In an age when timekeeping was vastly less detailed but no less accurate about essentials, Virgil’s poem about farming, the Georgics, explains how the stars will tell you when to plant.

Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here; see the illustrated blog post 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.