spite of his evident anxiety to attain exactness of detail, does not come up to the fullness of the earlier. The very meagreness of Virgil's paragraph about the lucky and unlucky days, whether it be true or no that the precise substance of it is borrowed from a later writer', may induce us to surmise that he would not have given a paragraph to the subject at all, but for his deference to the example of Hesiod. The famous storm-piece in the Georgics was evidently suggested by the winter-piece in the Works and Days, both being introduced to warn the farmer of the dangers to which he is liable in his calling, while each is evidently intended by its author as a specimen of elaborate description, at the same time that it is curious to contrast Virgil's rapid enumeration of the more striking features of the scene, the continuous burst of rain, the levelling of the crops, the swelling of torrent and sea, the flashing of the lightning, the terror of man and beast, the fall of the mountain peak, and the howling of the wind, with the Dutch fidelity of drawing with which Hesiod represented a single point, the effect of the sleet on the animals, how it pierces some and fails to pierce others, and how the wilder sort scud to their dens, like an old man moving on three legs, with his back rather broken than bent, and his head looking down to the ground. Not less instructive is the parallel between the two poets in the lines where they speak of the coming in of the warm weather, "when lambs and goats are at their fattest, and wine at its mellowest." Mr. Ruskin might appeal to the sequel of the passage in Hesiod, the wish for a sheltering rock, and wine of Biblos, and a cake raised by yeast, and goat's milk, and the flesh of a cow that has not yet calved, and of firstling kids, as a proof of the utter subordination of any feeling of the picturesque in the early Greek mind to a sense of physical comfort; while it would be only just to note that Virgil, in talking of the pleasure of mid-day sleep, and of the thickness of the shadowing foliage on the mountains, has at any rate omitted the grosser and more purely corporeal accessories of meat and drink. Virgil may be said also to follow Hesiod in his natural calendar, generally fixing the time of the year by the rising or setting of some star, and once or twice noting the return of a season by the return of a bird, such as the stork or the swallow. As in the Eclogues, the stately march of his diction has in it nothing of agricultural simplicity; yet there are instances in which he has imitated the proverbial quaintness of some of Hesiod's sayings, and expressed an epigrammatic precept in language of no less point and terseness. Owing to the nature of the subject, the passages in which Virgil has directly copied Hesiod are almost entirely confined to the first two-thirds of the First Book of the Georgics. 7 See note on 1. 276. We may conjecture that he may have been indebted in later parts of the poem to lost Hesiodic writings, but we shall be conjecturing with few or no data. Enough however has been said to show that if the rural poetry of Virgil bears the impress of a genius unlike that which produced the rural poetry of Hesiod, it is not because the Roman poet made no attempt to model his work on the Greek. 8 The same good fortune which has preserved to us the most important of Hesiod's agricultural poems enables us to judge also of Virgil's obligations to another writer, whom he has no where named or acknowledged. In the Phaenomena and Diosemeia, or Prognostics, of Aratus, we have a specimen of the didactic poetry of the earlier Alexandrian school. Cicero, who translated both works, speaks of him in a well-known passage as a writer who, though ignorant of astronomy, made an excellent poem about the heavenly bodies; and one of the early notices of his life helps us to explain the apparent anomaly by telling us that his Phaenomena is a metrical paraphrase of a treatise by Eudoxus, made at the request of his royal patron, Antigonus Gonnatas. He was in fact a metaphrastes, one of a class of writers not uncommon in the later times of Greek literature, who paraphrased the works of other authors, sometimes versifying a prose writer, at others transprosing a poet, sometimes turning a hexameter poem into iambics, at others preserving the metre while they altered the words. Sometimes a successful metaphrase became in its turn the subject of metaphrastic ingenuity. Aratus himself was rewritten in iambics by one Marianus, an unwearied writer, who attempted similar reproductions of Theocritus, the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, several poems of Callimachus, Nicander's Theriaca, and, as Suidas tells us, many others. Of the two poems now in question, if they are to be regarded as two, and not as one falling into two parts, Virgil has been but sparingly indebted to the first, the plan of the Georgics not leading him to attempt any description of the stars as they appear in heaven, which is the subject of the Phaenomena. But the other work, the Diosemeia, has been laid under heavy contributions, to furnish materials for that account of the prognostics of the weather which occupies the latter part of Virgil's First Book. The very first words of Aratus' poem, ovx ¿páaç, evidently suggested the familiar appeal nonne vides, which Virgil, in imitation of Lucretius, introduces more than once in the Georgics. The whole of 8 De Oratore J. 16: "Etenim si constat inter doctos hominem ignarum astrologiae, ornatissimis atque optimis versibus, Aratum, de caelo stellisque dixisse, si de rebus rusticis hominem ab agro remotissimum, Nicandrum Colophonium, poetica quadam facultate, non rustica, dixisse praeclare, quid est, cur non orator de rebus iis eloquentissime dicat, quas ad certam causam tempusque cognorit?" 9 See O. Schneider's Nicandrea (Leipsic, 1856), p. 202. the prognostics that follow, signs of wind, signs of rain, signs of fair weather, signs from sounds by land or by sea, signs from the flight, the motion, or the cry of birds, signs from the actions of beasts, reptiles, and insects, signs from the flames of lamps, and the appearances on water, signs from the sun and moon at their rising and at their setting, are all given nearly as Aratus has given them, though the manner in which they are dealt with is Virgil's own. We know not how closely Aratus may have followed his original, if indeed he had an original in this as in his other poem; but however much or however little scientific precision may have suffered from his language, which is that of a tolerably successful imitator of the old epic style, somewhat diffuse, but on the whole perspicuous, and not greatly over-wrought, the arrangement of his subject is sufficiently like that which we should expect to see in a prose treatise, so that the charms of variety are occasionally sacrificed to the claims of practical utility, the same thing being mentioned more than once where it happens to belong to more than one cluster of phenomena. But Virgil pushes the right of a poet over his materials far beyond Aratus. He delights in the profusion of picturesque images which is to be found in Aratus' collection of prognostics, and he makes free use of them for his own purposes; but those purposes are rather poetical than properly didactic. If the reader is not wearied, it matters little that he is left in ignorance of part of what it concerned him to know. Any one who will compare the hundred and fourteen lines in the Diosemeia, on the signs given by the moon and the sun, with the thirty-seven in the First Book of the Georgics on the same topic, will see at once that the two writers must have proposed to themselves different objects. The first thought of the one was to communicate information; the first thought of the other was to impart pleasure. In the case of a third writer whom Virgil is supposed to have imitated, circumstances have been less favourable to us. Quinctilian, in the well-known chapter in which he reviews the various authors of Greece and Rome, asks whether Virgil can be called an unsuccessful follower of Nicander. But of Nicander's Georgics, which is evidently the work referred to, we possess only fragments; and these, with the exception of one or two of the least important, relate to any part of the subject rather than to those of which Virgil has chosen to treat-to such trees as the beech, the mulberry, the palm, and the chestnut, to turnips, and gourds, and cabbages, to flowers of all kinds, and to pigeons. We may agree with the last editor of the Nicandrea1, that notwithstanding these specimens of his work, Nicander probably went 1 O. Schneider: from whose elaborate Prolegomena the following account is taken. over much the same ground as Virgil, only taking a more comprehensive view of his subject; but we have only Quinctilian's authority for surmising that the resemblance between the two poems extended beyond the name. Equally tantalising is the condition of our knowledge about another work by Nicander, the Meλoooupyiά, the title of which promises to throw a flood of light on Virgil's Fourth Book, while the notices of it that have been preserved merely tell us that the author used Ouμoc, thyme, as a masculine noun, that he applied the verb Evpopέw, if the reading is right, to the drones, in what connexion we know not, and that he placed the original birth-place of the bees in Crete, in the days of Saturn-the last point, at any rate, being one in which Virgil may seem to have followed his example. But if we are ignorant of those works of Nicander about which, as students of Virgil, we should have most wished to be informed, we can at any rate satisfy ourselves as to the general character of the poet by looking at his two extant productions, the Theriaca and the Alexipharmaca. Like Aratus, he appears to have been a metaphrastes; like him, he appears to have been honoured after his death by having his works subjected to the same process which he had tried on those of others; and he receives from Cicero a similar equivocal compliment, that he had written admirably on agricultural subjects, without ever having had the slightest connexion with agriculture. But though the translator of Aratus includes them in the same eulogy, they appear to have received very different degrees of consideration. One of the points on which the latest editor of Nicander has laboured most is to prove that his author was never much read. 'Nicander parum lectus' is a thesis which is dilated on more than once in his Prolegomena. He had his metaphrastes; he had his scholiasts; he seems even to have had his interpolators; but he was but little read, even by those who, journeying over the same ground, might have been expected to avail themselves of the notes of a former traveller. Dioscorides, Celsus, Scribonius Largus, Galen, Serenus Sammonicus, Oribasius, Aetius Amidenus, Paulus Aegineta, Theophanes Nonnus, and Ioannes Actuarius, are successively passed under review, to show that they attended to Nicander very slightly or not at all. Nor can it be said that he is likely to receive from modern readers the favour which was denied him by those who approached more nearly to his own time. The interest which attaches to him is purely historical and philological. He is supposed to have lived ninety years after Aratus; and his language shows plain marks of an increasing corruption in taste. He wrote a work on γλώσσαι, and his own poems contain many words which would fall under that category; terms borrowed from Homer, and used in questionable or altogether unauthorized senses; terms borrowed from the local usage of the different Greek nations, the Aeolians, the Aetolians, the Ambracians, the Cyprians, the Dorians, the Peloponnesians, and the Rhodians; terms invented by his own ingenuity, through the process of derivation or composition. The structure of the two poems, so far as I have examined them, seems to be not unlike that which is familiar to the readers of didactic poetry. Each commences with a brief address to the person to whom the poem is inscribed, and a brief statement of the subject, in the one case a description of noxious reptiles, and of the cures for their bites, in the other an account of edible and potable poisons and their remedies; each consists of a number of paragraphs of moderate length, apparently bearing a substantial resemblance to one another, connected by modes of transition, which are not quite free from sameness, and occasionally relieved by some mythological or geographical notice; and each ends with a brief reference to the author, whom the person addressed is requested to bear in mind. In the Theriaca there are one or two passages which enable us to compare Nicander more closely with Virgil. The directions in the Third Book of the Georgics to get rid of serpents from the cattle-sheds by fumigation are to be found at the opening of Nicander's poem. Later in the poem occur a few lines on the Chersydros, which have supplied Virgil with the details of his picture of the baleful serpent which haunts the mountain lawns of Calabria. Every reader of the Georgics will recognize the monster that at first under the wide-throated lake wages truceless war with the frogs, but when Seirius dries up the water, and the dregs at the bottom of the lake are seen, appears that moment on land, adust and bloodless, warming his grim form in the sun, and hissingly with out-darted tongue makes a thirsty furrow as he goes. 2 The mention of these metaphrastae may perhaps indicate the right point of view from which to regard Virgil's own work. Their characteristic was that they furnished metre and language to matter which had been collected by others; and any one who will read the Georgics, verifying the references made by the commentators, such as 2 ὃς δ ̓ ἤτοι τὸ πρὶν μὲν ὑπὸ βροχθώδεϊ λίμνῃ Theriaca, vv. 366-371 (ed. O. Schneider). I am not sure that I have in all cases rightly interpreted the words, as in a writer like Nicander there is room for considerable differences of opinion: but I have endeavoured to render closely, so as to give some notion of his style. K |