Donald McCarthy (University of Toronto)
Agricultural Resilience and Climate Data in the Georgics
Current scholarship has seen a growing interest in applying quantitative models and methods of inquiry to classical studies. This paper responds to a need for consilience (Scheidel, 2018) between the humanities and the sciences, particularly in response to increasing anthropogenic climate issues in the 21st century. Through a quantitative analysis of Vergil’s descriptions of climate in the Georgics and his agricola’s responses to it, I argue that far from being intent simply on delighting readers (legentes delectare), Vergil demonstrates a factual and intimate awareness of the natural world. Fundamentally this paper seeks to use the Georgics as a data source to answer the question set out by Haldon et al. (2020): “Did people in the distant past think about system recovery?” and furthermore, in what manner could the farmer as portrayed by Vergil be considered “resilient”? While the Georgics has often been categorized by both ancient (Seneca Ep. 86.15) and modern readers alike (Wilkinson, 1982; Putnam, 1979) as an inaccurate and incomplete portrayal of agriculture, I will argue that Vergil, while not writing a genuine farming handbook, was not only highly accurate in much of his agricultural description (Spurr, 1986; Thomas, 1987), but evinced a real preoccupation for human interactions with the natural world and resilience in the face of disaster.
I begin my paper with an analysis of the climate vocabulary of the Georgics and how this is distributed across the poem’s four books. Through an analysis of over 100 terms related to temperature, wind, precipitation, flooding, drought, fertility, infertility, and disease, I accumulated a dataset of nearly 700 instances of climate-significant language in the poem. This lexical stock serves as a proxy data source in much the same way that current scholarship uses ice cores and dendrochronological studies to recreate the ancient climate (Sigl et al., 2015; Steinhilber et al., 2012). The efficacy of this philological approach for recreating climate has already been demonstrated for the Arabic-speaking world by Meklach et al. (2021). From this lexical dataset I will then present some of the most important climate related trends in the poem. For example, Vergil presents seasonality in a noticeably unbalanced way, with winter and summer dominating the poet’s vocabulary, while spring and autumn appear less frequently. Given the importance of these latter two seasons for planting and harvesting, the significance of winter and summer for Vergil signals a dominant interest in climate extremes rather than a holistic examination of agriculture.
In the second part of the paper, I proceed from the data presented in part one and demonstrate how these shifting portrayals of climate events in the poem affect Vergil’s conception of the farmer. Vergil’s farmers do not stand idly by in the face of either annual or isolated climate events and are in fact models of resiliency. This does not, however, mean for Vergil that they are bound to succeed, and the poet in fact presents a world in which the farmer’s relationship with nature is mutually violent and potentially irreparable.