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AN UGLY COW WITH BIG FEET: SEX, METRE AND GENRE IN GEORGICS 3

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2021

Robert Cowan
Robert Cowan*
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney
*
[email protected]
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Extract

Virgil's list of the qualities that are desirable in a brood cow corresponds closely to those in Varro's De re rustica and in the texts which, though later, can be plausibly taken as evidence of an existing tradition. Yet, there is one exception, and it is an exception to which the poet carefully draws attention. Varro's, Columella's and Palladius’ ideal cows all share with Virgil's and with each other hairy ears, very long dewlaps and tail, and other features. However, whereas they all have narrow hooves (ungulis breuibus, Palladius), moderate at most (ungulis modicis, Columella), and certainly not broad (pedibus non latis, Varro), Virgil's cow emphatically has big feet (Verg. G. 3.51–9):

      optima toruae
      forma bouis cui turpe caput, cui plurima ceruix,
      et crurum tenus a mento palearia pendent;
      tum longo nullus lateri modus: omnia magna,
      pes etiam, et camuris hirtae sub cornibus aures. 55
      nec mihi displiceat maculis insignis et albo,
      aut iuga detrectans interdumque aspera cornu
      et faciem tauro propior, quaeque ardua tota
      et gradiens ima uerrit uestigia cauda.
      The best shape
      for a fierce cow is one which has an ugly head, which has a lot of neck
      and whose dewlaps hang from her chin all the way down to her legs;
      then let there be no limit to the length of her flank: let everything be big,
      even the foot, and hairy ears under in-curving horns,
      and I would approve of her being marked with white spots,
      either refusing the yoke or sometimes fierce with her horn
      and in appearance closer to a bull, and who is lofty in every respect
      and when walking sweeps her tracks with the tip of her tail.
Few readers who have sampled the density of Virgil's intertextuality, the cura with which he selects individual words, or the polyphonic meanings at play in every line of the Georgics would be tempted to ascribe any such divergence from the technical tradition to carelessness or indifference. However, even if any were inclined to do so elsewhere, the enjambed phrase pes etiam draws emphatic attention to this dissent: ‘you may, from your familiarity with the tradition, expect the feet to be an exception, but no, they too should be large’. The reader is thus positively invited to look for an explanation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 717 - 723
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

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References

1 Ears: pilosis auribus, Varro, Rust. 2.5.7 = Columella, Rust. 6.21.1, aure setosa, Palladius 4.11.5. Dewlaps and tail: a collo palea demissa … codam profusam usque ad calces, Varro, Rust. 2.5.7 palearibus et caudis amplissimis, Columella, Rust. 6.21.1 = Palladius 4.11.5.

2 The text of the Georgics is Mynors's OCT. All translations are my own.

3 Cf. Conington, J. (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Opera, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1858), 257Google Scholar: ‘Pes etiam, put thus emphatically, may be a special contradiction of the opposite view.’

4 The claim at Thomas, R.F. (ed.), Virgil Georgics Volume 2 Books III–IV (Cambridge, 1988), 50Google Scholar that Columella, Rust. 6.1.2 cites Mago as also approving ungulae magnae for cows is incorrect, since Columella is reporting Mago's recommendations about (male) bullocks: parandi sunt boues nouelli …

5 Heyne, C.G., Publius Virgilius Maro varietate lectionis et perpetua adnotatione instructus, i. Bucolica et Georgica (London, 1821 4), 346Google Scholar.

6 Erren, M., P. Vergilius Maro, Georgica. Band 2: Kommentar (Heidelberg, 2003), 595Google Scholar.

7 Mynors, R.A.B. (ed.), Virgil Georgics (Oxford, 1990), 189Google Scholar.

8 Hinds, S., ‘Booking the return trip: Ovid and Tristia 1’, PCPhS 31 (1985), 13–32, at 19Google Scholar (emphasis original).

9 The bibliography is extensive, but see especially the useful list at Barchiesi, A., ‘Alcune difficoltà nella carriera di un poeta giambico. Giambo ed elegia nell’epodo XI’, in Tovar, R. Cortes and Corte, J.C. Fernandes (edd.), Bimilenario de Horacio (Salamanca, 1994), 127–38, at 135–7Google Scholar.

10 Enn. Ann. fr. 1 Sk. See Hinds, S., Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 1998), 56–7Google Scholar; Morgan, L., Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010), 292CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Heyworth, S.J., ‘Catullian iambics, Catullian iambi’, in Cavarzere, A., Aloni, A. and Barchiesi, A. (edd.), Iambic Ideas: Essays on a Poetic Tradition from Archaic Greece to the Late Roman Empire (Lanham, MD, 2001), 117–40, at 133 n. 45Google Scholar; Ferriss-Hill, J.L., ‘Catullus poem 71: another foot pun’, CPh 104 (2009), 376–84Google Scholar; Barchiesi (n. 9), 134–5; Fineberg, B., ‘From a sure foot to faltering meters: the dark ladies of Tibullan elegy’, in DeForest, M. (ed.), Woman's Power, Man's Game: Essays on Classical Antiquity in Honor of Joy K. King (Wauconda, IL, 1993), 249–56Google Scholar; Henkel, J., ‘Metrical feet on the road of poetry: foot puns and literary polemic in Tibullus’, CW 107 (2015), 451–75Google Scholar.

12 Henkel, J., ‘Vergil talks technique: metapoetic arboriculture in Georgics 2’, Vergilius 60 (2014), 33–66, at 46–7Google Scholar.

13 Catull. 71, with Ferriss-Hill (n. 11).

14 Ov. Am. 3.8: et, puto, pes illi longior alter erat.

15 Wyke, M., ‘Reading female flesh: Amores 3.1’, in Cameron, A. (ed.), History as Text (London, 1989), 113–43Google Scholar; Keith, A.M., ‘Corpus eroticum: elegiac poetics and elegiac puellae in Ovid's Amores’, CW 88 (1994), 27–40Google Scholar.

16 Hor. Epod. 11.20. Cf. Barchiesi (n. 9), 135 (emphasis original): ‘la poesia, dopotutto, è scritta incerto pede: nella sua metrica è figurata l'esitazione fra giambo ed elegia. … l'epodo trasforma la forma in contenuto, e viceversa, e riapre una dialettica fra il testo e il genere letterario a cui fa appello la collezione degli Epodi.’

17 On elegiac smallness, see Cowan, R., ‘Ovid, Virgil and the echoing rocks of the two Scyllas’, CCJ 63 (2017), 11–28, at 18–21Google Scholar, with further references.

18 Hor. Sat. 1.2.93: pede longo. Freudenburg, K., The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton, 1993), 197Google Scholar.

19 Cowan, R., ‘Tall, pale and noble: beauty, rank and wordplay at Horace Satires 1.2.123–126’, Latomus 73 (2014), 1012–28Google Scholar, at 1026 (emphasis original): ‘If the satirist's perfect woman/perfect poem is not too much like Ennius’ Annales, it could be that, in keeping with the Callimachean principles of the Satires, it is not an excessively or artificially long (epic) poem.’ CQ's reader attractively suggests that the ‘hairy ears’ (hirtae … aures, 3.55) of Virgil's cow might also evoke the characterization of Ennian poetry as hirsutus (Prop. 4.1.61, Ov. Tr. 2.259, with Miller, J.F., ‘Ennius and the elegists’, ICS 8 [1983], 277–95Google Scholar).

20 M. Robinson, A Commentary on Ovid's Fasti, Book 2 (Oxford, 2010), 241.

21 Cf. Nikoloutsos, K.P., ‘The boy as metaphor: the hermeneutics of homoerotic desire in Tibullus 1.9’, Helios 38 (2011), 27–57, at 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘The image of a puer who struggles to make his feet fit into tight-laced shoes … is … in agreement with Callimachus's small-scale aesthetic.’

22 The antithesis with elegy is more important than distinctions between hexameter genres here, but in any case note Nelis, D., ‘From didactic to epic: Georgics 2.458–3.48’, in Gale, M.R. (ed.), Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry (Swansea, 2004), 75–107Google Scholar, at 83 on ‘a deliberate blurring of generic distinctions in the opening lines of book 3 and … a possible assimilation of bucolic, didactic and epic into a unified tradition of hexameter epos capable of assuming the grandest themes of natural history and political power’.

23 Papanghelis, T.D., ‘Catullus and Callimachus on large women (a reconsideration of c. 86)’, Mnemosyne 44 (1991), 372–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keith (n. 15); Keith, A.M., ‘Slender verse: Roman elegy and ancient rhetorical theory’, Mnemosyne 52 (1999), 41–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Reay, B., ‘Some addressees of Virgil's Georgics and their audience’, Vergilius 49 (2003), 17–41, at 39–40Google Scholar: ‘The Georgics … constructs a narrative of metapoetics. Didactic poetry, then, can be read as a commentary on itself, on what is properly or distinctively didactic and poetic.’

25 Pucci, J., The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (New Haven, 1998), 99–108Google Scholar; Clément-Tarantino, S., ‘La poétique romaine comme hybridation féconde. Les leçons de la greffe (Virgile, Géorgiques, 2, 9–82)’, Interférences – Ars Scribendi 4 (2006)Google Scholar, available online at http://ars-scribendi.ens-lsh.fr/article.php3?id_article=37&var_affichage=vf; Henkel (n. 12).

26 Pucci (n. 25), 100: ‘There is … a tradition of conceiving of language metaphorically in natural and, more specifically, arboricultural terms’. He goes on to cite specific literary grafting images from Aristophanes and Terence.

27 Henkel (n. 12), 34: ‘In the Georgics and elsewhere, Vergil's metapoetic passages make the terms of these metaphors once again literal, so that that fine-spun verse becomes fine-spun cloth and books become bark.’

28 The bibliography is immense, but see Meban, D., ‘Temple building, primus language, and the proem to Virgil's third Georgic’, CPh 103 (2008), 150–74Google Scholar, with further bibliography.

29 Verg. G. 3.40–1: interea Dryadum siluas saltusque sequamur | intactos.

30 Knox, P.E., ‘Love and horses in Virgil's Georgics’, Eranos 90 (1992), 43–53, at 48Google Scholar.

31 Kenney, E.J., ‘Doctus Lucretius’, Mnemosyne 23 (1970), 366–92, at 380–5Google Scholar; Brown, R.D., Lucretius on Love and Sex (Leiden, 1987), 132–5, 139–43Google Scholar.

32 See Gagliardi, P., ‘Omnia vincit amor: considerazioni sull'amore (e sulla poesia d'amore) nell'opera virgiliana’, A&R 5 (2011), 238–63Google Scholar; Domenicucci, P., ‘L'elegia di Orfeo nel IV libro delle Georgiche’, GIF 37 (1985), 239–48Google Scholar.

33 Miles, G.B., Virgil's Georgics: A New Interpretation (Berkeley, 1980), 184Google Scholar: ‘[T]he cow's apparent defects are her virtues’. The secondary sense of forma (3.52) as ‘beauty’ (OLD s.v. 5) produces a paradox which encapsulates this, so that one could also translate 3.51–2 as ‘the best beauty is one which has an ugly head’.

34 Ross, D.O. Jr., Virgil's Elements: Physics and Poetry in the Georgics (Princeton, 1987), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Martins, P., ‘Sobre a metapoesia em Propércio e na poesia erótica Romana: o poeta rufião’, Revista Classica 28 (2015), 125–59, at 133Google Scholar: ‘A virgem desenhada por Horácio contribui para o mapeamento da persona feminina que age na elegia e na poesia erótica.’ On Juv. 6.5–8 montana … uxor | … | haut similis tibi, Cynthia, nec tibi, cuius | turbauit nitidos extinctus passer ocellos, see Watson, P., ‘Juvenal's scripta matrona: elegiac resonances in Satire 6’, Mnemosyne 60 (2007), 628–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 The reference to the formosa iuuenca (or at least to the type of the seductive heifer of which this Bruttian temptress is a particularizing instance) as femina (3.216) further encourages an allegorical reading, especially with the suppression of the species-specific noun which usually accompanies the attributive sense of non-human ‘female’ (OLD s.v. 3).

37 Nappa, C., Reading after Actium: Vergil's Georgics, Octavian, and Rome (Ann Arbor, 2005), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 This article developed from teaching a Latin Republican Poetry class on Lucretius and the Georgics at the University of Sydney in 2018. I am grateful to the students in that class for the stimulating atmosphere their enthusiasm produced, and especially to Leila Williamson and Gonzalo Melchor, who also independently suggested that the big foot might be a metrical pun and gave me confidence to pursue my idea. I am also grateful to Eleanor Cowan, Emma Barlow, Paul Roche and CQ's anonymous reader for their helpful comments on written drafts.