Virgil, Georgics
NOTE: the assignment is changed:
Why write a poem about farming? Or is this a poem about farming? The selections that we are reading are not particularly agricultural, but the text as a whole is indeed organized around aspects of agricultural life: field crops in 1, trees and vines in 2, animals in 3, bees in 4. To an extent, the structure is modelled on Varro, De re rustica (written in the early 30s), but in no sense could one actually use Geo. as a manual for running a farm. Hence it is customary to view agriculture (or nature) as an index to something larger--human life, human nature, the organization of the moral world, etc. It is also, quite clearly, a political poem--or at least a poem in which the public world in general and Augustus in particular has an important role. As you read the beginning and end of Book 1 (and the proem of Book 3), consider just how this works. And the proem of Book 3 also very clearly raises the question of the relationship between the Georgics and the Aeneid. But you should look backward as well: how does Geo. relate to the world of the Eclogues? And what about didactic poetry in general? How is Geo. like/unlike Lucretius? What does didactic poetry actually teach, and why?
The great puzzle in the Georgics, of course, is its end: a) why bees, of all things, as an illustration of what Varro calls pastio uillatica--which includes chickens, dormice, and other delectable small creatures as well as bees? b) what does the Aristaeus/Orpheus episode have to do either with bees or with agriculture, and why does the poem end this way? In reading the passage, you should keep the structure of Catullus 64 in mind: what is the relationship between the frame and the inner story? What does either part (or what do both parts) have to contribute to understanding the relationship between human beings and the natural world? How can one control one's own, or external, nature?
The bibliography on Georgics is immense, and active. Here are three books worth reading; the first two (Putnam and Ross) use totally different methods to arrive at what are, for me, very similar conclusions; the third (Farrell) is an attempt to place Geo. within Virgil's literary development and within the intellectual history of the period.