ABSTRACT
The Roman poet Virgil dedicated his four-book Georgics, in form a didactic poem on farming, probably published in 29 BCE, the year of Octavian's triple triumph two years after the decisive battle of Actium in which Octavian had defeated Antony and Cleopatra and so brought to an end two decades of civil war. During the last ten years of his life, Virgil was working on the Aeneid, an epic in the Homeric manner on the wanderings and wars of the Trojan hero Aeneas, archetypal city-founder and ancestor of Augustus. In all three of his major works he reveals a deep interest in the individual's relationship to his wider environment and to the natural world. One of the marks of his greatness as a poet is his openness to the whole range of ancient traditions and attitudes, popular and philosophical, concerning the natural world and man's place in it.
