Playing the Farmer: Representations of Rural Life in Vergil's Georgics

ISBN-13: 9780520268326 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 336 str.

Philip Thibodeau

Opis

Playing the Farmer reinvigorates our understanding of Vergil s Georgics, a vibrant work written by Rome s premier epic poet shortly before he began the Aeneid. Setting the Georgics in the social context of its day, Philip Thibodeau for the first time connects the poem s idyllic, and idealized, portrait of rustic life and agriculture with changing attitudes toward the countryside in late Republican and early Imperial Rome. He argues that what has been seen as a straightforward poem about agriculture is in fact an enchanting work of fantasy that elevated, and sometimes whitewashed, the realities of country life. Drawing from a wide range of sources, Thibodeau shows how Vergil s poem reshaped agrarian ideals in its own time, and how it influenced Roman poets, philosophers, agronomists, and orators. Playing the Farmer brings a fresh perspective to a work that was praised by Dryden as the best poem by the best poet. "