Hesiod's works and days is ostensibly a story about how to farm. But that's also the poem where you get the story of Pandora, for example,. The ages of man. There's lots of mythology in there. And ultimately it's a moral text, so it's telling you how you should farm and how to live a good life.
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