Cause of Vergil's reticence 237 



and not to spare his life is sheer waste. That there may be sarcasm 

 underlying the passage does not impair its candour. And it distinctly 

 includes rustic slavery in the words sine pascat durus aretque. Lastly, 

 while both poets praise the restfulness of the countryside with equal 

 sincerity, it is Horace who recognizes 1 that the working farmer him- 

 self, after his long labours at the plough, looks forward to retirement 

 and ease when he has saved enough to live on. His is a real rustic, 

 Vergil's an ideal. 



It will be admitted that all writers are, as sources of evidence, at 

 their best when they feel free to say or to leave unsaid this or that 

 according to their own judgment. If there is in the background some 

 other person whom it is necessary to please, it is very hard to divine 

 the reason of an author's frankness, and still more of his reticence. 

 For instance, the omission of a topic naturally connected with a subject 

 need not imply that a patron forbade its introduction. I cannot believe 

 that such a man as Maecenas 2 banned the free mention of slavery in 

 the Georgics. But, if a whole subject is proposed for treatment under 

 conditions of a well-understood tendency, the writer is not unlikely to 

 discover that artistic loyalty to that tendency will operate to render 

 the introduction of this or that particular topic a matter of extreme 

 difficulty. If the task of Vergil was to recommend a return to a more 

 wholesome system of agriculture, reference to the labour-question 

 or to land-tenure bristled with difficulties. My belief is that the poet 

 shirked these topics, relevant though they surely were, because he did 

 not see how to treat them without provoking controversy or ill-feeling ; 

 a result which Maecenas and the Emperor were undoubtedly anxious 

 to avoid. It was simpler and safer not to refer to these things. True, 

 the omission was a restraint on full-blooded realism. An indistinct 

 picture was produced, and modern critics have some reason to com- 

 plain of the difficulty of understanding many places of the Georgics. 



Whether chronological considerations may throw any light on the 

 influences to which this indistinctness is due, and, if so, what is their 

 exact significance, are very difficult questions, to which I cannot offer 

 a definite answer. The completion of the Georgics is placed in the 

 year 30 BC, after seven years more or less spent on composition and 

 revision. Now it was in that year that the new ruler, supreme since 

 the overthrow of Antony, organized the great disbandment of armies 

 of which he speaks in the famous inscription 3 recording the events of 



1 Hor Sat I i 28, 32. 



2 For the story of the 0tdX?j (freedman's offering) sent yearly by Maecenas to Augustus 

 as a recognition of his restoration of Roman freedom, see Gardthausen Augustus vn 7 and 

 notes. 



3 Monum Ancyr ed Mommsen, I 16-9, ill 22-8. 



