An agricultural regeneration of Italy was impending, chiefly in
viticulture, as Ferrero has pointed out. With far sighted appreciation
of the economic advantages of this, Octavian determined to promote the
movement, which became one of the completed glories of the Augustan
Age, when Horace sang

Tua, Caesar, aetas
Fruges et agris rettulit uberes.

Varro's book appeared in B.C. 37 and during that year Maecenas
commissioned Virgil to put into verse the spirit of the times; just
as, under similar circumstances, Cromwell pensioned Samuel Hartlib.
Such is the co-incidence of the dates that it is not impossible that
the _Rerum Rusticarum_ suggested the subject of the _Georgics_, either
to Virgil or to Maecenas.

There is no evidence in the _Bucolics_ that Virgil ever had any
practical knowledge of agriculture before he undertook to write the
_Georgics_. His father was, it is true, a farmer, but apparently in a
small way and unsuccessful, for he had to eke out a frugal livelihood
by keeping bees and serving as the hireling deputy of a _viator_ or
constable. This type of farmer persists and may be recognized in any
rural community: but the agricultural colleges do not enlist such
men into their faculties. So it is possible that Virgil owed little
agricultural knowledge to his father's precepts or example. Virgil
perhaps had tended his father's flock, as he pictures himself doing
under the guise of Tityrus; certainly he spent many hours of youth
"patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" steeping his Celtic soul with the
beauty and the melancholy poetry of the Lombard landscape: and so he
came to know and to love bird and flower and the external aspects of