Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics ed. by Bobby Xinyue and Nicholas Freer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics ed. by Bobby Xinyue and Nicholas Freer Lucy Nicholas Bobby Xinyue and Nicholas Freer (eds.). Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil's Georgics. Bloomsbury Classical Studies Monographs. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. xi, 286. $114.00. ISBN 978-1-350-07051-6. According to Italo Calvino, "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." This certainly captures the view of Virgil's Georgics as approached in Xinyue and Freer's edited volume. The early reference to the "inexhaustible interpretive possibilities" (1) of the Georgics establishes the keynote of this wide-ranging and dexterously arranged book, which pays homage to the poem's elastic open-endedness as much it seeks to offer a crop of rich readings. The Georgics does not want for scholarly attention, yet the editors make a virtue out of the bibliographical amplitude, and the orientation they provide in the introduction constitutes one of the book's many strengths. Inspired in part by overviews of the Virgilian landscape, such as Katharina Volk's Vergil's Georgics (Oxford 2008), they offer a taut summary of the secondary yield, before identifying several recent studies that best convey recent shifts in Georgics criticism, not least through their emphasis on instability over certainty. These scholarly trends then serve as the thematic glue and the springboard for a spread of essays that extend ambitiously across time and space. The volume is divided into five parts, the first comprising a series of technical appraisals. Cowan innovatively applies theories from the field of narratology to Virgil's poem, focusing on the use of the second-person. By exploring the full spectrum of the multiple referents "you" implies, including "farmer" and "narratee," Cowan broaches the moot relationship between the act of composition and agricultural activity. Heyworth's chapter likewise blurs the distinction between literature and farming. Placing the first Georgic under the philological microscope, he contends that Virgil's advice on "beginnings" is as applicable to the poet as it is to the husbandman. If Heyworth problematizes the nature of this work's instruction, Thomas queries whether didaxis has any role at all. This chapter prioritizes the aesthetic qualities of the Georgics, suggesting that it is the pleasure and empathy they generate that lend meaning to the poem. Part 2 is dedicated to religion and philosophy. Mackenzie unites a recent surge in awareness of Orphic texts with a growing interest in the cult of Bacchus in Augustan poetry. His account of several underexplored intertexts is a handsome enough offering, but he then moves on to assess the implications of Orphic expiation for the reign of Augustus, especially his apotheosis. Adventitiously in tune with a broader impetus for philosophical readings of Latin poetry, [End Page 238] Freer considers the Georgics' engagement with Epicureanism. Specifically, he contends that Virgil used his poem to generate a tension between two lines of thought within the Epicurean school concerning poetry's efficacy to teach. While the previous section provided a foretaste of the contemporary compass of the Georgics, part 3 forcefully reinserts the poem into the political, cultural, and social dynamics of the Augustan Principate. Xinyue pursues further the issue of Octavian's divinization, positing that the Georgics functions as a meditation on the status and (diminishing) role of poetry at a time of unprecedented concentration of power in one man. Following neatly on, Giusti also considers the extent to which the poem serves as a commentary on Rome's transition from Republic to Principate. In this somewhat complex but ultimately rewarding chapter, Giusti maps the proem of the third Georgic onto the theatrical practices and foreign policies of the emerging empire. Stöckinger then persuasively interrogates Rome's political transition from the angle of gift-giving and reciprocity. The remaining two sections mark a new direction, namely the poem's reception. Two splendid essays in part 4 represent the ancient reception. Myers addresses Columella's anomalous hexameter treatment of horticulture in a prose text. She observes how interpretation is at work as much as imitation in this gardening cold frame, which seems to respond directly to the Georgics' own paucity...