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

4. PUZZLES OF GLORY AND GRIEF

Chapter Four PUZZLES OF GLORY AND GRIEF n The last book of the Georgics departs sharply from the relentless grimness with which Book 3 ends. The syllabus with which the Georgics began told us to expect beekeeping, and that is indeed where the fourth book picks up.1 However, the Book 1 proem also suggested that the agricultural topics of the poem would lead to something else, and indeed they did as each book came to comprehend the greater problems of life, politics, and history. Yet that same process structures the poem as a whole: just as the agricultural material within each book yields to other matters, so do the agriculture, husbandry, and apiculture of the Arst three and a half books culminate in the remarkable myth that takes up over half of the fourth and Anal book.2 Thus, Book 4 fulAlls the promise of the poem’s opening lines, but at the same time it asks new questions and poses more riddles. The bees treated in the fourth Georgic are interesting for their human characteristics but perhaps more so for their alien qualities.3 They reinforce the theme of community that the poet has developed through the Arst three books and also suggest, once again, the unreality of a Golden Age.4 Moreover, the bees have kings and civil wars, and so they allow the poet to continue the poem’s political explorations. We should remember that Vergil’s discussion of the bees is addressed to a human beekeeper; their civilization is not autonomous but dependent on human support and protection. This dependence is reinforced by the excursus within the discussion of bees on the old man of Tarentum, who is himself a beekeeper. By describing a world with two sources of authority—a king within the hive and a distant caretaker—the poet re160 turns to the set of themes that relates Jupiter and Octavian in their twin, but ultimately unequal, kingdoms. First, the proem: Protinus aërii mellis caelestia dona exsequar: hanc etiam, Maecenas, aspice partem. admiranda tibi leuium spectacula rerum magnanimosque duces totiusque ordine gentis mores et studia et populos et proelia dicam. in tenui labor; at tenuis non gloria, si quem numina laeua sinunt auditque uocatus Apollo. (4.1–7) [Now I will pursue the heavenly gift of airy honey: Maecenas, pay attention to this section too. You will have the spectacle of tiny things to marvel at, and point by point I shall tell of the greathearted leaders of the race, of its way of life, its ambitions, its peoples and their battles. Effort (labor) for something slight, but the glory won’t be slight—if the hostile divinities permit and Apollo when invoked heeds prayers.] After beginning simply enough by stating that his topic is apiculture and its product, honey, Vergil immediately urges Maecenas to pay attention. By now, the pose of the (gently) scolding teacher is familiar, and Maecenas may well need encouragement at this stage, since Book 3 forced him to Ax his attention on a spectacle that was ultimately disturbing and disgusting. What follows also explains Vergil’s suspicion that Maecenas needs a special reason to follow along through what is to come: Vergil’s subject consists of “tiny things” (leuium rerum) and a matter that is tenuis, “slight.” The contrast between the apparent slightness of the subject and the grand themes Vergil ends up covering is employed with considerable humor, but Vergil’s humor should not blind us to his insight, and the contrast between great and small serves to focus a number of other important themes from elsewhere in the poem.5 Just as there is an implicit contrast throughout the Georgics between Vergil, Maecenas, and Octavian, on the one hand, and the agrestes on the other, here there is a contrast between the big world of human beings and the little one of bees. Yet, just as the lessons of the farm are also the lessons of the battleAeld and the state, so are the concerns of the bees the same as those of men. The smallness of the bees, and accordingly their comparative vulnerability , allows Vergil to make the question of perspective more explicit. Earlier in the poem (2.458ff.), the question of philosophical perspective was introduced Puzzles of Glory and Grief 161 to suggest how, for example, the poor rustic might be as happy as the wealthy urbanite, but the poet refrained...