How The Georgics drew on On the Nature of Things
A documented line of influence: Virgil demonstrably engaged Lucretius’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
On the Nature of Things
Lucretius · c. 55 BCE
Ancient RomeThe influenced
The Georgics
Virgil · 29 BCE
Ancient RomeRelevance
9/10
On The Georgics’s page
- The Georgics is built on Lucretius — Virgil adopted On the Nature of Things as his Latin didactic template and wove its thought and diction through every book
- Read the plague that ends Book 3 with Lucretius's plague of Athens (DRN 5–6) in mind and you'll see the borrowing in the open
- The relationship is about as deep as one poet's debt to another gets; reading Lucretius first puts Virgil's whole project in view
On On the Nature of Things’s page
- The Latin didactic poem Virgil set out to answer — its influence on The Georgics is, in scholarly terms, perhaps stronger than any one poet ever exerted on another
- Virgil took the De Rerum Natura as his model and saturated his farming poem in Lucretian thought, composition, and diction
- The famous cattle-plague that closes Georgics Book 3 reaches straight back to Lucretius's plague of Athens in Books 5–6