Varro’s treatise on farm management is the best practical book on the subject which has come down to us from antiquity.  It has not the spontaneous originality of Cato, nor the detail and suave elegance of Columella.  Walter Harte in his Essays on Husbandry (1764) says that Cato writes like an English squire and Varro like a French academician.  This is just comment on Cato but it is at once too much and too little to say of Varro:  a French academician might be proud of his antiquarian learning, but would balk at his awkward and homely Latin, as indeed one French academician, M. Boissier, has since done.  The real merit of Varro’s book is that it is the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records.

The authority from which Virgil drew the practical farming lore, for which he has been extolled in all ages, was Varro:  indeed, as a farm manual the Georgics go astray only when they depart from Varro.  It is worth while to elaborate this point, which Professor Sellar, in his argument for the originality of Virgil, only suggests.[6]

After Philippi the times were ripe for books on agriculture.  The Roman world had been divided between Octavian and Antony and there was peace in Italy:  men were turning “back to the land.”

An agricultural regeneration of Italy was impending, chiefly in viticulture, as Ferrero has pointed out.  With far sighted appreciation of the economic advantages of this, Octavian determined to promote the movement, which became one of the completed glories of the Augustan Age, when Horace sang

    Tua, Caesar, aetas
  Fruges et agris rettulit uberes.

Varro’s book appeared in B.C. 37 and during that year Maecenas commissioned Virgil to put into verse the spirit of the times; just as, under similar circumstances, Cromwell pensioned Samuel Hartlib.  Such is the co-incidence of the dates that it is not impossible that the Rerum Rusticarum suggested the subject of the Georgics, either to Virgil or to Maecenas.

There is no evidence in the Bucolics that Virgil ever had any practical knowledge of agriculture before he undertook to write the Georgics.  His father was, it is true, a farmer, but apparently in a small way and unsuccessful, for he had to eke out a frugal livelihood by keeping bees and serving as the hireling deputy of a viator or constable.  This type of farmer persists and may be recognized in any rural community:  but the agricultural colleges do not enlist such men into their faculties.  So it is possible that Virgil owed little agricultural knowledge to his father’s precepts or example.  Virgil perhaps had tended his father’s flock, as he pictures himself doing under the guise of Tityrus; certainly he spent many hours of youth “patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi” steeping his Celtic soul with the beauty and the melancholy poetry of the Lombard landscape:  and so he came to know and to love bird and flower and the external aspects of