Orpheus gives us an example of what happens if you fail to follow reason effectively. He is the ultimate example of that feeling emotional person who fails to see what reason can actually bring to you. It's worth spending a minute thinking about the passage towards the end of Book One of the Georgics, where we have this image of a farmer in the future plowing the land. And out of the land comes these javelins and helmets corroded by rust and these gigantic bones. You get the sense that he has no idea why they're there. All of this death and destruction that's occurred at some future point in time will be a little bit more than a day. In that sense
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