To whom addressed? 223 



from effects of the recent civil wars as well as from economic difficulties 

 of old standing ; and to convey sound precepts for the conduct of 

 agriculture in its various branches. But there is little doubt that the 

 precepts are all or most of them taken directly from earlier 1 writers, 

 Roman or Greek ; and we may reasonably suppose that most of them 

 (and those the most practical ones) were well known to the very classes 

 most concerned in their application. It is absurd to suppose that 

 agricultural tradition had utterly died out. The real difficulty was to 

 put it in practice. Now, what class of farmers were to be benefited by 

 the new poem ? Was the peasant of the uplands, soaked in hereditary 

 experience, to learn his business over again with the help of the poet- 

 laureate's fascinating verse? Surely he spoke a rustic 2 Latin, and 

 sometimes hardly that. Was it likely that he would gradually absorb 

 the doctrines of the Vergilian compendium, offered in the most refined 

 language and metre of literary Rome ? It is surely inconceivable. Nor 

 can we assume that any remaining intensive farmers of the Campanian 

 plain were in much need of practical instruction : what was needed 

 there was a respite from the unsettling disturbances of the revolutionary 

 period. To suggest that a part of the poet's design was to supply 

 much-needed teaching to the new coloni from the disbanded armies, 

 would be grotesque in any case, and above all in that of Vergil. If 

 we are to find a class of men to whom the finished literary art of the 

 Georgics would appeal, and who might profit by the doctrines so 

 attractively conveyed, we must seek them in social strata 3 possessed 

 of education enough to appreciate the poem and sympathize with its 

 general tone. Now all or most of such persons would be well-to-do 

 people, owners of property, often of landed property : people of more 

 or less leisure : in short, the cultured class, whose centre was Rome. 

 These people would view with favour any proposal for the benefit of 

 Italian agriculture. Many landowners at the time had got large estates 

 cheaply in the time of troubles, and to them anything likely to improve 

 the value of their lands, and to draw a curtain of returning prosperity 

 over a questionable past, would doubtless be welcome. They would 

 applaud the subtle grace with which the poet glorified the duty and 



1 Keightley includes Mago, whether rightly or not I am not sure. Conington's Introduc- 

 tion treats this matter fully. 



2 The futility of addressing rustic readers in polished literary language (diserte) is com- 

 mented on by Palladius [4th cent AD] in his opening sentences. He has been thought to 

 have in view Columella, who by the by is Vergil's great admirer. I cannot accept the views 

 of Daubeny in his Lectures pp 3-5. It is possible that the use of fire in improving land 

 may be a bit of Vergil's own advice, but I doubt it. See Daubeny pp 91-4, georg I 84 foil. 



3 E Meyer Kl Schr p 488 describing the hopeless task of Augustus in attempting the 

 moral and physical regeneration of Italy makes the general remark 'Nur an die hoheren 

 Stande, nur an die Elite, konnte Augustus sich wenden.' This is a true picture of the situa- 

 tion as a whole. To have to begin building at the top was fatal. 



