At the heart of the Georgics, Virgil begins his third Book by laying his farming theme aside for a time to look forward to greater things. Conventional mythological themes from Greece, he says, have become trite, and he sets out his ambition to transcend them with something new and distinctively Roman. In a passage rich in allusions, not only to mythology and Greek locations, but also to the military achievements of Julius Caesar’s nephew Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, he imagines a future work that he will write on this new and loftier theme. He uses the analogy of the building of a new temple: Octavian will be the resident deity, but in the ceremonial games that will celebrate the temple’s foundation, Virgil imagines he too will stand alongside the great man in a victor’s trappings, having transferred all the poetical resources of the Greek world into a new Latin creation which will extend Octavian’s fame (and Virgil’s) as far into the future as the time that has elapsed since the beginnings of mankind and heroes. In its details the conception is not yet the great historical epic which Virgil will write – Caesar himself, not yet his legendary forebear, Aeneas, is the focus – but it is clear, as Virgil summons up renewed enthusiasm to return to the rural theme that he now needs to complete, that the road to the Aeneid has begun here in this passage of the Georgics.
See the illustrated blog post here.
You can follow all of our extracts from the Georgics in order in the selection here.
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