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Now, if I consult my dictionary I find: faselus, faseolus, phaseolus, haricot. Learned lexicographer, permit me to remark that your translation is incorrect: faselus, faseolus cannot mean haricot. The incontestable proof is in the Georgics, where Virgil tells us at what season we must sow the faselus. He says:
He accordingly draws in all his moneys on the Calends on the Ides he lends them out again! What Vergil wrote Horace when he received a copy of the Epode, we are not told, but in his next work, the Georgics, he returned the compliment by similarly threading Horace's phrases into a description of country life a passage that is indeed one of the most successful in the book.
Vergil's study of evolution had for him also united man and nature, making the romance of the Georgics possible; it had shaped a kind of scientific animism that permitted him to accept the language of the simple peasant even though its connotations were for him more complex and subtle.
Of Virgil's works the Georgics is unquestionably the most artistic. Grasp of the subject, clearness of arrangement, evenness of style, are all at their highest excellence; the incongruities that criticism detects in the Eclogues, and the unrealities that often mar the Aeneid, are almost wholly absent.
In this respect he often reminded me of Sir Walter Scott, with whom, in the general character of his mind, he had very little affinity. The Georgics pleased me better; the Eclogues best, the second and tenth above all. But I think the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin, "Sepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala " I cannot tell you how they struck me.
So I needed "The Georgics" very badly that afternoon, and the hour would have lost much of its perfection had I not been able to take the book from my knapsack, and corroborate my mood, while Colin was sketching an old barn, by reading aloud from its consecrated pages: "I can repeat to thee many a counsel of them of old, if thou shrink not back nor weary to learn of lowly cares.
Wherefore they do not as it were paint the earth, but dig it up well and use secret remedies, so that fruit is borne quickly and multiplies, and is not destroyed. They have a book for this work, which they call the Georgics. As much of the land as is necessary is cultivated, and the rest is used for the pasturage of cattle.
In Georgics II, 146, Vergil repeats the phrase maxima taurus victima, but the phrase must have had its origin in the Catalepton, since here maxima balances humilis. In the Georgics the phrase is merely a verbal reminiscence, for there is nothing in the context there to explain maxima. Was not this the act that prompted the happy idea of writing the epic of Aeneas?
In the fields, the pecoraro, in shaggy sheep-skin breeches, the very type of the mythic Pan, leaned against his staff, half-asleep, and tended his woolly flock, or the contadino drove through dark furrows the old plough of Virgil's time, that figures in the vignettes to the "Georgics," dragged tediously along by four white oxen, yoked abreast.
This modern habit it is that makes the Georgics read so much like Fabre's remarkable essays. The study of the bees in the fourth book is, of course, not free from errors that nothing less than generations of close scrutiny could remove. But the right kind of observing has begun. On the other hand the book is not merely a farmer's practical manual on how to raise bees for profit.
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