The Vergil Garden in Naples
By C.W. Marshall, University of British Columbia
The Parco Virgiliano a Piedigrotta, Naples, has a “Virgil Garden”—a terraced park that feature the many plants mentioned in the poet’s works, all carefully labeled with botanical detail and a pertinent hexameter excerpt. This paper examines this site through ten frames, to understand how Virgilian vegetation is redeployed for homage, honour, and horticulture. The ten frames perceive the garden
(i) as a park, with beautiful views of the Amalfi coast and Mt. Vesuvius, purporting to offer a connection with nature and elevating the site within the city’s long history;
Durando saecula uincit: Time of Plants and Time of Men in Virgil's Oeuvre
By Francesco Grotto, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Virgil shows a particular fondness for ancient trees and forests throughout his entire oeuvre. In this paper, I would like to highlight some philosophical implications of the relationship between ‘arboreal time’ and ‘human time’ as represented in his poetry, a topic that deserves further investigation in the context of more recent ecocritical approaches.
Vergil’s Rivers: A Case Study in Non-Human Agency
By Kresimir Vukovic, University of Venice, Ca' Foscari
Much ink has been spilled on the literary role of rivers as metaphors, personifications, and narrative devices (see Jones 2005). However, the role of rivers as active agents in the environment has not been extensively explored. The rising paradigm of ecocriticism calls for a rejection of the traditional image of non-human elements as (passive) landscape and for a reconsideration of the environment as a network of elements with their own agency (see Martelli 2020).
Darkness Golden: Dark Ecology in Vergil's Golden Age
By Erica Krause, University of Virginia
The goal of this paper is twofold: to use environmental philosopher Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology to better understand Vergil’s conception of the mythical Golden Age in the Georgics and the Eclogues, and to use Vergil to better understand dark ecology and modern human-nonhuman relations. These texts display awareness that human cruelty to nonhumans leads to human suffering, as the climate crisis is teaching us anew today.
Imagining Affect: Movement and Emotion in the Georgics
By Aaron Seider, College of the Holy Cross
In its imagination of human beings and the land, the Georgics explores the emotions farming prompts, ranging from the old man of Tarentum’s satisfaction to the despair caused by the need for incessant labor. By drawing on ideas from affect studies about people’s emotional responses to and impacts on their environment, I argue that the Georgics portrays its characters and poet as experiencing and creating fundamentally different emotions as they move through space.
Vergil on Nature and Culture: a Re-reading of Eclogue 10
By Thomas Munro, Yale University
Vergil’s tenth eclogue is often read as a pessimistic coda to the collection as a whole, not least as a rejection of the genre of pastoral. Not only does Gallus, the main figure of the poem, spurn the bucolic hexameter in favour of love elegy, but the poet himself is preparing to leave the world of shepherds and flocks. As modern readers, we know that in closing the collection Vergil is already looking ahead to the Georgics, to the world of organised farming and the loftier genre of didactic.