ABSTRACT
The lines quoted above from a prose translation of the second book of Virgil’s Georgics (Fairclough and Goold 1999, 149) draw attention to the friability, the color, and the inherent fertility of soils, three key properties constituting the “genius” of natural porous media found at the land surface. This iconic Latin poem about farming goes on to contextualize these three properties in a very practical manner for a variety of agricultural crops (“the denser better for Ceres, the lighter for Bacchus”) in what the poet-translator David Ferry has called “one of the great songs, perhaps the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in the difcult circumstances of the way things are” (Ferry 2005, xiv). While Virgil’s Georgics celebrate the unique characteristics of soils in nature, the poem does not underestimate the arduous task of cultivating them for human use (Ferry 2005, xiv):
The farmer works the soil with his curved plow, This is the work he does, and it sustains His country, and his family, and his cattle, His worthy bullocks and his herd of cows. No rest from this.
