Aude
DOODY Virgil the Farmer? Critiques of the
Georgics in Columella and Pliny
For
Columella and Pliny, Virgil's Georgics occupied an important place in a Roman
discourse on agriculture. They use Virgil as a source,
alongside Cato and Varro, to illustrate points or to give
an alternative view, and criticise him for inaccuracy,
when they think necessary. In modern scholarship, the
question of Virgil's authority as an agriculturalist
rarely arises, nor are mainstream readings often
concerned with the detail of his advice. Virgil's claim
to follow Hesiod, and his literary engagement with
Lucretius, have been creatively explored, but his
relationship with the prose writing of Varro and Cato has
usually been seen as a straightforward borrowing of
information. The dichotomy we see between the genres of
didactic and technical writing makes it difficult for us
to come to grips with Virgil's self-positioning, and
later reception, within an ancient discourse on
agriculture. It is clear that the Georgics
is not a practical handbook on agriculture; the question
is in what ways does it matter to Pliny or Columella that
it is a poem?
The
Georgics, of course, is not just any poem: its
writer is already 'noster Maro' in both authors, a writer
who had become a national symbol.
Already Virgil's importance influenced how the
Georgics could
be read: the authority of the poet behind the poem is
part of the reason why the Georgic's
information gets such high profile treatment in Columella
and Pliny's work. But although both writers use Virgil,
their patterns of use and their attitudes to his work
seem quite different. Columella often quotes lines from
the poem, Pliny usually only refers to the content;
Columella is usually positive, Pliny often criticises.
But if we look closer at the citations of Virgil in the
context of source criticism and the value placed on
tradition in each of the later writers, the simple
division of good from bad critique becomes harder to
uphold. Virgil means many things to the Roman writers who
come after him: for Pliny and for Columella, Virgil's
value is partly symbolic; he is a means of situating
themselves in relation to an earlier tradition of
agriculture and in relation to the Roman literary
tradition. The style and the substance of the
Georgics come under scrutiny, but Virgil's place
within a canon of agricultural writing is taken for
granted. The extent to which Virgil seems to place
himself within that tradition needs to be assessed, his
engagement with Varro and Cato needs to be analysed in
terms of creative engagement rather than simple borrowing
of information. The focus here, however, is on Columella
and Pliny's readings of the Georgics, how they attempt to reconcile its poetry
with its information when they appeal to its authority.
aed20@cam.ac.uk