Exploring the powerful sexual drive that acts on both people and animals, Virgil in his Georgics uses mares as his example of the creatures most sensitive of all to its compulsion. The illustration (a stallion not a mare, but from this angle it might be either) is the famous racehorse Whistlejacket, painted by George Stubbs. Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in John Dryden’s seventeenth-century English here.
In the fourth Book of the Georgics, Virgil’s poem on farming and the countryside, he describes the life of bees. Hear his Latin and follow in English here.
Pausing in his countryside poem, the Georgics, Virgil looks ahead to the composition of a poem on a loftier theme – the glorification of the Emperor Augustus through the Aeneid. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Close to the beginning of the Aeneid, Virgil explains why his hero Aeneas, in spite of his virtues and qualities, faces the implacable enmity of Juno, the Queen of the Gods. It is clear from the start that Aeneas is destined to succeed in settling in Italy and laying the foundations for a people who will become the founders of Rome, but Juno is a powerful enemy, and Virgil makes it clear that great ordeals and years of wandering lie between him and success.
Hear Virgil’ Latin and follow in English here.
As he deals with how to grow crops in his Georgics, Virgil gives advice on how to read the calendar for planting in the stars. The illustration is of the constellation Taurus, from a star-map of 1603 by Johann Bayer: in the map as in Virgil’s poem, the Bull’s horns are heightened with gold.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
How did the Romans forecast the weather? Virgil’s answer is from the Georgics, his poem about agriculture. Hear his Latin and follow in English here.