This chapter argues that Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa (Ep. 5.6) engages in a complex intertext with Statius’ villa descriptions in the Silvae (1.3 and 2.2). The intertext involves Pliny recognizing and ‘correcting’ Statius’ combinatorial appropriation of Lucretius and Vergil’s Georgics. Statius alludes to the concept of nature in Lucretius and Vergil in order to justify his (polemical) celebration of the domination of nature by positioning it within the didactic tradition. In doing so Statius is able to praise the extravagance of his patrons and their villas. Chinn argues that Pliny acknowledges and elaborates this intertext by ‘correcting’ Statius’ Lucretian allusion and thereby positioning himself as the controller of nature and hence the object of praise.

Chapter 5 looks at passages of carpe diem within longer texts, such as satires of Horace and Juvenal, Petronius’ Satyrica and Vergil’s Georgics. As carpe diem poems are read and re-read, they become independent textual objects: they can be inserted just about anywhere but never lose their lyric splendour. Thus, Vergil applies the carpe diem motif to a context as humble as cattle-breeding, while both Seneca and Samuel Johnson ignore the context and treat this section as vatic wisdom. This chapter analyses how such excerpts relate to Latin satire, which bastardised other texts, to late antique anthologising, medieval florilegia, and early modern commonplace-books. The chapter also proposes a new model for understanding textual allusions and intertexts in classical literature. Finally, the chapter argues that clichés are important features of classical culture that are worthy of close study.

In Chapter 17, “Cultivating Nature,” Shiuhhuah Serena Chou analyzes the development of farming literature from Virgil’s ancient didactic poem The Georgics to the contemporary writing of authors like Wendell Berry. The chapter begins with a timely analysis of the agricultural origins of the novel coronavirus pandemic and of the pandemic’s xenophobic representations in the media and political discourse. Chou connects the pandemic to modern industrial agriculture and turns to farming literature for alternative imaginings of humanity’s relationship to the land and food production. Chou illuminates how farm writing in the Anthropocene moves beyond the pastoral-georgic binary that structures earlier examples of the genre, analyzing the works of David Mas Masumoto, his wife Marcy, and his daughter Nikiko as paradigmatic examples.