Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: influence, allusion, intertextuality
- 2 Beginnings and endings
- 3 The gods, the farmer and the natural world
- 4 Virgil's metamorphoses: mythological allusions
- 5 Labor improbus
- 6 The wonders of the natural world
- 7 The cosmic battlefield: warfare and military imagery
- 8 Epilogue: the philosopher and the farmer
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
8 - Epilogue: the philosopher and the farmer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: influence, allusion, intertextuality
- 2 Beginnings and endings
- 3 The gods, the farmer and the natural world
- 4 Virgil's metamorphoses: mythological allusions
- 5 Labor improbus
- 6 The wonders of the natural world
- 7 The cosmic battlefield: warfare and military imagery
- 8 Epilogue: the philosopher and the farmer
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
At the end of the introductory chapter, I proposed a reading of the Georgics as a profoundly open work, in which the didactic praeceptor passes in review a number of different ways of looking at the world, without finally allying himself to any one philosophical school or aligning himself definitively with the stance of a specific literary predecessor. I hope to have shown how such a reading can help to make sense of the tensions and conflicts which are so characteristic of this elusive poem. Some passages seem to express complete confidence in the benevolence of Jupiter, and in Octavian as his earthly counterpart; in others, Jupiter and the other gods seem distant or capricious, and the position of the princeps correspondingly precarious. At times, the poet seems to recommend a quasi-Epicurean withdrawal from public life, and to commit himself to the ideal of ataraxic calm and peace; elsewhere, he celebrates the virtues of labor in tones which are more suggestive of Stoic or traditional Roman ideals. The natural world can be perceived as indifferent to its human inhabitants (so Lucretius), or as an ideal environment providentially designed for us by a beneficent, Aratean deity; nature is characterized now as an ordered system, governed by laws and by the limits of the possible,now as chaotic, violent and mysterious.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virgil on the Nature of ThingsThe Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition, pp. 270 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000