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
Preface
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
It is now some twenty years since Michael Putnam's influential study, Virgil's Poem of the Earth, first put forward the view that the Georgics is a profoundly gloomy work, a view which has dominated scholarly opinion (at least in the English-speaking world) ever since. Putnam himself speaks of the ‘realism, graphic and largely pessimistic’ with which the poet depicts the relationship between human beings and the world around them; the overt, agricultural subject-matter of the poem is, in his view, ‘one grand trope for life itself’. Other critics have focussed their attention on the political stance of the poet, or the position he takes up with respect to the literary debates of his era; but the majority have followed Putnam in treating the didactic surface of the poem as a kind of façade, behind which the poet's true concerns lie concealed. There has been a prevailing tendency, too, to privilege certain sections of the text over others, in the attempt to construct a univocal ‘message’ from the shifting balance between the elements of light and darkness, panegyric and vituperation, comedy and tragedy, which make up the Georgics as a whole.
It is my contention that attempts to explain away the poem's ambiguities in this way are misconceived. While the work admits of either an optimistic or a pessimistic reading, it does not enforce either. It seems to me that what Milan Kundera says of the novel in my epigraph can equally be applied to the Georgics: Virgil ‘does not assert anything’, rather he ‘searches and poses questions’. In what follows, I attempt to show how the poem engages dynamically with the entire didactic tradition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virgil on the Nature of ThingsThe Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition, pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000