I

In the introduction to his recent commentary on the Georgics – the most significant recent contribution to Georgics scholarship – Richard Thomas discusses Virgil's comparison of the mourning Orpheus to a nightingale who has lost her young to a predatory ploughman (4.511–15). As Thomas says, this ploughman must ultimately reflect Aristaeus, who was himself a farmer and was also responsible for the death of the wife Orpheus was mourning. And as Thomas also says, we have met this ploughman before, when the ‘angry ploughman’ extirpates the ‘ancient homes of birds’ in the process of creating ‘shining’ ploughland at 2.207–10. Thomas' pessimistic conclusion encapsulates his view of the whole poem: ‘here, as throughout, ’ he writes, ‘the complexity, ambivalence and ultimate darkness of the Virgilian world shine through’.

This book will argue a diametrically opposite view of the Georgics. What it will seek to establish is that the Georgics, far from being the bleakly pessimistic document envisioned by Thomas, can on the contrary be interpreted as a thoroughgoing exercise in Octavianic propaganda, a precise response to the requirements of the regime headed by Octavian which at the time of the poem's completion was emerging from the chaos of the Civil Wars; a text, in other words, capable of yielding a highly optimistic purport.

II

The year 29 BC was a momentous one for Octavian. By the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 and Alexandria in 30 he had eliminated the final military challenge to his supremacy. His position thus corresponded to Caesar's on his final return to Rome after the Spanish campaign in October 45. Within six months Caesar was dead, assassinated by disaffected aristocrats, and this example seems to have weighed heavily with Octavian. It convinced him that military success alone was not sufficient to ensure the survival of his regime: the Roman elite must be brought along with him in any new dispensation. By as early as 36, in fact, Octavian was energetically appeasing upper-class sentiment. In that year he gave an undertaking to restore senatorial government (App. B Civ. 5.13.132), words which he sought to substantiate by constructing a new senate house, and by refusing to depose the former triumvir M.