Creative Imitation and Latin Literature

Virgil's account of a cattle plague at the end of the third book of the Georgics draws heavily upon Lucretius' account of the plague at Athens which ends the sixth and last book of the De rerum natura. The purpose of this essay is to throw light upon the Virgilian passage by comparing it with the Lucretian.

As a clinical history this is not satisfactory. What is the tempestas which arose? Season? Time? Commotion? Calamity? And how coorta? Arisen from the ground? or gathered somehow in the air? And how is it helpful to say that a cattle plague arose because of a disease of the sky? This is little more than a metaphor and it is followed by another, when Virgil says that the season burned throughout the heat of a whole autumn. And what is the tabum which infected the food and water? It could perhaps refer to the plague with which the season infected the drink and food of animals. But the usual meaning of tabum is ‘decaying gore or tissue’, and on that explanation a more satisfactory chronology is given: in 1. 480 the season kills the animals and then (through their corpses) infects their food and drink.