For a person who loves the Aeneid, it's sort of amazing that I never managed to read Virgil's Eclogues or Georgics. Happily, I found a lovely Oxford University copy that included both. In this case I suppose I was finally driven to do it by the endless and exhausting demands of the Epics book (a very cruel mistress). There was a great passage in one of the Eclogues that fit in beautifully with my Aeneid chapter; it discussed how much better the world would be under Roman leadership. It served my purpose because I was trying to discuss that what Virgil was celebrating in the Aeneid was not Roman power, but instead the role that Rome would serve in bringing order and light to the world. So, I may have finally read it for selfish reasons, but in the end I loved it for the beauty of Virgil's words. There are many beautiful passages, but let me just include one, right at the end of the Georgics Book I:
"Surely the time will come when a farmer on these frontiers
Forcing through earth his curved plough
Shall find old spears eaten away with flaky rust,
Or hit upon helmets as he wields the weight of his mattock
And marvel at the heroic bones he as disinterred.
O Gods of our fathers . . ."
I think I must have been moved by it so much because it reminded me of what I hope the Epics book accomplishes, waking people to these extraordinary works that are sadly ignored yet existing right beneath the surface.
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