The Natural World through the Eyes of the Ancients
In an era of turbulence in the natural world, I found myself curious about how the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed and connected with nature, and turned to two didactic agricultural poems, Hesiod’s The Works and Days and Virgil’s The Georgics, to find out. Hesiod’s work inspired Virgil’s, and the two works have much in common, as they begin with addresses to the Muses, observe the cycle of the year, and offer practical advice for farmers and men in general alongside a certain amount of superstition.
One thing the two long poems take for granted is the stability of their natural world. Though disasters can strike unexpectedly and ruin crops, and they acknowledge that a farmer’s lot can be a difficult one, they are deeply familiar with the turning of the seasons and the yearly the passage of the stars, and use observable phenomena in nature to mark the proper start and end times for certain activities, as is common with many ancient agricultural societies. Hesiod writes,
At the time when you hear the cry of the crane
going over, that annual
voice from high in the clouds, you should take notice
and make plans.
She brings the signal for the beginning of planting.
These cues are important to follow, and the hard work of farming, done properly, is the only way to reasonably expect a good life. Hesiod advises his reader, and his brother, to whom the work is addressed, “It is best to do things / systematically, / since we are only human, and disorder / is our worst enemy.”
Prayer, too, is important. Without the blessing of the gods, all work may come to naught, so a wise farmer will make prayers and oblations a part of his practice, and hope for the best. As much as Hesiod and Virgil’s listeners may labor to master their fields, there is never a sense that they are truly masters of the universe. There is a humility to their enterprises that is generally lacking in our own. Uncertainty accompanies them on their toils, and gratitude gushes forth when the crops endure to provide a rich harvest.
In Virgil especially, the earth and its flora are personified and endowed with action and feeling. They are at times described as gods, of course, but even aside from that, his language gives life to a world that modern people too often see as an inert stockpile of objects whose sole purpose is exploitation. In the springtime, Virgil writes,
The nurturing earth is pregnant; warmed by breezes
Of Zephyrus the fields unloose their bosoms.
Mild moisture is all-pervading, and unharmed
The grasses brave the unaccustomed suns;
Nor do the vine-shoots fear a southern gale,
Or northern rainstorms driving down the sky,
But put forth buds and all their leaves unfold.
Days such as these shone out and went their way,
I can well believe, at the dawn of the infant world.
His sympathies extend to cattle, horses, and bees, who are endowed with thought and feeling in his poem and are treated with compassion. The frolicking of young colts is described in charming detail, and as are the labors of bees. Farmers are urged to feed their livestock with care and tenderness from a young age, and the slaughter of oxen, man’s fellow laborers, is lamented. Beyond humanizing, Virgil suggests that the creatures of earth, and all living things upon it, are holy, even: “Some have affirmed that bees possess a share / Of the divine mind and drink ethereal draughts; / For God, they say, pervades the whole creation.” What restraint would we show in our dealings with the earth if we viewed it this way, if we felt that every thing on earth touched the sublime?
Though The Works and Days is agricultural in nature, the advice it offers often breaks the confines of farming and addresses all men. We may receive help two or three times without giving anything in return, Hesiod tells us, but not beyond that. Learn to do things well, that you may be largely self-sufficient, and be generous, so that others will be generous to you in turn. Both Hesiod and Virgil encourage the reader to shun greed and to be content with a life tilling the soil, in touch with the earth. “No greedy profits,” warns Hesiod.
Greedy profit is a kind of madness. . .
For when a man gives willingly, though he gives
a great thing
yet he has joy of his gift and satisfaction
in his heart,
while he who gives way to shameless greed and takes
from another,
even though the thing he takes is small,
yet it stiffens his heart.
Virgil gives a sense that it is wonderful to be “far from the madding crowd,” ploughing one’s field, tending one’s goats, and nurturing one’s vines, not consumed by status and power and profit like the restless multitude in the cities. Both he and Hesiod speak disparagingly of war, viewing it not as a glorious pageant but as a senseless and tragic contest “where men are wasted.” It is far better, as Achilles says in Homer’s Odyssey, to live out one’s life as a farmer, not cut it short in battle. “How lucky, if they know their happiness, / Are farmers,” says Virgil, “more than lucky, they for whom, / Far from the clash of arms, the earth herself, / Most fair in dealing, freely lavishes / An easy livelihood.”
Elsewhere in both poems, the work itself does not seem as easy as he portrays it here. Both Hesiod and Virgil lament the passing of the legendary Golden Age under the god Saturn, when no wars were fought, no animals slaughtered, and the earth gave food for all without the need for cultivation. In the harsher ages that have followed, life is now sustained by hard work, contention reigns supreme, and men grow decadent in cities and the halls of power. But it is still better, Virgil insists, to be a farmer than to be consumed with strife and vanity and fleeting pleasures:
peace they have and a life of innocence
Rich in variety; they have for leisure
Their ample acres, caverns, living lakes
Cool Tempes; cattle low, and sleep is soft
Under a tree. Coverts of game are there
And glades, a breed of youth inured to labour
And undemanding, worship of the gods
And reverence for the old. Departing Justice
Left among these her latest earthly footprints.
If we, heeding Hesiod and Virgil thousands of years later, could find our way to observe the varied seasons and the yearly parade of the stars, to work in some way with the earth, and to revere the dignity and the divine that each element of it possesses, what riches might we find in the everyday? Not searching for fame or power or wealth, would we discover something deeper, something simple, decent, and pure? Every day in the modern news cycle is a bearer of signs that tell us: We have lost the way. The ancient poets of simplicity and virtue, grounded in a love for the unfailing earth, can help us find it.