Virgil and Bacon in the Schoolroom

Virgil's Georgics is an elusive text and scholars have consistently sought to gain some kind of interpretive purchase on it by driving it into the dirt. The desire to read the Georgics in this fashion—to track its hexameters towards the horizon line of the English countryside, or into the reforming programs of institutions such as the Royal Society's Georgical Committee—has dominated recent accounts of the poem's early modern legacy. This particular approach to the Georgics has yielded valuable insights concerning the transformations to which literary texts (and indeed the practice of interpretation) are susceptible. Douglas Chambers, for instance, has argued that seventeenth-century georgic is characterized by a desire to "extend the exegesis of Virgil's text into the practice of agriculture."¹ We can detect in this particular act of exegetical extension a response to Virgil's self-presentation in the Georgics as poet-preceptor, and an attempt to recast conventional claims about the instrumentality of literary texts.

This pragmatic version of georgic may constitute a direct response to the educational legacy of Virgil's poem. From Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Francis Bacon to John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and a host of English schoolmasters, adventurous readers explored and codified the epistemological resources of the Georgics. These readers consistently understood the poem's formal structures and discursive logic in relation to the educational institutions that sponsored first encounters with literary texts. Their efforts suggest that we need to reassess the kind of cultural work in which Virgil's poem has been said to be engaged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Given its relatively stable position in grammar-school curricula throughout this period, we would do well to inquire how and to what purpose the poem became enmeshed in a network of self-reflexive educational discourses, and how this pedagogical mode relates to the more familiar versions of georgic that emerge during the course of the seventeenth century.² When Virgil's poem is reimagined by agrarian reformers and green-thumbed gentlemen, its nascent agricultural legacy is the offspring of an educational fantasy. Accordingly, the following discussion pursues the Georgics into the schoolroom rather than the fields.

I. "The Rurall Part of Virgil"

In The Book Named the Governor (1531), Elyot praises Virgil as a poet whose variety makes his poems uniquely suited to the education of children. He anatomizes the benefits of a curriculum that includes all three of Virgil's canonical poems, but his praise for the Georgics can be read as a statement about the goals to which instruction in literary texts might aspire:

In his Georgics, Lord, what pleasant variety there is; the divers grains, herbs, and flowers that be there described, that, reading therein, it seemeth to a man to be in a delectable garden or paradise. What ploughman knoweth so much of husbandry as there is expressed? Who, delighting in good horses, shall not be thereto more inflamed, reading there of the breeding, choosing, and keeping of them? In the declaration whereof Virgil leaveth far behind him all breeders, hackneymen, and skosers.

Is there any astronomer that more exactly setteth out the order and course of the celestial bodies, or that more truly doth divine in his prognostications of the times of the year, in their qualities, with the future estate of all things provided by husbandry, than Virgil doth recite in that work?

If the child have a delight in hunting, what pleasure shall he take of the fable of Aristeus; semblably in the hunting of Dido and Aeneas, which is described most elegantly in his book of Aeneid.³

It is difficult to account for the terms in which Elyot praises the poem (to say nothing of his odd suggestion that "the fable of Aristeus" is just the thing for the child who delights in hunting) without reference to the theory and practice of humanist pedagogy.⁴ Although at least one modern classicist interprets Elyot's remarks as proof of his utter...