240 The reticence deliberate 



Can we suppose that Vergil did not know how important a place 

 in contemporary agriculture was filled by slave-labour? I think not: 

 surely it is inconceivable. What meets us at every turn in other writers 

 cannot have been unknown to him. Macrobius 1 has preserved for us 

 a curious record belonging to 43 BC, when the great confiscations and 

 assignations of land were being carried out in the Cisalpine by order 

 of the Triumvirs. Money and arms, needed for the coming campaign 

 of Philippi, were being requisitioned at the same time. The men of 

 property threatened by these exactions hid themselves. Their slaves 

 were offered rewards and freedom if they would betray their masters' 

 hiding-places, but not one of them yielded to the temptation. The 

 commander who made the offer was Pollio. No doubt domestics are 

 chiefly meant, but there were rustic slaves, and we have reason to 

 think that they were humanely treated in those parts. Dion Cassius 2 

 tells us that in 41 BC Octavian, under great pressure from the clamorous 

 armies, saw nothing to be done but to take all Italian lands from pre- 

 sent owners and hand them over to the soldiers pe-rd re rij<; SouXeta? 

 teal /jieTaTrjs a\\rj<; /caracrKevfjs. Circumstances necessitated compromise, 

 which does not concern us here. But it is well to remember that it 

 was just the best land that the soldiers wanted, and with it slaves and 

 other farm-stock. For it was a pension after service, not a hard life 

 of bodily drudgery, that was in view. The plan of letting the former 

 owner stay on as a tenant has been referred to above. 



I hold then that Vergil's silence on the topics to which I have 

 called attention, however congenial it may have been to him, was in- 

 tentional : and that the poem, published in honorem Maecenatis*, was 

 limited as to its practical outlook with the approval, if not at the 

 suggestion, of the patron. It is essentially a literary work. In it 

 Vergil's power of gathering materials from all quarters and fusing them 

 into a whole of his own creation is exemplified to a wonderful degree. 

 His own deep love of the country, with its homely sights and sounds, 

 phenomena of a Nature whose laws he felt unable to explore, helped 

 him to execute the task of recommending a social and economic reform 

 through the medium of poetry. By ignoring topics deemed unsuitable, 

 he left his sympathies and enthusiasm free course, and without sym- 

 pathies and enthusiasm the Georgics would not have been immortal. 

 Even when digressing from agriculture, as in his opening address to the 

 Emperor, there is more sincerity than we are at first disposed to grant. 

 He had not been a Republican, like Horace, and probably had been 

 from the first attached to the cause of the Caesars. 



1 Macrob Sat I n 22. 2 Dj on c ass XLVIII 6 3. 



3 The words of Donatus (after Suetonius) in his life of Vergil. Reifferscheid's Suetonius 

 P59- 



