Fantham Elaine - Georgics

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO (VIRGIL) was born near Mantua in northern Italy in 70 BCE. He was educated at the larger town of Cremona and finally at Milan. He moved to Rome around 52 BCE, but spent most of his time thereafter in the (then) congenial surroundings of the Bay of Naples. He wrote the Eclogues in the period circa 4239 BCE. Around the year 38 he joined the circle of poets in the entourage of Maecenas, the future imperial Minister for the Arts. The composition of the Georgics occupied him from 37 or earlier until 29. He spent the rest of his life working on his epic poem, the Aeneid. He died at Brundisium in 19 BCE after abandoning a visit to Greece and Asia on which he intended to complete and perfect his epic.

PETER FALLON grew up on a farm near Kells in County Meath. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where he was Writer Fellow in 1994. He was inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2000. He founded The Gallery Press in 1970 and has edited and published more than 400 titles. His own books include News of the World: Selected and New Poems (1998). He lives in Loughcrew in County Meath.

ELAINE FANTHAM was educated at Oxford and taught first at the University of Toronto (196886) then Princeton University (19862000). She is author of commentaries on Senecas Trojan Women, Lucan, Civil War, Book 2, and Ovid, Fasti IV, of Roman Literary Culture, and most recently of Ovids Metamorphoses (Oxford Approaches to Literature) and The Roman World of Ciceros De Oratore.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

VIRGIL

Translated by
PETER FALLON

With an Introduction and Notes by
ELAINE FANTHAM

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP

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First published as The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon by The Gallery Press,
Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland in September 2004

This revised translation and Translators Note Peter Fallon 2004, 2006
Editorial material Elaine Fantham 2006

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2006

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ISBN 0192806793 9780192806796

for Adam

cecini pascua rura duces
I sang of farms and fields and men who lead
Virgil, on his deathbed

What tickles the corn to laugh out loud

Thus far I have been singing of working the land

You too, Pales, great goddess of the folds

Which brings me to heavens gift of honey

Virgils Poem of the Land

Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet we know as Virgil, was born and spent his childhood in the fertile countryside of Andes, near the ancient Etruscan city of Mantua, by the waters | of the wide Mincius whose ambling course flows this way and that, | its sides tossing their fringe of wavy rushes. (Georgics 3.1315). We think of Mantua as Italian, but it and most of northern Italy had been inhabited by Gauls (Celtic tribes) until they were brought under Roman control by a series of campaigns ending about a century before Virgils birth, on 15 October, 70 BCE. Geographically continuous with Roman territory, this region, roughly corresponding to Lombardy, was still treated in Virgils youth as outside Italy proper, and governed as the province of Cisalpine Gaul. The elite acquired Roman citizenship through holding local magistracies, and were linked in family or friendship with Roman society, but the peoples of the Po basin would not become Roman citizens until their last governor, Julius Caesar, had the power to impose a law giving them citizenship when Virgil himself was in his twenty-first year, in 49 BCE.

Despite various reports by his biographers Virgils father must have been a relatively prosperous farmeror even landownerand he was culturally ambitious, like the parents of Virgils poetic predecessor Valerius Catullus from Verona, and of the contemporary historian Titus Livius (Livy) from Padua. He sent his son away to be educated, first for elementary instruction in language and literature at Cremona, then to Milan, and finally to prepare for public life by studying rhetoric at Rome itself.father must have realized that his son was unsuited for the standard career of a lawyer or army officer. In fact both father and son may have taken active steps to avoid being involved in the civil war which broke out when Julius Caesar defied the Senates attempts to control him and re-entered Italy with an army at Ariminum (near Mantua), in Virgils twentieth year. The civil war divided the loyalties of many families, and most young Romans were caught up in the fighting between Caesars forces and the forces of the senate commanded by Pompey, in northern Greece and later in North Africa and Spain.