Virgil seems to see there as being more agency for humans in the relationship with nature, perhaps, than Lucretius does. He believes that if you can learn the right lessons and implement them correctly, then it is possible to achieve a kind of a positive equilibrium with nature. There's a famous passage in the third book where Virgil offers a sort of vignette of two bulls squaring up against one another in their sort of desperate wish to mate with this beautiful cow. It's something scholars have argued about at great length.
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