Vergil's vocabulary 229 



sleep. This much-admired passage may remind us of the high value 

 set upon the ox in ancient Italy, traditionally amounting to a kind of 

 sanctity; for it is said 1 that to kill an ox was as great a crime as to 

 kill a man. We may wonder too what the luxurious but responsible 

 Maecenas thought of the lines contrasting the simple diet and un- 

 troubled life of the ox with the excesses and anxieties of man. But, if 

 civilization owed much to the labours of the ox, and if gratitude was 

 due to man's patient helper, what about the human slave? Is it not a 

 remarkable thing that the Georgics contain not a word of appreciative 

 reference to the myriads of toiling bondsmen whose sweat and sufferings 

 had been exploited by Roman landlords for at least 150 years? Can 

 this silence on the part of a poet who credits an ox with human affec- 

 tion be regarded as a merely accidental omission? 



Of poets in general it may I think be truly said that the relation 

 between the singer and his vpcabulary varies greatly in various cases. 

 Personal judgments are very fallible: but to me, the more I read Vergil, 

 the more I see in him an extreme case of the poet ever nervously on 

 his guard 2 against expressing or suggesting any meaning or shade of 

 meaning beyond that which at a given moment he wishes to convey. 

 This is no original discovery. But in reaching it independently I have 

 become further convinced that the limitations of his vocabulary are 

 evidence of nice and deliberate selection. The number of well- 

 established Latin words, adaptable to verse and to the expression of 

 ideas certain to occur, that are used by other poets of note but not by 

 him, is considerable. I have a long list : here I will mention only one, 

 the adjective vagus. The word may have carried to him associations 

 below the pure dignity of his finished style. Yet Horace used it freely 

 in the Odes, and Horace was surely no hasty hack careless of propriety, 

 and no mean judge of what was proper. Now, when I turn to the 

 Georgics, Vergil's most finished work, I am struck by the absence of 

 certain words the presence of which would seem natural, or even to be 

 expected, in any work professedly treating of agriculture in Roman 

 Italy. Thus servus does not occur at all, serva in the Aeneidonly, and 

 servitium in the strict sense only Buc I 40 and Aen III 327. In Georg 

 III 167-8 ubi libera colla servitio adsuerint he is speaking of the 

 breaking-in of young oxen 3 in figurative language. So too dominus 

 and domina occur in the Bucolics and Aeneid but not in the Georgics. 

 The case of opera and the plural operae may seem to be on a somewhat 

 different footing in so far as the special sense of opera^ 'the average 



1 Varro II 5 4, Coltfmella Vipraef 7, Plin Nffvui 180. 



2 The molle atque facetum attributed to V by Horace is I think rightly explained by 

 Quintilian VI 3 20, and amounts to easy and fastidious taste, of course the result of careful 

 revision, his practice of which is attested in the Suetonian biography. 



3 So Tibullus II i 41-2. 



