The FourthGeorgic, Virgil, and Rome

Never were more prophetic words penned than these of Friedrich Klingner. Many and various have been the interpretations put forth since then, and some of them have been very strange indeed. The reader who has duly confronted Coleman, Otis, Segal, Bradley, Wender, Wilkinson, Wankenne, Coleiro, Hardie, Joudoux, Wormell, Otis again, Parry, Putnam, Cova, Chomarat, and Stehle, feels dismay; perhaps despair. For some, the point of the Aristaeus and Orpheus episodes is political propaganda (so Coleiro: Gallus could have survived had he humbled himself like Aristaeus, the moral being the duty of subordination to the Princeps; so, rather differently, Joudoux: the poem is propaganda for the supremacy of Octavian, in terms of the threefold Indo-European structure ofDumezil). For others, it is moral (so, for instance, Wender: Orpheus turned away from the hard and morally ambiguous farmer's life, as lived by Aristaeus; Aristaeus gets bugonia as his reward, while Orpheus is dismembered and scattered in order to fertilize the earth); or religious (so Chomarat: the experience of Aristaeus is presented under the schema of initiation into a mystery religion); or political and moral (so Wormell and Otis: Aristaeus ‘stands for the sinful self-destruction, atonement and revival of the Roman people’; life emerges from death, ‘in political terms, the Augustan restoration from the anarchy of civil war’; ‘Aristaeus, it is to be presumed sic , was induced to heed the lesson’).