The Georgics is a poem about work. For all that, human beings don’t seem to do very much of it. Tom Geue‘s put out an article now that focuses on this conundrum re: book 4, the one about the bees. I was lucky enough to see an early version of that at the SCS a few years ago and think it’s only improved with time, especially as it now addresses better the labor problems in Georgics 1-3. These are, as he highlights, a drag: the trajectory for the poem as a whole is from hands-on to hands-off. Book 4 in essence describes a managed slave economy, or an Empire: once you’re there, you can relax.
Of course, bad luck is still a problem. Vergil’s didactic highlights this, because something is always going wrong. In book 4, the misfortune is that all of Aristaeus’ bees have died; this turns out to be easy enough to fix, even though it’s essentially Aristaeus’ fault for having chased Orpheus’ wife Eurydice to death. An insight of Geue’s paper is that it highlights the importance of (almost) invisible slave labor in bringing about this fix.
Book three has the very dramatic animal plague, which forces humans to take the place of their now-dead beasts of burden. In that case it’s unclear how, or if, civilization’s going to recover. Among other things, the episode makes clear how much humans owe to animal labor. Without our animal friends, we’re in quite a pickle – forced to find out what Vergil really means when he says that labor omnia vincit.
I’m now planning a paper on the subject of a slightly different sort of animal labor, this not in the service of human civilization but opposed to it. Georgics 1.176-203 has been understood by pretty much everyone as belonging to the poem’s “pessimistic” dimension: it begins with an insistence that the reader focus her attention on tenuis…curas, a properly miserable part of the didactic project, and concludes by insisting that failure to apply constant labor in accord with Vergil’s instructions will lead to a praeceps collapse of the farming enterprise. The core of the passage, though notionally about preparing the area where grain will be threshed, actually ennumerates the various plant and animal pests that are likely to disrupt this work.
Tum variae inludant pestes: but they’re not playing, they’re working, and they only seem to be making fun of you from your perspective. The mouse is building a home and stocking his storehouse; the ant, fearing poverty in old age, struggles to carry off your grain. These earth-born monsters, your rivals in labor, will beat you unless you keep your eye constantly on the ball.
Richard Thomas notes in his commentary that the comic reading of this passage which seems most natural to a modern audience is only partly right. Quae plurima terrae monstra ferunt looks forward to Vergil’s discussion, later in book 1, of the gigantomachy: the farmer is in the position of the Olympian gods with respect to these very serious challengers. An intertext that has so far been overlooked, though, may be equally important. That’s with the paradoxographical tradition, and in particular with the archaic poet Callinos who is the first of many writers to describe mice as gegenes or “earth-born.” Romans and Greeks alike believed that mice were born from the ground by spontaneous generation – which is why, unlike other biological species, they can’t be exterminated. You’ll just get a fresh crop next year.
Vergil’s passage on pests, I think, actually highlights the difficulties involved in bringing animal labor under our control. The kind of micro-management that he’ll later propose for bees isn’t always possible. Sometimes, animals labor in their own behalf. Their aims in so doing are legitimate from a moral perspective, as Vergil’s language in the passage in question suggests. Still, we have to regard them as rivals and fight a war of extermination against them that we can never win.
Why civilization? That’s a question that Vergil’s Georgics, with its civilizing project, never really answers. To its credit, however, the poem at least raises it, here and elsewhere.