The Georgics

The Georgics is a didactic poem by the Roman poet Virgil, written in Latin under the title Georgica and generally dated to around 29 BC. Composed of 2,188 lines of dactylic hexameter arranged in four books, the poem takes its name from a Greek word meaning agricultural matters and presents itself as instructional verse on farming, covering in turn crop cultivation, tree and vine growing, livestock husbandry, and beekeeping. Beneath its didactic surface, the poem is widely read as carrying deeper tensions between the ideal of peaceful rural labor and the disruptive realities of civil war and human ambition that had recently torn Rome apart, giving it a thematic complexity well beyond a practical farming manual. Written between Virgil's earlier pastoral Eclogues and his later epic the Aeneid, the Georgics draws on a range of earlier Greek and Roman didactic poetry and went on to influence a long line of later poets writing in the georgic and pastoral traditions.