How The Georgics drew on Theogony/Works and Days
A documented line of influence: Virgil demonstrably engaged Hesiod’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Theogony/Works and Days
Hesiod · c. 700 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
The Georgics
Virgil · 29 BCE
Ancient RomeRelevance
8/10
On The Georgics’s page
- The Georgics is Virgil consciously remaking Hesiod's Works and Days — same didactic hexameter, same man-and-land subject, same day-by-day farming counsel, now sung "through Roman towns"
- Virgil signals it openly, billing his poem an "Ascraean" song after Hesiod's home town of Ascra
- Read Hesiod first and Virgil's polish reads as an answer to a much older, plainer voice
On Theogony/Works and Days’s page
- Hesiod invented the kind of poem Virgil set out to rewrite for Rome — didactic verse about man and the land
- Works and Days hands down its farming life in day-by-day precepts and hexameter; Virgil takes that template wholesale
- Virgil names the debt in the text, calling the Georgics an "Ascraean song" — Ascra was Hesiod's home town