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In Our Time: Virgil's Georgics

Virgil's Georgics

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Virgil's Georgics

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet's celebration of agriculture and rural life

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Roman poet's celebration of agriculture and rural life composed in 29BC after a civil war, when questions of land ownership were contested.

In the year 29 BC the great Roman poet Virgil published these lines:  
Blessed is he who has succeeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death. But happy too is he who knows the rural gods…

They’re from his poem the Georgics, a detailed account of farming life in the Italy of the time. ‘Georgics’ means ‘agricultural things’, and it’s often been read as a farming manual. But it was written at a moment when the Roman world was emerging from a period of civil war, and questions of land ownership and management were heavily contested. It’s also a philosophical reflection on humanity’s relationship with the natural world, the ravages of time, and the politics of Virgil’s day.  

It’s exerted a profound influence on European writing about agriculture and rural life, and has much to offer environmental thinking today. 

With 

Katharine Earnshaw 
Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter; 

Neville Morley 
Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter

and

Diana Spencer
Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham

Producer: Luke Mulhall

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