seen at the end of June beans gathered and
millet sowed on the same day: from which he generalized that Virgil
disregarded the truth to turn a graceful verse, and sought rather to
delight his reader than to instruct the husbandman. This kind of
cheap criticism does not increase our respect for Nero's philosophic
minister.[8] Whatever may have been Virgil's mistakes, every farmer
of sentiment should thank God that one of the greatest poems in any
language contains as much as it does of a sound tradition of the
practical side of his art, and here is where Varro is entitled to the
appreciation which is always due the schoolmaster of a genius.

NOTE ON THE OBLIGATION OF VIRGIL TO VARRO

At the beginning of the first _Georgic_ (1-5) Virgil lays out the
scope of the poem as dealing with three subjects, agriculture, the
care of live stock and the husbandry of bees. This was Varro's plan
(R.R. I, I, 2, and I, 2 passim) except that under the third head Varro
included, with bees, all the other kinds of stock which were usually
kept at a Roman steading. Varro asserts that his was the first
scientific classification of the subject ever made. Virgil (G. I,
5-13) begins too with the invocation of the Sun and the Moon and
certain rural deities, as did Varro (R.R. I, I, 4). The passages
should be compared for, as M. Gaston Boissier has pointed out, the
difference in the point of view of the two men is here illustrated
by the fact that Varro appeals to purely Roman deities, while Virgil
invokes the literary gods of Greece. Following the _Georgics_ through,
one who has studied Varro will note other passages for which a
suggestion may be found in Varro, usually in facts, but some times
in thought and even in words, viz: Before beginning his agricultural
operations a farmer should study the character of the country (G. I,
50: R.R. I, 6), the prevailing winds and the climate (G. I, 51: R.R.
I, 2, 3), the farming practice of the neighbourhood (G. I, 52: R.R. I,
18, 7), "this land is fit for corn, that for vines, and the other
for trees," (G. I, 54: R.R. I, 6, 5). He should practise fallow
and rotation (G. I, 71: R.R. I, 44, 2), and compensate the land by
planting legumes (G. I, 74: R.R. I, 23); he should irrigate his
meadows in summer (G. I, 104: R.R. I, 31, 5), and drain off surface
water in winter (G. I, 113: R.R. I, 36). Man has progressed from
a primitive state, when he subsisted on nuts and berries, to the
domestication of an