Virgil's georgic project. Richard Thomas, who like Seneca declares aesthetic pleasure the highest aim of the Georgics (uoluit … legentes delectare, Ep. 86.15), essays a defence of New Criticism's interest in ‘Aesthetics, Form and Meaning’; he illustrates this with an anthology of poetic features including archaism, verbal arrangement, rhyme, acrostics and numerology, most well known already to Virgilian scholarship. Virgil's luxuriant language undeniably rewards close attention, but Thomas’ sparse catalogue of poetic effects, pruned of context, stops short of producing sustained readings, even on the New Critical model.
Two chapters on the Georgics’ flirtation with Orphism (Tom Mackenzie) and Epicureanism (Nicholas Freer) follow, tracing admirably clear paths through these mysterious and (in the case of Orphic cult) deliberately murky philosophical-religious systems. Both chapters handle their fragmentary materials with precision, drawing on recent textual discoveries in each field to reveal the Georgics’ deep-rooted engagement with them. Mackenzie suggests that Virgil's poem not only exhibits Orphic tropes (patterns of expiation, katabasis, theogony) but functions as a sort of cultic initiation, including in its didactic instructions the secrets of how to conquer death itself, and offering Octavian, the Georgics’ privileged reader, the possibility of Orphic renewal. Freer likewise moves quickly through established Epicurean undercurrents to argue that Virgil rejects Lucretian compromise between the poetic medium and Epicurus’ teachings, instead promoting Epicurus’ idea of poetry as seductive Siren-song, fundamentally unsuited to didactic instruction. Dionysian rhapsody and poetic ecstasy increasingly undermine Virgil's ideals of order and control, leaving Octavian to fulfil the poet's philosophical trajectory and take up Epicurus’ role of apotheosised culture-hero. These chapters raise interesting further questions, not least what might be implied by the co-presence within the Georgics of Orphism and Epicureanism, two incompatible philosophies yoked together to plough the same furrows of poetic hesitation and imperial protreptic.
Bobby Xinyue's chapter foregrounds the political dimensions of imperial divinisation, tracking the Georgics’ changing depictions of the relationship between poet and princeps. While Virgil begins the poem confident in his power to confer provisional godhood to his tutelary deity Octavian, as the poem progresses the emperor's divinisation becomes increasingly inevitable, with or without Virgil's help, and the poet's options narrow: either accept subordination as a panegyricist, or relinquish himself to an idealised past while Caesar forges a brave new future (G. 4.563–6). At the middle of the volume (ch. 7, a real highlight), Elena Giusti looks to the Georgics’ proem-in-the-middle, unravelling the poetic and political implications of Virgil's Britons who paradoxically seem to raise the very curtain into which they are woven (intexti tollant aulaea Britanni, 3.25). Giusti locates these Britons at a transitional moment between mid-republican theatrical propaganda and the empire's triumphal expansionism, as Virgil lays the groundwork for the Aeneid's theatrical barbarians and double-edged stories of foreign conquest. The figures’ openly artificial nature, the curtain's trompe l'œil effect, both recalls republican mockery of ‘self-painting Britons’ (110) and indexes the factitious nature of Octavian's post-civil war representations of foreign enemies (114). Martin Stöckinger's chapter, meanwhile, delves into the socio-politics of trade. Virgil occludes economic realia in the Georgics, and his farmers are curiously solitary creatures, but gift giving and exchange permeate the poem on all levels, from poetic patronage to the give-and-take between nature, gods and men. As both Virgil and Octavian understood, reciprocity could help smooth the path of social cohesion — even among the new hierarchies of the principate.
Onwards to reception. Sara Myers guides us on a meandering tour of Columella's luxury garden, finding in his assignment of flowery ornament to verse (Rust. 10) and real instruction to prose (Rust. 11) a tendentious resolution of the Georgics’ didactic tensions. Ailsa Hunt probes Servius’ mediation of the Georgics for both his contemporary schoolboy audience and modern scholars; she unearths a salutary lesson of caution, revealing the distortions introduced into our image of Roman religion by over-reliance on Servian interpretations of Virgil's poetry. Leaping ahead to the newly colonised Nova Scotia of the seventeenth century, William Barton pursues a thorough investigation of Marc Lescarbot's vernacular georgic in A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France, which transplants Virgil's didactic preoccupations to a new landscape and another post-civil war society in need of national renewal. Susanna Braund finds Janet Lembke's Georgics translation moderate, ‘unpretentious’ (186, 190), green-fingered and sympathetic. Vita Sackville-West's ambitious The Land fits Braund's category of a supposedly feminine ‘middle style’ less well, despite seeming equally personal in its hands-on horticulture, exilic nostalgia and occasionally bogus local dialect (Braund gathers some delicious Kentishisms: ‘yeavy’, ‘shrammed’, ‘haysel’, ‘reasty’, ‘droil’). Finally, in an expansive and sharply perceptive analysis (ch. 12), Katharine Earnshaw rescues Shelley's translation of Aristaeus’ journey to his mother (G. 4.360–73) from obscurity, setting it against his philosophies of mind, language and poetry to draw out its richly allusive texture. In Shelley's hands, Aristaeus becomes a brooding Romantic poet-hero and his watery descent a quasi-katabasis, helped along by the knowingly Dantesque terza rima. Shelley's newly eschatological landscape amplifies Virgil's own ‘infernal hints’ (177); its shadowy ambiguity evokes the more famous Orpheus episode, too, collapsing poetic past and future in a single frozen moment of sublime present.
