wheat and woodland
tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd,

but it does not appear that he ever followed the plough, or, what is
more important, ever laid off a ploughgate. As a poet of nature no one
was ever better equipped (the highest testimony is that of Tennyson),
but when it came to writing poetry around the art of farm management
it was necessary for him to turn to books for his facts. He
acknowledges (_Geo_. I, 176) his obligation only to _veterum
praecepta_ without naming them, but as M. Gaston Boissier says he was
evidently referring to Varro "le plus moderne de tous les anciens."[7]
Virgil evidently regarded Varro's treatise as a solid foundation for
his poem and he used it freely, just as he drew on Hesiod for literary
inspiration, on Lucretius for imaginative philosophy, and on Mago and
Cato and the two Sasernas for local colour.

Virgil probably had also the advantage of personal contact with Varro
during the seven years he was composing and polishing the _Georgics_.
He spent them largely at Naples (_Geo_. IV, 563) and Varro was then
established in retirement at Cumae: thus they were neighbours, and,
although they belonged to different political parties, the young poet
must have known and visited the old polymath; there was every
reason for him to have taken advantage of the opportunity. Whatever
justification there may be for this conjecture, the fact remains that
Varro is in the background every where throughout the _Georgics_, as
the "deadly parallel" in the appended note will indicate. This is
perhaps the most interesting thing about Varro's treatise: instructive
and entertaining as it is to the farmer, in the large sense of the
effect of literature on mankind, Virgil gave it wings--the useful cart