1. EVOKING THE GEORGICS IN CARMEN 2.15

Even without any specific verbal repetition, Horace's topic may well have put his readers in mind of the Georgics. The circulation at Rome in the 20s b.c.e. of a poem whose professed subject was ploughland—pauca aratro iugera—was likely to have evoked the Georgics for its reader on these grounds alone. Virgil had defined his didactic poem in its sphragis by its agricultural content in the phrase haec super aruorum cultu pecorumque … | et super arboribus (‘These things … about [or ‘in addition to’] care of fields, cattle and trees’, 4.559–60). Ovid had referenced the poem by the single word fruges, ‘crops’, at Am. 1.15.25.Footnote ³ In the ‘pre-proem’ or prefatory epigram of the Aeneid (Ille ego qui quondam …), it was possible to conjure the Georgics in the phrase uicina coegi | ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono, | gratum opus agricolis (‘I compelled the neighbouring fields to serve the husbandman, however grasping: a work welcome to farmers’).Footnote ⁴ Beyond this circumstantial evocation, the direct influence of the Georgics upon individual odes within Books 1–3 has been the subject of a number of studies.Footnote ⁵ Most recently, in Stephen Harrison's edition of Odes Book 2, the importance of Virgil's didactic epos to the second book of odes has been placed on new footing, and rated as ‘prime’ among the near-contemporary Latin poems to which Horace refers in this book.Footnote ⁶ We can see the influence of the Georgics at a number of moments within Book 2. Virgil's image of fields fertilized by the dead of the Civil War at G. 1.491–2 is surely reprised at Hor. Carm. 2.1.29–31.Footnote ⁷ The description of conquered races at G. 3.30–3 appears to influence Horace's choice at Carm. 2.9.18–24.Footnote ⁸ The battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs at G. 2.455–7 may find reference at Carm. 2.12.5–6.Footnote ⁹ Georgics Book 4 more specifically features prominently in Odes Book 2. Virgil's account of the myth of Orpheus at G. 4.315–557 is recalled at various points throughout the book: in Carmen 2.9 the language and the imagery used of Valgius’ grief are reprised from Orpheus’ lament for Eurydice;Footnote ¹⁰ at Carmen 2.13 Horace's vision of the underworld clearly alludes to the katabasis of Orpheus;Footnote ¹¹ at Carmen 2.19 the pacification of Cerberus replicates details from Virgil's account of Orpheus in the underworld;Footnote ¹² and at Carm. 2.14.7–9 the confining rivers of the underworld seem to look to G. 4.478–80.Footnote ¹³

Finally, the scene of the Corycian gardener itself is foregrounded as a model for Carm. 2.6.10–20. David West has argued that Carmen 2.6 responds with gentle polemics to a number of aspects of Virgil's description of Tarentum in Georgics Book 4.Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, the etymology of the Galaesus river, from γάλα (‘milk’), is alluded to in both passages: via its opposite meaning (κατ’ ἀντίφρασιν) in the adjective niger (‘dark, black’) at G. 4.126,Footnote ¹⁵ and positively as a dulce flumen (‘sweet river’) for sheep at Carm. 2.6.10–11. The founder of Tarentum is varied from Oebalus in Virgil to Phalanthus in Horace. Most emphatically, the richness and the fertility of the land around Tarentum are stressed by Horace at Carm. 2.6.9–20 in contrast to Virgil's emphasis upon the infertility of the pauca iugera farmed by the gardener at G. 4.128–9 nec fertilis illa iuuencis | nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho ‘not productive for oxen [that is, ploughing], nor appropriate for pasturage, nor suitable for Bacchus’. West summarizes the connections between the two poems neatly:

In light of the above, readers of the Odes, and of the second book in particular, should be alert to potential allusions to the Georgics, and to Georgics Book 4 more specifically, because Virgil's poem forms such a rich and frequently invoked context for Horace.

Turning to Carmen 2.15 itself, the points of linguistic correlation between it and G. 4.125–48 are more numerous than have been previously recognized. Two individual items below (points 1 and 5) have been annotated—more or less inertly—in the Quellenforschung of Virgil's commentators,Footnote ¹⁷ but they require further brief elaboration, and to itemize the complete list of markers here will make clear their cumulative effect upon the reader. My aim in what follows is merely to isolate the linguistic vehicles of allusion at work, since I will offer an interpretation of these points of connection in the section following the present one.

1. 1. The opening clause of the poem directs the reader to the Georgics.Footnote ¹⁸ The phrase iam pauca aratro iugera regiae | moles relinquent (2.15.1–2) echoes Verg. G. 4.127–8, where the Corycian gardener is first defined by the relative clause cui pauca relicti | iugera ruris erant ‘who owned a few acres of abandoned land’.Footnote ¹⁹ The prosaic register of the phrase is less important as a marker of allusion than its relative rarity.Footnote ²⁰ Our present evidence suggests that by the time Odes Books 1–3 were published in 23 b.c.e. the collocation had occured only in our two passages, at Hor. Carm. 3.16.29, where siluaque iugerum | paucorum ‘a woodland of a few acres’ is counted among the simple blessings of Horace's Sabine estate (more on this passage below), and at Prop. 3.5.44 Tityo iugera pauca nouem ‘nine acres are too few for Tityos’, where nouem is the modifier, pauca is used predicatively, and the mythological context is radically different.Footnote ²¹ Decisive for the allusion is that the combination paucus and iugerum with relinquere is exclusive to both Carm. 2.15.1–2 and G. 4.127–8, albeit in differing senses of the word: ‘leave remaining’ in Horace (OLD s.v. relinquo 13a), ‘abandoned’ in Virgil (OLD s.v. relictus ¹ 1).

2. 2. In the opening line of Virgil's description, his Corycian senex gardens sub Oebaliae … turribus arcis ‘under the towers of the Oebalian citadel’ (4.125): a learned antonomasia for Tarentum that evokes the early Spartan king, Oebalus.Footnote ²² Critics understandably cite Horace's own learned periphrasis for Tarentum at Carm. 2.6.11–12 regnata … Laconi | rura Phalantho (‘land ruled by Spartan Phalanthus’),Footnote ²³ but Carmen 2.15 also looks to these lines. Horace likewise presents his pauca iugera as encroached upon by regiae moles, literally ‘massive structures worthy of a king’ (OLD s.v. regius 6). Horace's regiae moles also recall Virgil's statement at G. 4.132—namely, that his gardener ‘used to equal the wealth of kings in his happiness’ (regum aequabat opes animis).

3. 3. Horace's uisentur—in context an indication of the viewer's awed wonderFootnote ²⁴—may be seen to replicate Virgil's insistence upon autopsy at the beginning of his passage: cf. G. 4.125–7 memini me … | Corycium uidisse senem ‘I recall that I saw an old Corycian man’.

4. 4. At Carm. 2.15.4–5 attention turns to the planting of trees: platanusque caelebs | euincet ulmos. Horace's two named trees are the first and last items in Virgil's list of trees planted by the Corycian senex at G. 4.144–6, the finale of the passage: ille etiam seras in uersum distulit ulmos | eduramque pirum et spinos iam pruna ferentis | iamque ministrantem platanum potantibus umbras ‘That man planted even fully grown elms in row, the hardened pear-tree, blackthorns already bearing plums and the plane tree already providing shade for drinkers.’ Note also that the function of Horace's laurea, the final tree mentioned in his description of the pleasure garden at lines 9–10 (spissa ramis laurea feruidos | excludet ictus), corresponds directly to the function of the platanus, the final tree of Virgil's account.

5. 5. The phrase fertilibus domino priori uses the same unusual construction—fertilis in the sense ‘prolific’ with a dative—as that used at G. 4.128 nec fertilis illa iuuencis:Footnote ²⁵ these are the first two examples of this usage on record.Footnote ²⁶

2. THE BETRAYAL OF THE GEORGIC MODEL IN CARMEN 2.15

The allusive relationship between Carmen 2.15 and G. 4.125–48 is as contrastive as that sketched by West for Carmen 2.6.Footnote ²⁷ In Carmen 2.6 Horace corrects his predecessor on the issue of Tarentum's climate: where Virgil had described an infertile region beset by long, harsh winters and rock-breaking cold (G. 4.128–9, 135–8), Horace had responded with a smiling landscape of long spring, warm winters and abundant fertility (Carm. 2.6.13–24). Carmen 2.15 likewise pivots away from this Virgilian image of infertility, but it does so in a distinctive manner. At issue in our poem is not whether the fields under Tarentum's towers are fit or unfit for agriculture, since the geography of this ode is removed from Tarentum. The Lucrine Lake at lines 3–4 may put Horace's reader in mind of the area of Puteoli, but it does not locate his pauca iugera in this or in any specific region of Italy. Rather the Lucrine Lake—renovated into naval dockyards by Agrippa during the Sicilian War (Suet. Aug. 16)—features as a famous, large body of water serving a public interest. It is thus morally aligned with the ethos of the second half of the poem, and it is included as a point of contrast to the private and useless ornamental pools of the new pleasure gardens that will exaggeratedly take up more space than this monumental public work. This comparison runs parallel to the manner in which the pleasure gardens themselves will hyperbolically squeeze out almost all arable land in the poem. The geography of Carmen 2.15 is non-specific for the same reason that it lacks a specific addressee, and that is to make the author's moralizing point as universal as possible.Footnote ²⁸

The primary relevance of Virgil's description of the Corycian gardener for Carmen 2.15 is the morally edifying image it conveys of the old man's unrelenting labour on a small and unpromising plot of land and the self-sufficiency resulting from this labour over many years. Horace inverts the coordinates of this image to sharpen his own description of perfectly fertile land and long-developed productivity being wasted by the farm's new owners: Virgil's Corycian senex is evoked as a model of behaviour in order to illustrate the perversion of this ideal in Carmen 2.15. Thus, Virgil's contention at G. 4.128–9 that the farmer's land is nec fertilis illa iuuencis | nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho ‘not productive for oxen [that is, ploughing], nor fit for pasturage, nor suited for viticulture’ sets the context for his hard-won success in making his plot productive. It is answered directly by Horace's detail at Carm. 2.15.7–8, that the violets, myrtles and other plants now cultivated only for their fragrance have displaced olive groves that were fertilibus domino priori ‘productive for their former master’. The productivity and self-sufficiency of the Corycian gardener is clear throughout Virgil's episode—it has been seen, for example, in his independence from larger societyFootnote ²⁹—and is expressed most explicitly and memorably at G. 4.133 dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis ‘he heaped his tables with unbought feasts’.Footnote ³⁰ This was a phrase that Horace himself had used to evoke rustic self-sufficiency at Epod. 2.48–9, where the farmer's wife dapes inemptas | apparet ‘serves unbought feasts’.Footnote ³¹ Although the relative dating of the composition of Epode 2 and the Georgics is beyond certainty, it is probable on textual grounds that Horace was already alluding to Virgil's Corycian gardener in Epode 2, and that he saw in the phrase a neat symbol of agricultural self-sufficiency.Footnote ³² Within Carmen 2.15 the repeated emphasis upon the non-productive plantings of the farm can be set against this Virgilian paradigm: platanusque caelebs euincet ulmos pointedly denies any agricultural productivity to the new plantings and insinuates that the elm trees of the prior farm were used for viticulture (see below); the cultivation of fragrant plants over a fertile olive grove makes the same point, as do the inert resonances of the stagna lacu, and the planting of laurels to cast shade.Footnote ³³

A further relevant dimension to Virgil's farmer is his contentment with the sufficiency of his farm and the equanimity this brings him.Footnote ³⁴ We are told at G. 4.132–3 regum aequabat opes animis seraque reuertens | nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis ‘in happiness he equalled the wealth of kings and returning home late at night he used to heap his tables with unbought feasts’. Horace responds to these lines when he describes the villa that now crowds out the ploughland as regiae moles ‘massive structures worthy of a king’: the measure of the farmer's inner happiness is thus converted by Horace into the means by which his new owners seek relentlessly to expand their material possessions.Footnote ³⁵ The dynamic of increasing material acquisition is conveyed in the phrase iam … relinquent ‘soon they will leave’, since it describes an ongoing process of the villa building's expansion;Footnote ³⁶ if we take iam as also modifying the next two future-tense verbs as well, uisentur and euincet, the same dynamic process of expansion can be seen in the hyperbole of fishponds larger than the Lucrine Lake and plane trees displacing elms.

In Carmen 2.15 the new gardens crowd out elms previously in use for viticulture (2.15.5) and replace abundant olive trees (2.15.7–8). Time is a factor in the moralizing message of this detail, since both of these plants are slow growing, and point to the patient cultivation of the farm over many years. Columella tells us that elms for supporting vines are planted in rich or moderately rich soil (Rust. 16.1 eaque maxime serenda est locis pinguibus uel etiam mediocribus): a point that further reinforces the wasted fertility of Horace's new pleasure gardens. Columella notes that elms take three years before they can be shaped to receive the vine and six years before the vine can be ‘wedded’ to it (Rust. 16.3 sexto anno, si iam firma uidebitur, maritabis hoc modo). This process of ‘wedding’ the vine to a mature elm tree is what Horace draws our attention to when he describes the plane tree that displaces the elm as caelebs (‘a bachelor’). As Nisbet and Hubbard explain, caelebs prompts us to understand the adjective maritas (‘married’) with ulmos.Footnote ³⁷ Another hint at the previous farm's long and productive tenure can be found in the mention of its former olive groves. Olive cuttings take at least five years to be transplanted to the grove (Columella, Rust. 5.6), where they must not be trimmed for two further years (Columella, Rust. 5.11).Footnote ³⁸ Virgil had called the olive tree tarde crescens ‘slowly growing’ (G. 2.3), echoing Theophrastus (Caus. pl. 1.8.4 ἐλαία δυσαυξῆ ‘the olive slow in growing’) and Varro's De re rustica (1.41.5 olea in crescendo tarda ‘the olive slow in growing’).Footnote ³⁹ The replacement of the olive-trees with myrtle in Carmen 2.15 is especially egregious, not only because the latter is being planted for its fragrance rather than for its fruit but also since the myrtle and the olive tree were well-known examples of ‘mutually affectionate’ trees (Theophr. Caus. pl. 3.10.4 προσφιλῆ … δένδρα): intertwining olive and myrtle had a beneficial effect upon the quality of the myrtle's berries. I suggest that Horace's moralizing point comes not just from the useless, self-indulgent and unproductive nature of the elm and the plane treeFootnote ⁴⁰ but also from the longevity of the farm under its previous owners, which we can infer from in its modes of agricultural production.

This issue of carefully cultivated, slow-growth trees and their moral symbolism should be on the reader's mind, because it clusters in the two poems immediately preceding Carmen 2.15 and is present in Virgil's vignette of the Corycian gardener. The penultimate stanza of Carmen 2.14 had the vivid image of all that must be left behind when we die, a tricolon that climaxes in the trees cultivated by Postumus on his property (2.14.21–4):

The poem immediately prior, Carmen 2.13, had opened with a different image of a tree passing from owner to owner (2.13.1–4):

The elm's age seems also to be an active issue in the Georgics. Virgil seems to stress the maturity of the elm trees that the Corycian farmer transplanted at G. 4.144 seras in uersum distulit ulmos (‘he planted out elms in rows after the normal time’, OLD s.v. serus 2b). The majority of critics see the adjective seras as describing the mature status of the trees being transplanted and the detail as imparting a veneer of unreality to the farmer's activities.Footnote ⁴¹ Manfred Erren has offered an alternative interpretation of seras—namely, that it pertains to the late season of an old man's life (that is, OLD s.v. serus 5b ‘[occurring] at a late hour’).Footnote ⁴² This seems less convincing, but can nevertheless be put into dialogue with the moralizing message of Carmen 2.15 as well, for, on Erren's analysis, the old man plants young trees whose full maturity he himself will not enjoy, as a gift for the next generation, while in Horace's version the long-established elm trees of the former farm are overwhelmed by sterile ornaments in the next generation of owners.

3. ‘A FEW ACRES’ ECHOED IN CARMEN 3.16

It was noted earlier that Horace also used the collocation pauca iugera in Carmen 3.16. Its appearance here is relevant to its use in both Carmen 2.15 and the Georgics, since it can be seen to mark this poem as a further point of reference in Horace's reception of Virgil's passage. The phrase occurs in Horace's description of his Sabine farm at Carm. 3.16.29–38:

There are a number of elements in these lines that may be read as marking an allusion to the Georgics.

1. 1. The grammatical case of the key phrase siluaque iugerum paucorum has shifted from nominative to genitive, but this should not render it a less effective marker of allusion to its earlier uses in the nominative in Virgil and in Carmen 2.15.Footnote ⁴³ The fact that it had only been used in these three locations at the time Odes Books 1–3 were published is more than enough to give it privileged status. Indeed, Virgil's full phrase cui pauca relicti | iugera ruris erant shows that Horace's phrase is an inversion of Virgil's grammar wherein a noun/adjective pair in the nominative (pauca iugera) is modified by a genitive (ruris), so that a near-synonym in the nominative (silua) is modified by the same noun/adjective pair (iugerum paucorum). We should also note the rarity of the word iugerum in Virgil and Horace more generally: it occurs only three times in the Odes (again only at 3.24.12) and, perhaps more surprisingly, only twice in the Georgics (again only at 2.264). We may even see a self-annotating pun marking the allusion in the phrase silua paucorum iugerum in the sense ‘the raw material (for poetry) consisting of “a few acres”’ (OLD s.v. silua 5b), in which pauca iugera now refers specifically to Virgil's description of the Corycian gardener's few acres in Georgics Book 4 and the rich material it offers to Horace's lyric project.Footnote ⁴⁴

2. 2. Horace's description of the agricultural products that are unavailable to him—honey, wine and pasturage (Carm. 3.16.33–6)—evoke further specific details from the Corycian gardener's plot. Bees and honey at line 33 clearly look to the farm of the Corycian gardener, which is also located in Calabria,Footnote ⁴⁵ which is described in a book dedicated to apiculture, and whose owner raises bees: G. 4.139–41 apibus fetis idem atque examine multo | primus abundare et spumantia cogere pressis | mella fauis (‘he was likewise the first to abound in fruitful bees and a great swarm and to collect foaming honey from the pressed honeycomb’). The wine and pasturage not provided on Horace's Sabinum were also noted for their absence in Virgil's description of the Corycian gardener's plot at G. 4.129 nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho.

Whereas I have argued that Carmen 2.15 illustrates the perversion of an ideal embodied by the Corycian senex, Carmen 3.16 rather affirms some of the most prominent aspects of the Georgics passage in order to co-opt it for its own moralizing purposes. The contentment of the Corycian farmer and the productive use to which he puts his small plot of land offer a paradigm for Horace's profession of fulfilment with the gift of the Sabine estate. At the same time, the relationship of Carmen 3.16 with the Georgics also puts it in dialogue with Carmen 2.15. The emphasis in Carmen 3.16 upon contentment with the Sabine farm, even in contrast to larger—indeed, fantastically largerFootnote ⁴⁶—estates, is cut from the same cloth as the contrast in Carmen 2.15 between the simple productivity of the old farm and the ever-increasing material development of the present farm, and the contrast is made by the same style of exaggerated comparison we see at Carm. 2.15.2–4.Footnote ⁴⁷ So too, the philosophically tinged expression sorte beatior and other maxims in Carmen 3.16 regarding limitation of desire (3.16.21–3, 38–9, 43–4) may in light of this allusion evoke for the reader the philosophical language expressing the contentment of the senex at G. 4.132 regum aequabat opes animis:Footnote ⁴⁸ such phrases evoke paradigms of self-control and contentment that are transgressed by the new farm-owners of Carmen 2.15. There are, to be clear, distinct differences in the messages of the two lyric poems: the basic message of Carmen 2.15 that expansive luxury villas and their horti transgress a positive model of antique simplicity is not the same as the message in Carmen 3.16 of the poet's contentment with the sufficiency provided him by Maecenas. Nevertheless, the key phrase siluaque iugerum | paucorum is, I think, more than merely an expression of ‘antique frugality’,Footnote ⁴⁹ and acts as an invitation to draw Carmen 3.16 into meaningful dialogue with Carmen 2.15 and G. 4.125–48.