Saturday, June 21, 2025
The Life of the Farmer
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Poets in a Landscape (1957; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2010), p. 66 (he = Vergil):
From Eric Thomson:
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He did not attempt to disguise or glorify the primitive and often sordid life of the farmer. He used words and images that were kept strangers to elevated poetry in his time: dung, spittle, slime, sweat, weeds, pigs, tar. But he emphasized that, with all their difficulty and poverty, the farmers still lived a life of natural wealth, unlike the factitious wealth of city people, and of natural peace of mind.
From Eric Thomson:
For the first, dung, no need to stray much beyond the first four programmatic words – Quid faciat laetas segetes, on which Servius comments[laetas] fertiles, fecundas, id est quae res terras pingues efficiat; nam segetem modo pro terra posuit: sic alibi 'horrescit strictis seges ensibus'. pingues autem efficit terras, ut paulo post dicturus est, cinis, intermissio arandi, incensio stipularum, stercoratio. unde etiam 'laetas' ait; nam fimus, qui per agros iacitur, vulgo laetamen vocatur.“Spread a little happiness" comes to mind. Highet might have explored the agricultural understanding of laetus and felix as at the heart of farmers’ "natural wealth" and "natural peace of mind”.
Eighty lines on we have:sed tamen alternis facilis labor, arida tantumSafe to say that the author of The Classical Tradition was well acquainted with The Dunciad so Highet might have recalled Pope’s (self-)annotation on a passage in book 2:
ne saturare fimo pingui pudeat sola neve
effetos cinerem immundum iactare per agros.
G. 1.79–81Though this incident may seem too low and base for the dignity of an Epic poem, the learned very well know it to be but a copy of Homer and Virgil; the very words ὄνθος and fimus are used by them, though our poet [...] has remarkably enriched and coloured his language [...]. Mr. Dryden in Mack-Fleckno, has not scrupled to mention the Morning Toast at which the fishes bite in the Thames, Pissing Alley, Reliques of the Bum, etc. but our author is more grave, and (as a fine writer says of Virgil in his Georgics) tosses about his Dung with an air of Majesty."This incident” being:Full in the middle way there stood a lake,*[sc. Elizabeth Thomas (1675-1731), known for her intestinal troubles, so “cates” are presumably last night’s semi-digested dainties in a puddle of piss]
(Such was her wont, at early dawn to drop
Her evening cates before his neighbour's shop,)
Here fortun'd Curl to slide; loud shout the band,
And Bernard! Bernard! rings thro' all the Strand.
Obscene with filth the miscreant lies bewray'd[.]
(Dunciad 2.69-75)
Candidates for the others might be:
Spittlenamque aliae turpes horrent, ceu pulvere ab altoSlime
cum venit et sicco terram spuit ore viator
aridus;
G. 4.96-98hic demum, hippomanes vero quod nomine dicuntSweat
pastores, lentum destillat ab inguine virus,
hippomanes, quod saepe malae legere novercae
miscueruntque herbas et non innoxia verba.
G. 3.280-83ille volat simul arva fuga, simul aequora verrensWeeds
hinc vel ad Elei metas et maxuma campi
sudabit spatia et spumas aget ore cruentas,
Belgica vel molli melius feret esseda collo.
G. 3.201-04intereunt segetes, subit aspera silva,Pigs
lappaeque tribolique, interque nitentia culta
infelix lolium et steriles dominantur avenae.
quod nisi et adsiduis herbam insectabere rastris … G. 1.152-55ornusque incanuit alboTar
flore piri glandemque sues fregere sub ulmis.
G. 2.71–72aut tonsum tristi contingunt corpus amurca
et spumas miscent argenti et sulfura viva
Idaeasque pices et pinguis unguine ceras
scillamque elleborosque gravis nigrumque bitumen.
G. 3.444–47