Georgics, Book 2, lines 458 - 474

The farmer’s happy lot

by Virgil

Virgil praises the ease and simple privileges of a farmer’s life. The picture is a romantic one: one doubts that farmers themselves would see things this way, and no passage in the Georgics illustrates more clearly that this is definitely a city-dweller’s view of the countryside.

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O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas! quibus ipsa procul discordibus armis
fundit humo facilem victum iustissima tellus.
si non ingentem foribus domus alta superbis
mane salutantum totis vomit aedibus undam,
nec varios inhiant pulchra testudine postis
inlusasque auro uestis Ephyreiaque aera,
alba neque Assyrio fucatur lana veneno,
nec casia liquidi corrumpitur usus olivi;
at secura quies et nescia fallere vita,
diues opum uariarum, at latis otia fundis,
speluncae vivique lacus, at frigida tempe
mugitusque boum mollesque sub arbore somni
non absunt; illic saltus ac lustra ferarum
et patiens operum exiguoque adsueta iuventus,
sacra deum sanctique patres; extrema per illos
Iustitia excedens terris vestigia fecit.

Farmers would be too happy, if they understood the good things they have! For whom the just land itself pours forth from the soil an easy living, far from clashing arms! If they have no lofty mansion, disgorging a great wave of clients come to greet them in the morning from all its grand halls through its haughty gates, and if they don’t pant for doors beautifully inlaid with tortoiseshell, Corinthian bronzes and clothes threaded with gold, and if their white wool is not red with Assyrian dye, and their bright oil uncorrupted by aromatics, yet safety, peace, a life free of dishonesty, rich in abundance of all sorts, rest in open country, grottoes, pools of living water, cool vales, the lowing of cattle and gentle sleep under a tree, all these they have; there lie forests and haunts of game, the young are used to hard work and to frugal life, the Gods are reverenced and the old respected; among them Justice left her last traces as she left the Earth.

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More Poems by Virgil

  1. The natural history of bees
  2. Dido’s release
  3. King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
  4. Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
  5. A Fury rouses Turnus to war
  6. Storm at sea!
  7. The death of Pallas
  8. Mourning for Pallas
  9. Love is the same for all
  10. Aeneas arrives in Italy
  11. Aeneas joins the fray
  12. The farmer’s starry calendar
  13. Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
  14. Aeneas is wounded
  15. The death of Euryalus and Nisus
  16. The Trojan Horse enters the city
  17. More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
  18. The Trojans reach Carthage
  19. King Mezentius meets his match
  20. Vulcan’s forge
  21. Turnus at bay
  22. Juno throws open the gates of war
  23. Virgil begins the Georgics
  24. Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
  25. Mercury’s journey to Carthage
  26. The Aeneid begins
  27. Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
  28. Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
  29. Turnus is lured away from battle
  30. Dido falls in love
  31. Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
  32. The portals of sleep
  33. Aristaeus’s bees
  34. The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
  35. Virgil’s perils on the sea
  36. Aeneas’s oath
  37. In King Latinus’s hall
  38. Rumour
  39. Turnus the wolf
  40. Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
  41. Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
  42. The journey to Hades begins
  43. Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
  44. Laocoon and the snakes
  45. The death of Dido.
  46. Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
  47. Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
  48. Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
  49. Rites for the allies’ dead
  50. The death of Priam
  51. The Harpy’s prophecy
  52. The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
  53. Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
  54. Palinurus the helmsman is lost
  55. Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
  56. Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
  57. Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
  58. Charon, the ferryman
  59. Omens for Princess Lavinia
  60. The Syrian hostess
  61. The infant Camilla
  62. Catastrophe for Rome?
  63. Signs of bad weather
  64. Sea-nymphs
  65. Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
  66. New allies for Aeneas
  67. Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
  68. Jupiter’s prophecy
  69. How Aeneas will know the site of his city
  70. Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
  71. Juno is reconciled
  72. Aeneas tours the site of Rome
  73. Aeneas’s ships are transformed