Umida solstitia atque hiemes orate serenas, Agricolae-- Votisque vocaveris imbrem-- In primis venerare deos, atque annua magnae Sacra refer Cereri(301)--
the specification of lucky and unlucky days, the reference to the old Greek fables of Coeus, Iapetus, and Typhoeus, are, though not directly imitated from Hesiod, yet conceived in his spirit.
But, besides appealing to primitive religious and mythological associations, the poet of Andes aims at reproducing some flavour of the sentiment of a remote antiquity and of the quaint _naïveté_ characteristic of the sage of Ascra. The very use of such an expression as '_quo sidere_ terram Vertere,'--the thought of the husbandman's labours as being regulated not by the Roman Calendar(302), with its prosaic divisions of the month by kalends, nones, and ides, but by the rise and setting of the constellations,--the picturesque signs of the change of the seasons, as in the line
Candida venit avis longis invisa colubris(303),--
the use of such quaint expressions as 'nudus ara, sere nudus,'--seem all intended to remind the reader that the subject is one 'antiquae laudis et artis,'--the most ancient and unchanging of the great arts of life,--that too in which man's dependence on Nature and the Spiritual power above Nature is most vividly realised(304). This infusion into the practical realities and prosaic details of his subject of something of the wonder and 'freshness of the early world' Virgil derives from the relation which he establishes between himself and his Boeotian prototype.
Though in spirit and poetical inspiration Virgil's debt to Hesiod is greater, yet the Georgics present more direct traces of imitation of the Alexandrine poets. It is in accordance with the learning and science of Alexandria that the subject is illustrated by local epithets, such as 'Strymoniae grues,' by reference to the products of distant lands--
nonne vides croceos ut Tmolus odores, etc.,--
by recondite mythological and astronomical allusions and by the substitution of the names of various deities, such as Liber and Ceres, for the natural products which were supposed to be their gifts. But to several special authors his debt is more direct. Thus the passage, i. 233--