Such suspicions could hardly beget the patience essential for the development of agriculture.  And yet this was the very time when farming must be encouraged.  Large parts of the arable land had been abandoned to grazing during the preceding century because of the importation of the provincial stipendiary grain, and Italy had lost the custom of raising the amount of food that her population required.  As a result, the younger Pompey’s control of Sicily and the trade routes had now brought on a series of famines and consequent bread-riots.  Year after year Octavian failed in his attempts to lure away or to defeat this obnoxious rebel.  At best he could buy him off for a while, though he never knew at what season of scarcity the purchase price might become prohibitive.  The choice of Vergil’s subject coincided, therefore, with a need that all men appreciated.

The Georgics, however, are not written in the spirit of a colonial advertisement.  In the youthful Culex Vergil had dwelt somewhat too emphatically upon the song-birds and the cool shade, and had drawn upon himself the genial comment of Horace that Alfius did not find conditions in the country quite as enchanting as pictured.  This time the poet paints no idealized landscape.  Enticing though the picture is, Vergil insists on the need of unceasing, ungrudging toil.  He lists the weeds and blights, the pests and the vermin against which the farmer must contend.  Indeed it is in the contemplation of a life of toil that he finds his honest philosophy of life:  the gospel of salvation through work.  Hardships whet the ingenuity of man; God himself for man’s own good brought an end to the age of golden indolence, shook the honey from the trees, and gave vipers their venom.  Man has been left alone to contend with an obstinate nature, and in that struggle to discover his own worth.  The Georgics are far removed from pastoral allegory; Italy is no longer Arcadia, it is just Italy in all its glory and all its cruelty.

Vergil’s delight in nature is essentially Roman, though somewhat more self-conscious than that of his fellows.  There is little of the sentimental rapture that the eighteenth century discovered for us.  Vergil is not likely to stand in postures before the awful solemnity of the sea or the majesty of wide vistas from mountain tops.  Italian hill-tops afford views of numerous charming landscapes but no scenes of entrancing grandeur or awe-inspiring desolation, and the sea, before the days of the compass, was too suggestive of death and sorrow to invite consideration of its lawless beauty.  These aspects of nature had to be discovered by later experiences in other lands.  At first glance Vergil seems to care most for the obvious gifts of Italy’s generous amenities, the physical pleasure in the free out-of-doors, the form and color of landscapes, the wholesome life.  As one reads on, however, one becomes aware of an intimacy and fellowship with animate things that go