Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

THE GEORGTCS
by the simile of a legion drawn up for battle (279-85), the description of a great
oak (291-7), and of a plantation fire (303-11), and the soaring paean on spring
(322—45). The damage done by the goat, for which it is sacrificed to Bacchus,
gives occasion for a description of the festival of Compitalia (380—96), corresponding
to that of Ceres in Book 1 but in this case idealized by the introduction
of Greek elements (for this is literature, not documentary). 1 It is important to
realize that religion in the Georgics is more Greek than Italian. 2 (To see their
life-scene in the light of their knowledge of Greek life and literature was
peculiarly exciting to Romans, just as post-Renaissance Europeans loved to
invest the present with classical trappings.) Other trees need less care than vines,
and are treated in a light-hearted passage that ranges far and wide over the
world (420—57).
The tone is thus set for the famous finale, the encomium of country life
(458—542), which consummates the optimism of Book 2 by contrast with the
finale that consummates the pessimism of Book 1. It is fine rhetoric on a conventional
theme, even if the idyllic and Golden Age colouring belies the
emphasis in Book 1, and particularly in the theodicy there, on the necessity for
unremitting toil. Lines 495-512 are Lucretian-style satire on the hectic, immoral
life of the metropolis, juxtaposed most effectively, through the sudden, asyndetic
peace of the spondaic line, agricola incuruo terram dimouit aratro ' the farmer
has gone on cleaving his land with the curved plough', to an enthusiastic description
of the regular, moral life of the country, with its constant round of produce
and pleasures, the life that in the past made Rome great.
Book 3 opens with a proem (1—48) in which Virgil speaks of his poetic
intentions. The central portion (10-40) reveals a remarkable symbolic vision.
Apparently with Pindar in mind, he imagines himself as both victor and master
of ceremonies at games to be held at his native Mantua, whither he has led the
Muses in triumph from Helicon. There he will build by the Mincius a temple to
Caesar, with his cult-statue placed in the midst. (No doubt he was thinking of
the temple of Divus Iulius which Caesar, who must here be Octavian, was
shortly to dedicate, as well as the temple of Zeus by the Alpheus at Olympia
and the Pindaric metaphor of building a temple of song.) Then, adopting
another Pindaric metaphor, that of the chariot of song, already introduced at the
close of the previous book, he says he will cause a hundred chariots to race by
the river, and divert all Greece from Olympia and Nemea to these Mantuan
competitions. He himself will lead the procession to sacrifice and also stage plays
(a feature of Roman, not Greek, games). On the doors of the temple (here he
may have had in mind another temple then rising, that of Palatine Apollo) he
will have carvings descriptive or symbolic of Caesar's victories in the East, and
there will be statues of the Trojan ancestors of Rome and Apollo the founder of
1 Meuli (1955).
326
2 Wissowa (1917) 98-9.
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