Madeline Davis (Christendom College)
‘The best poem by the best poet,’ as John Dryden called Vergil’s Georgics, continues to offer a rich harvest to lovers of Latin literature, but still defies all efforts of oversimplification and does not yield its meaning to facile interpretations. The issues of labor and justice are inextricably bound with the question of man’s relation to the natural world, and Vergil offers no superficial solutions. In this essay, I examine the heart of the poem, a passage near the end of Book II known as “The Praises of Country life.”
Interpretations of the Georgics broadly divide into more optimistic or more pessimistic readings. Those who take the optimistic view often cite and make much of these praises of country life. However, it is not in choosing optimistic over pessimistic readings or vice-versa that we can best appreciate Vergil’s genius. Vergil employs his poetic skill to condemn the luxury and vice that enthralled much of his audience, while contrasting it with the simple yet contented and well-ordered life of the farmers. While pessimistic readings would take this passage as a hollow paean of a fiction that has no place in the real world—a world stripped of justice and burdened by hard labor—Vergil’s emphasis on the virtue of the farmers suggests another possibility. The farmer cultivates the earth justly, and the earth in turn cultivates justice in the farmer, allowing for the happy flowering of virtue that produces an ease similar to, but also quite distinct from, the abundance that characterized the age of Saturn. In the virtue cultivated by the farmer in his steady labor with the earth, and cultivated in him by the iustissima tellus, Vergil reveals a bridge between the golden age of Saturn and the harsher world ruled by Jove in which the farmer, the poet, and his audience find themselves.