Aristias is a poem, it's interesting in that mythology doesn't feature in terms of big set pieces for much of the four books. There is a very long story within a story where Aristias, the farmer, loses his bees and he doesn't know how to get them back. Within that narrative, Aristias has to engage with a figure with Homeric mythological roots, Proteus who's famous from the Odyssey. He tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydique - they are about to get married when Aristias tries to rape her. And she flees, and unfortunately in her flight, she's bitten by a snake and dies. So she is plunged
In the year 29 BC the great Roman poet Virgil published these lines:
Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death. But happy too is he who knows the rural gods…
They’re from his poem the Georgics, a detailed account of farming life in the Italy of the time. ‘Georgics’ means ‘agricultural things’, and it’s often been read as a farming manual. But it was written at a moment when the Roman world was emerging from a period of civil war, and questions of land ownership and management were heavily contested. It’s also a philosophical reflection on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, the ravages of time, and the politics of Virgil’s day.
It’s exerted a profound influence on European writing about agriculture and rural life, and has much to offer environmental thinking today.
With
Katharine Earnshaw
Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter;
Neville Morley
Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter
and
Diana Spencer
Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham
Producer: Luke Mulhall