Reading after Actium: Vergil's Georgics, Octavian, and Rome

3. THE FIRE IN THE FLESH

Chapter Three THE FIRE IN THE FLESH n The third book of the Georgics recapitulates themes of the Arst two in a particularly compelling way by bringing the audience into the world of animals.1 The very human-seeming animals of the Georgics help Vergil further elaborate the idea that man is not essentially different from animals or even plants in his relationship to the wider world. Distinctions between wild and cultivated, nature and civilization are again elided, and readers must explore for themselves their place in the world as such dichotomies collapse. Book 3 also foregrounds the internal struggles of both man and beast in a way left unexplored in the earlier books, as Vergil introduces the topic of amor, a force as dangerous as any of the external threats the farm or farmer may face, but one that is necessary for both the farm and life in general. Book 3 plays a central, and perhaps underappreciated, role in Vergil’s political dialogue with Octavian. In dealing with the passions of his humanseeming animals, the poet compels us to consider the way emotions motivate, advance, and hinder human activity. Victory in the games is produced by passionate longing, as is victory in war, but such passion can also bring renewed vigor to an enemy. It can also become a blind and futile wandering; what might have been useful and productive can become volatile and ruinous. More than any other, then, Book 3 invites Octavian to consider not only the dangers that face him personally but also the dangers that threaten Rome and Italy from within, the internal crisis from which he must protect it, and the forces that, left unchecked, might spiral out of control and destroy everything. 115 the new olympia When it opens, the book appears to be interested in a very different set of themes.2 It begins, in fact, by returning to several dominant images of the second book: politics, sacriAce, Greek culture, and Italian hegemony. First, its tutelary gods: Te quoque, magna Pales, et te memorande canemus pastor ab Amphryso, uos, siluae amnesque Lycaei. (3.1–2) [We shall sing of you also, great Pales, and you, shepherd of Amphrysus, whom men must recall, and you too, woods and rivers of Lycaeus.] The invocation blends the native Italian herd divinity Pales, whose festival is the birthday of Rome; the Greek Apollo, addressed with Alexandrian obscurity ; and speciAc locations in the Greek world.3 Yet Vergil does not continue as we might expect, naming attributes or benefactions of the gods in question. Rather, he sets them in opposition to themes he has chosen to leave aside. cetera, quae uacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, omnia iam uulgata: quis aut Eurysthea durum aut inlaudati nescit Busiridis aras? cui non dictus Hylas puer et Latonia Delos Hippodameque umeroque Pelops insignis eburno, acer equis? (3.3–8) [Other subjects that would have distracted idle minds with poetry, all of these have been worn out: who does not know all about harsh Eurystheus or the altars of reviled Busiris? By whom has the boy Hylas not been narrated, or Latonian Delos, or Hippodame and the swift horseman Pelops, distinguished by his ivory shoulder?] Vergil will sing of Pales and Apollo in preference to the hackneyed themes of earlier poets.4 Both Callimachus and Pindar have been invoked as the poet in question, and each did indeed cover the themes listed here.5 Yet more important than the question of a particular model are two more general considerations : the well-worn themes are all staples of Greek poetry, and all but Delos involve the hero Hercules. In the last part of Book 2, Vergil opposed the poetry of natural philosophy 116 READING AFTER ACTIUM to that of the countryside and set up a distinction between the Lucretian or Epicurean way of understanding the universe and his own, the poetic roots of which seemed to lie in the Greek haunts of Orpheus (2.475–89). Here Vergil distinguishes himself from other poets, this time those Greek writers of mythological narrative and in particular the writers of epinician, for both Pindar and Callimachus wrote epinician in which the myths cited played a prominent part.6 He opposes to them a very different poetic model. temptanda uia est, qua me quoque possim tollere humo uictorque uirum uolitare per ora. primus ego in patriam mecum, modo uita supersit, Aonio rediens deducam uertice Musas. (3...