In the early sixteenth century, most Tudor gentlemen would have scoffed at farmwork as drudgery. That such attitudes changed is due in no small part to the rediscovery of this text by the Roman poet Virgil, who knew first-hand the joys and frustrations of farming. His husbandry manual in verse was so influential that the term georgic became shorthand for all writing about agriculture. In contrast to pastoral, which adopts the contemplative perspective of the leisure-loving shepherd, georgic celebrates the farmer's more aggressive intervention in the natural world. Rather than bemoan the loss of the Golden Age as Ovid does, Virgil celebrates labour as a cure for idleness (which would have appealed to the Puritan work ethic of many English readers) and perhaps also urban overpopulation, which was worrying Emperor Augustus and had become a glaring problem in Stuart London. English translations of Virgil by Abraham Fleming in 1589 and this one by Thomas May, a friend of Ben Jonson's, contributed to the growing mania for agricultural “improvement.” The ecocritical merit of the georgic mode is ambiguous, as it could encourage more efficient farming methods (manuring, fallowing, tree care, and rotating crops), but also enclosing commons or putting more meadows, woodlands, and heath under the plough to boost profits (see McRae 1990).

Source: Virgil's Georgics, trans. Thomas May (1628), 3–5, 7–9.