The Georgics of Virgil, like his Pastorals, are a direct and confessed imitation from Greek originals. The poem of Hesiod--“Works and Days”--which has come down to us, though apparently in an incomplete form, gives a mythological sketch of the early history of the world, with its five ages of the human race--the gold, the silver, the brazen, “the age of heroes,” and the present--which last, with the cynicism or melancholy which seems so inseparable from the poetic temperament, Hesiod looks upon as hopelessly degenerate, with the prospect of something even worse to come. To this traditional cosmogony the Greek poet adds directions as to farm operations in their several seasons, and notes of lucky and unlucky days. Virgil has borrowed from him largely on these two latter subjects. He is also considerably indebted to other Greek writers less known to us, and in whose case, therefore, his obligations are not so readily traced. From his own countryman and immediate predecessor, Lucretius, the author of the great didactic poem “On the Nature of Things,” he drew quite as largely, but in another field. Virgil is said to have been born on the very day of Lucretius’s death, and he had an intense admiration for both his diction and his philosophy. There are passages in Virgil’s writings which would seem to show that his greatest ambition would have been to have sung, like Lucretius, of the secrets of nature, rather than either of heroic legends or of country life. And here and there, throughout these books of Georgics, wherever he has the opportunity, he forgets the farmer in the natural philosopher, and breaks off in the midst of some practical precepts to indulge in speculations on the hidden causes of nature’s operations, which would have sorely puzzled a Roman country gentleman or his bailiff, if we could suppose that the work was really composed with a view to their practical instruction. He addresses his poem to his noble patron Mæcenas. And amongst the long list of divine powers whom, as the guardians of fields and flocks, he invokes to aid his song, he introduces the present Autocrat of Rome.