[...]... sounds of the countryside 27 L P Wilkinson, The Georgics of Virgil: A Critical Survey (Cambridge, 1969), ch 10, ‘The Georgics in After Times’ 28 This is Cather’s version (My Ántonia, book 3, ch 2) of the lines from Eclogue 9, quoted above in Guy Lee’s translation Introduction xxxiii In the past it was relatively easy for students of the Roman world to read the Georgics with less awareness of real country... and Ovid (Toronto, 1998) is a wise and accessible study (ch 4 on Georgics) that should be better known outside Canada: see also K Volk, The Poetics of Latin Didactic: Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, Manilius (Oxford, 2002), ch 4 Introduction xvii 9 of Alexandrian poets Besides Aratus, whose weather lore Virgil adapts extensively in Book 1 of the Georgics, Virgil adapts Eratosthenes’ account of the five zones... collection (1999, above n 7) and J Farrell, Virgil’s Georgics and the Tradition of Ancient Epic: The Art of Allusion in Literary History (Oxford, 1991) 10 Thomas (1999), 137–40, has identified allusions to seven Greek and Latin poets in Virgil’s adaptation of this passage alone Virgil adapts Nicander’s Theriaca for his account of antidotes to snakebite in Georgics 3.414–39, and probably for his vivid botanical... Orpheus and the Georgics , in Conte, Virgil: The Poetry of Pathos (Oxford, forthcoming) 26 Odyssey 4.351–570 xxxii Introduction contains many echoes of Virgil’s bee community in the account of the new colony of Carthage, and the sixth book offers another, much fuller, descent to the underworld, and similar treatment of the dead As Wilkinson showed in his still definitive study,27 the Georgics have remained... by the admiring professional poet and critic Dryden, the Georgics were both read and imitated in eighteenth-century England––though few of us now read Thomson’s The Seasons But the poem was also studied even in the brutal farming conditions of pioneer Nebraska, if the narrator of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia stands for his author He first reads the Georgics while studying at university, and is moved first... by Rome out of respect for its Greek origin and culture We do not know how long Virgil stayed with Siro, but he writes in the coda to the Georgics (about twenty years later) that he is ‘lying in the lap of Naples, quite at home | in studies of the arts of peace’ (Georgics 2 This is the so-called Appendix Vergiliana (ed W V Clausen, Oxford, 1966); I know of no English translation, so have offered my own... evoked by the poem is caught up in a critical moment for Rome and Italy as the chaos of civil war is Donatus, Life, lines 91–7 The following quotation is from lines 81–4 On Virgil’s use of Varro in the Georgics, see R F Thomas, Reading Virgil and his Texts: Studies in Intertextuality (Ann Arbor, 2000), chs 5 and 8 6 7 xvi Introduction becoming a benevolent but unacknowledged monarchy; and we as readers... rejected Epicurean beliefs about divine indifference, and passionately advocated devout worship of the gods But the powerful language of Lucretius’ poetry had a greater influence on Virgil’s language in the Georgics than any other Latin poet The other kind of didactic, that gave instruction in an art or sport, looks like a model for Virgil to instruct the farmer, but normally took a far more trivial form,... compose works on hunting or dicing, and a conventional framework for Virgil’s most talented successor, Ovid, to create his parodic Art of Love As recent scholarship has shown, Virgil has applied in his Georgics not only the learning of Greek and Roman prose treatises but a wealth of poetic memories from Homer, whose heroic narrative poems were also seen by the ancient world as a source of teaching, from... fertile countryside of Andes, near the ancient Etruscan city of Mantua, ‘by the waters | of the wide Mincius whose ambling course flows this way and that, | its sides tossing their fringe of wavy rushes.’ (Georgics 3.13–15) We think of Mantua as Italian, but it and most of northern Italy had been inhabited by Gauls (Celtic tribes) until they were brought under Roman control by a series of campaigns ending . The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon by The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland in September 2004 This revised translation and Translator’s Note © Peter Fallon 2004, 2006 Editorial. © Elaine Fantham 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2006 All rights reserved but he writes in the coda to the Georgics (about twenty years later) that he is ‘lying in the lap of Naples, quite at home | in studies of the arts of peace’ (Georgics 2 This is the so-called