The Georgics
Virgil29 BCEVirgil wrote the most beautiful Latin poem about farming, bees, and the Italian countryside, and turned what's basically agricultural instruction into real art.
Read this if you…
- want Virgil's 2nd best work (BIG dropoff though)
- liked Hesiod's "Works and Days"
- are interested in bees and beekeeping and farming
Skip this if you…
- haven't already read aeneid
- are expecting a plot like the aeneid
- don't care about farmlife as a topic
Why It Matters
Virgil wrote the most beautiful Latin poem about farming, bees, and the Italian countryside, and turned what's basically agricultural instruction into real art. The Georgics shaped pastoral poetry for two thousand years and proved that ordinary labor was a worthy subject for serious writing. Virgil thought it was his best poem, and plenty of classicists agree.
The 
Take
Nice to round out Virgil with a meditation on farming animal husbandry and beekeeping, but ultimately kinda boring
Where to go next
- On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. The Georgics built on it. - *The Georgics* is built on Lucretius — Virgil adopted *On the Nature of Things* as his Latin didactic template and wove its thought and diction through every book - Read the plague that ends Book 3 with Lucretius's plague of Athens (DRN 5–6) in mind and you'll see the borrowing in the open - The relationship is about as deep as one poet's debt to another gets; reading Lucretius first puts Virgil's whole project in view
- Theogony/Works and Days by Hesiod. The Georgics built on it. - *The Georgics* is Virgil consciously remaking Hesiod's *Works and Days* — same didactic hexameter, same man-and-land subject, same day-by-day farming counsel, now sung "through Roman towns" - Virgil signals it openly, billing his poem an "Ascraean" song after Hesiod's home town of Ascra - Read Hesiod first and Virgil's polish reads as an answer to a much older, plainer voice
- The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. The Georgics shaped it. - The *Georgics* is the Latin wellspring Boethius reaches back to from his prison cell - His opening verse (I.m1) echoes *Georgics* 4.564–565, and the great Timaean hymn "O qui perpetua" (III.m9) takes its phrasing from *Georgics* 4.228 - Virgil's Orpheus — the poet who descends to the underworld and looks back — supplies Boethius the exemplum his philosophy turns on
Depicted in Art
Shepherds bring livestock to drink at a stream on a summer morning; rustic figures and animals fill a stylized landscape.
400
An elderly gardener tends his self-sufficient plot — the iconic Corycian senex from Georgics Book IV.
400
The Cyclopes hammer at Etna's forge — the divine smithy passage from Georgics Book IV.
400
Juno afflicts Io with the gadfly; below, herdsmen shield pregnant cows from the biting flies of Lucania.
400
Orpheus plays his lyre at right while Eurydice, in white, flees a serpent at left, in a Roman Campagna landscape with the Castel Sant'Angelo on the horizon.
Nicolas Poussin, 1651
Pastoral group of shepherds resting with their flock in a wooded landscape — a Romantic-era sketch after a Georgics scene.
Louis Boulanger, 1845
A shepherd sits among his flock in a frontal, hieratic pose — the opening of Georgics Book III on animal husbandry.
450
Recommended Editions
Peter Fallon
Oxford University Press · 2006
Fallon is an Irish farmer who also happens to be a poet, so the plowing and the beekeeping and the cattle care all sound like someone who's done them. The verse holds up alongside the husbandry.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“Labor conquers all things.”
“Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things.”
More by Virgil
- The Eclogues
c. 37 BCE · Pastoral
- The Aeneid
19 BCE · Epic