horse became Pegasus.

As a consequence of the chorus of praise of the _Georgics_, there have
been those, in all ages, who have sneered at Virgil's farming. The
first such _advocatus diaboli_ was Seneca, who, writing to Lucilius
(_Ep_. 86) from the farm house of Scipio Africanus, fell foul of the
advice (_Geo_, I, 216) to plant both beans and millet in the spring,
saying that he had just seen at the end of June beans gathered and
millet sowed on the same day: from which he generalized that Virgil
disregarded the truth to turn a graceful verse, and sought rather to
delight his reader than to instruct the husbandman. This kind of
cheap criticism does not increase our respect for Nero's philosophic
minister.[8] Whatever may have been Virgil's mistakes, every farmer
of sentiment should thank God that one of the greatest poems in any
language contains as much as it does of a sound tradition of the
practical side of his art, and here is where Varro is entitled to the
appreciation which is always due the schoolmaster of a genius.




NOTE ON THE OBLIGATION OF VIRGIL TO VARRO


At the beginning of the first _Georgic_ (1-5) Virgil lays out the
scope of the poem as dealing with three subjects, agriculture, the
care of live stock and the husbandry of bees. This was Varro's plan
(R.R. I, I, 2, and I, 2 passim) except that under the third head Varro
included, with bees, all the other kinds of stock which were usually
kept at a Roman steading. Varro asserts that his was the first