Virgil's Plough

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In this paper Virgil's description of a plough (Georgics, 1, 169 ff.) is re-examined in the light of modern records of wooden ploughs from SW Europe, taken in a broad sense to include Italy and the Swiss canton of the Grisons, and from neighbouring Mediterranean regions. This on the assumption that Virgil is describing a single type of plough, not ‘integrating’ types; in other words, that there is such a thing as ‘Virgil's Plough’ and that one may hope to find its modern analogues. To archaeological evidence only incidental allusions are made, mainly to evidence appearing later than Gow's and Drachmann's articles.When the passage from the Georgics is set out in separate sentences of 2 + 2 + 3 lines with their differing evocations, the field and woodland scenes evoked do not appear so closely related to each other and to the references to parts of the plough as they do if the passage, which is fundamentally a structural account of the plough, is interpreted in the light of a visit to a craftsman's shop with outdoor evocations arising from the craftsman's explanations to his visitor. The thesis now put forward is that Virgil's description arises from just such a visit, which would open quite naturally with talk about the ‘knee timber’ needed for the curved beam (buris) as the part taking the principal strain. So to-day in talks with Spanish ploughwrights, one of whom even used Virgil's verb when explaining to the writer in 1935 that, in a certain valley from which he bought the elm for his beams, ‘doman el ramito de año,’ they tie down the yearling branchlet.

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: