A collection of critical essays on Virgil's Georgics needs no defence. A great, a magnificent poem, widely read, if not universally applauded, the Georgics has received far less critical attention than either the Eclogues or the Aeneid. Index in part of the apparently uncongenial nature of ‘didactic’ verse, the relative dearth of critical activity on the poem is particularly to be regretted in view of the Georgics' chronologically central position in Virgil's poetic career, its crucial role in the development of his style and thought. Indeed, given the peculiar and self-conscious unity of Virgil's poetic oeuvre, its complex system of evolving themes, images, structures, its bonding, meditated network of inter-poem reference, the critical neglect which the Georgics has received — there are brilliant, recent exceptions — seems less omission, more outrage. Even the Georgics' influence on later European poetry — one thinks, for example, of the Italian humanists, Politian and Alamanni, the eighteenth century English poets, especially Thomson and Cowper, and that remarkable twentieth century English georgic, The Land, by Virginia Sackville-West — while not of the magnitude of that of either the Eclogues or the Aeneid, ought to have elicited a more substantial investigation of the poem than has transpired. No boast, Wilkinson's claim that his 1969 book on the Georgics was the first to appear in English was sad affirmation of this major critical gap.

A common view among scholars is that Homer's verse, ‘When the early-born (ērigeneia), rose-fingered (rhododaktylos) dawn appeared’, is a conventional standard phrase used by Homer to say ‘when the day broke out’. In this they of course follow Milman Parry who illustrated with this very phrase his famous definition of formula.

This implies that we have here a mere piece of compositional technique. The poetic value of the phrase is either disregarded or taken for granted. It is seen, at best, as a good instance of artistic craft—as one of those countless formulas which make up Homeric verse.

It is my contention that the phrase reflects a mode of perception and thought. Technique, compositional device, style are but the outcome of a way in which things are visualized and expressed. The phrase must thus be explained on the strength of a deeper poetic reason, it must be appreciated both in its intrinsic value and in its relation to the context. In order to do this, let us look at its occurrences, and then at what these occurrences imply as regards the conception of the poems as a whole.

In a recent book L. P. Wilkinson has said, ‘The chief obstacle to appreciation of the Georgics has been its ostensible genre: it was deceptive and has abundantly deceived. This is no more a didactic poem than Ovid's Ars Amatoria: it simply masquerades as such.’ Throughout the Georgics, however, Vergil explicitly identifies his work as a didactic poem, both by use of didactic convention and through many specific references to the works of earlier didactic poets. Why, then, does Wilkinson reject Vergil's own definition of his work? What is it that makes readers of the Georgics so reluctant to classify it as a didactic poem? Part of the problem, I believe, has to do with the genre itself. Since this literary type is not popular with modern readers, its methods and objectives are not well understood. I will therefore begin this essay with a discussion of didactic convention and of the assumptions that underlie its use. The linguistic structure of didactic poetry provides the poet with an unusual degree of authority and autonomy but it also involves him in certain difficulties. The seriousness of these difficulties is already apparent in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, a work which profoundly influenced Vergil's development as a poet. In the second part of the paper I will examine Vergil's use of didactic language in the Georgics, placing particular emphasis on the poet's narrative or rhetorical stance. There I hope to show that Vergil makes new demands on this literary genre, for he uses didactic convention as a means for examining and calling into question the fundamental assumptions on which all didactic poetry is based.

For almost all present-day readers, Catullus is a compelling love poet; for Quintilian, he was a master of the savage political lampoon. These two views of the same author are not mutually exclusive. Yet a natural wish to establish Catullus as a great ‘lyric poet’, as twentieth-century scholars understand the term, has sometimes trapped his admirers into a false dichotomy: his invectives are denied any claim to artistic merit, and the Roman rhetorician's preference for them is dismissed as an odd lapse of taste. Such a pronouncement hardly does justice to Quintilian's aesthetic judgment. Nor does it give due recognition to Catullus' noteworthy achievements in the iambic mode. Even in the harshest of his lampoons, modern techniques of literary analysis reveal a level of sophistication as high as in any of the famous love lyrics, together with an equivalent degree of emotional complexity. In this paper I intend to support that thesis through an exploration of one significant characteristic of certain pasquinades: the use of standard invective topoi as condensed metaphors of political corruption.

While it is widely agreed that psychological realism is not a primary objective of Aeschylean dramaturgy, it remains somewhat uncertain whether any psychological interpretation can be valid for this sort of drama. Do Aeschylean stage figures possess ‘dramatic character’ at all? The answer probably depends upon a definition of ‘character’. Even in recent years, some critics have continued to assume that psychological analysis will not work at all unless at least the primary dramatic figures have been given a consistent and self-aware personality, whose motivations will bear rationalist scrutiny to the last detail. It was this notion of character that T. Wilamowitz used as a lever to overthrow traditional psychological interpretations of Sophoclean drama. But T. Wilamowitz's own touchstone of ‘dramatische Wirkung’ is so broad — and can be attached to such trivial matters — that it is virtually worthless as a tool of criticism. Use of such a vague criterion can lead, for example, to the assumption that anything anomalous or unexpected must somehow be ‘effective’.

The concept of otium (peace) is central to Vergil's pastoral vision in the Eclogues. Not only is it a necessary condition for the well-being of the shepherd poets but also an ideal whose realisation would transform the world into a more joyous, more peaceful and less deceitful place. As well as pastoral, otium has philosophical associations for it is a key concept in the philosophy of Epicurus. It is not in the Eclogues, however, but in the Georgics that Vergil's most mature examination of otium is to be found.

Having depicted in the first book the farmer's life of unrelenting toil and the horrors of Rome's civil wars, Vergil turns in the second book of the Georgics to a world in which the necessity for work is balanced by the land's natural fertility, and the martial quality of the Italian peoples by their land's potentiality for peace. Whereas in Book I the farmer is represented as a military figure, in Book II he is presented under two aspects: as the embodiment of both military and pastoral ideals. Since it is with the farmer as the expression of pastoral ideals that we are primarily concerned let us turn to the classic description of the life of otium, the conclusion of the second Georgic.

(Catullus 9)

Within the structural economy of the Georgics there are a number of short sections or episodes. One of the most surprisingly abrupt, for example, is those few lines that are Virgil's equivalent of Hesiod's Days:

I have several times in the past given my students the following oversimplified scheme. Each of Virgil's three works was based on a Greek original: the Eclogues on the Idylls of Theocritus, the Georgics on Hesiod's Works and Days, the Aeneid on Homer's two epics. The difference among these Greek poets (I used to say in my opinionated way) is that while Theocritus was a very fine poet, and Homer of course a genius, Hesiod was only mediocre; therefore Virgil depended on him less and was able to be freer and more genuine in the Georgics than in the Eclogues or the Aeneid. And that, I used to conclude, is why only the Georgics surpasses its model, and justifies Dryden's description of it as the most perfect poem by the most perfect poet.

After spending some time working with the literary sources of the Georgics, I am still inclined to the same final conclusion, that the Georgics is Virgil's masterpiece. I have, however, come to some new observations about the relation of the Georgics to its literary predecessors, which may help in a small way to illuminate the poem.

Criticism of the Ion has been more successful in defining the play's problems than in arriving at any sort of consensus about its interpretation. Indeed, modern critical response has run the gamut from Verrall's view that Euripides was fashioning a pointed attack on Apollo to Kitto's insistence that he was above all concerned to present a piece of lighthearted entertainment. Despite this wide range of opinion, however, discussions have tended to delineate several issues which seem central to the play, and so have endured as subjects for critical examination. One of these is the network of irony which is so prominent a feature of the Ion's structure. It is abundantly clear that dramatic irony is important to the Ion, and that Euripides was deeply involved with the tension between appearance and reality; however, despite its obvious position in the play, this aspect of the Ion continues to present an interpretive problem.

In this study I want to concentrate on three areas that are of special significance in the development of the general theme of appearance and reality into a coherent intellectual position within the Ion, for it was an idea on which Euripides often touched in plays written in this period. First, there is the concept of identity which is of great importance for Ion and to a lesser extent for Creusa and Xuthus. Next, I will discuss the complexity of relationships between Ion, Creusa, and Xuthus. These change dramatically as the play develops, and the characters react to their perceptions of the truth regarding their relationships with alarming irregularity. Finally, I will look at the problem of understanding Euripides' presentation of Apollo's oracle from the point of view of these other complications caused by the interplay of truth and reality. When we have analyzed the Ion along these lines it will be possible to make some general observations about the approach to reality which Euripides has presented in his play, for these elements suggest that he is making a more formal epistemological statement than is generally realized.

The pessimism of the Eclogues is pronounced. Often denied, that of the Georgics is yet evident.

In contrast to heroic epic and Homer's silence about himself, didactic epos was self-conscious right from the beginning, for Hesiod named himself and described his poetic consecration by the Muses in the proem to the Theogony (22-34). It was not usual for Greek poets to dwell upon their role as poets, and Pindar's attention to this theme makes him a notable exception. With Roman poets things were different, since the conditions under which Latin literature came into being forced upon its exponents an awareness of creating in a context, as part of a tradition in which much had already been accomplished. Accordingly, Ennius did not preserve Homeric anonymity, but actually claimed to be Homer reborn, and possibly added, as well, a ‘Hesiodic’ meeting with the Muses. Moreover, he did not hesitate to criticize his Latin predecessors and to point out how he differed from them. In turn, his successor in the hexameter, Lucretius, felt the need to situate himself in the tradition by acknowledging poetic descent from Ennius, as well as originality in his own enterprise (I.117-9, I.921-30; cf. IV. 1-5). The stance that combined homage of the inuentor of a genre with specific criticism of him became the framework for showing what was special about one's own handling of a genre. We see this in Horace's discussion of his relation to Lucilius in Satires I.4 and I.10.

The end of the first Georgic is turbulent. The assassination of Caesar leads to civil war; Mars rages savagely; the charioteer can no longer control his chariot (512-14). But at the beginning of Georgic 2 normality seems to have returned, and the farmer is not only plowing but planting trees for his grandchildren (2.58). Later in the book, however, Virgil's instructions for planting grapevines include a puzzling simile which reminds the reader of the end of Georgic 1. He compares the arrangement of vines in a field to the deployment of battle troops on a plain.