Phoebe Lakin (Harvard University)
Few parts of the notoriously “intractable” Georgics (Batstone 1997: 125) are as perennially contested as the vignette of the Old Man of Tarentum (4.116-48), the anonymous gardener who transforms a vacant lot into a profusion of flowers and fruit trees. This paper examines the reception of this elusive passage through an ecocritical lens. Instead of seeking closure for the puzzle of the Old Man, I examine the portrayal of his garden in two twentieth-century adaptations of the Georgics, arguing that its hermeneutic openness turns it into a window onto the environmental ethos of its readers.
Narrative techniques mark out the garden as significant for questions of both land-use and poetics, but stop short of telling us how it is significant. The speaker’s praeteritio (4.116-19, 147-48) signals that horticulture is important yet not completely georgic (Perkell 1981: 169); the gardener’s activities hold metaliterary connotations (Thibodeau 2001: 183-191); the hurried envoi leaves the topic to “others” (4.148). Although this frame invites readers to determine the garden’s meaning, evidence from elsewhere in the Georgics validates multiple readings (Kronenberg 2009: 175). In this determination, then, readers’ own perspectives on the value and meaning of land-use are crucial.
Robert Brasillach’s proto-fascist biography of Virgil (1931) and David Slavitt’s irreverent translation of the Georgics (1972) reveal the role of readers’ own “environmental hermeneutics” in defining the Tarentine garden. Brasillach’s fictitious account of Virgil’s life unites far-right ideology and environmental aesthetics (Tame 1986, Ziolkowski 1993). Here the poet encounters an old man tending “a conquered garden on rebellious soil” (127), and his subdued landscape is described as visually beautiful, morally unblemished, and nostalgically resonant for Virgil (127-128). Brasillach’s dual emphases – ordered violence and the romantic beauty of the countryside – render the garden a microcosm of the agrarian policies of his fascist party.
Slavitt, meanwhile, fashions the garden as a utopian, if self-consciously literary, escape from ecological disaster. Translated as disruptions to the biosphere were entering public consciousness in the U.S., Slavitt’s Georgics alludes to contemporary ecological concerns as presented by the American news media. For instance, he complicates Virgil’s advice to “praise large estates, cultivate small ones” by riffing on a New York Times article about the pollution of the Mediterranean by oil refineries (Cornwell 1971; Slavitt 1972: 82-3); even harvesting honey becomes an extractive practice, akin to robbery (128). Yet the Tarentine gardener propagates a “dream of paradise,” the consummate small estate where “generous” bees willingly part with their honey (122). This version of the garden offers a wistful alternative to the polluting specter of modern industry.
As shown by recent work in “Eco-Georgic” (Fairer 2011, Ecozon@ 2021) and related topics (Sayre 2013, 2017), Virgilian scholarship is engaged in acknowledging and exploring the extent to which readers’ own sense of the biosphere inflects interpretations of the poem. How can we apply ecocritical theory to ancient texts in a way that accounts for some of the more troubled appropriations of environmentalism, and how will future Virgilians read the Georgics in an era of anthropogenic climate change?