Virgil's Agricultural Lore

Abstract

When the Virgil Society did me the very high honour of asking me to lecture to-day, there was little doubt in my mind as to what my subject should be. For Mr. Jackson Knight had been constantly spurring me to develop three ideas which he saw in embryo in my notes to The Singing Farmer—the sources of Virgil's agricultural lore, how he used them, and points in Roman farming which might be of scientific interest to-day. To deal adequately with these subjects would require a volume of imposing proportions: all that can be done in the short space of an hour is to state, and attempt to solve, a few of the problems, and thereby to indicate lines on which further profitable research may proceed. A good deal of accurate research work on Virgil's botany, animal husbandry, and natural history has already been done by the late John Sargeaunt and by Canon Royds; and Professor T. J. Haarhoff has done much to demonstrate the modernity of our poet in his searching study, Vergil in the Experience of South Africa, and will, I understand, be doing still more in a forthcoming volume, to be entitled Vergil the Universal. I can only pray, therefore, that my exiguous mouse, born to-day after mountains of labour, will not abstract anything from your grain-heaps of knowledge but add to them; for it is in this hope that I have tried to be, during the two and a half years since my release from captivity, a picker-up, not merely of learning's crumbs, but of unconsidered trifles.