Laudator Temporis Acti

Vergil, Georgics 2.173-174 (tr. C. Day Lewis):

Hail, great mother of harvests! O land of Saturn, hail!
Mother of men!

salve, magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus,
magna virum...

The Latin words appear on this medal in honor of the bimillenary of Vergil's birth: Richard Jenkyns, Virgil's Experience. Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 367-368:

'magna parens frugum, ... magna [parens] virum'—in the parallelism between these two phrases the way that a people's identity is rooted in its native soil is more firmly than ever proclaimed. In this context 'Saturnia' is profoundly and multiply suggestive. Virgil is not asserting that the miraculous world of the golden age survives in Italy; for an Italian, after all, Saturn was a genuine native deity, not a moral or poetical symbol. He is at moments almost a 'patron saint' of Italy: Ennius already uses 'Saturnia terra' as a synonym for Italy, and when Evander in the eighth Aeneid says that 'Saturnia tellus' has often changed its name, he means that Italy has changed its name not that paradise has.⁷⁵ Saturn will have suggested several things to Virgil's contemporaries. His name appears to be of Etruscan derivation; he was an agricultural deity, invoked against blight. Antiquarians (wrongly) drew the name's etymology from the root which produces 'sata' (crops). He became identified with the Greek Kronos, ruler of the gods until he was overthrown by his son Zeus, and in the Eclogues Virgil has already had him reigning in that golden age which Zeus or Jupiter destroyed; hence too the story in the Aeneid that when defeated by Jupiter he fled to Italy, establishing another kind of 'golden age' there.⁷⁶

Bearing all this in mind, we can see how rich in associations his name is here. It evokes a complex of ideas: fecundity, moral virtue, national glory, numinousness, the immemorial depths of Italian history, the blessedness and changelessness of country life. Sundry phrases in lines 173-5 bring out the various aspects of the complex emotion contained within the words 'Saturnia tellus'. 'Frugum' stresses fertility, `virum' patriotic pride; the idea of motherhood in 'parens frugum' and 'parens virum' seems to suggest both the intimacy of man's link with nature, which nurtures him, and, more particularly, the strength of the tie that binds his loyalty and affections to one especial spot of earth.

⁷⁵ Enn. Ann. 21 Sk; Aen. 8.329

⁷⁶ Ecl. 4.6 (cf. 6.41); Aen. 8.319 ff.