A rapid review of the tastes, sympathies, and affections on the part of his readers to which Virgil appeals, both in the body of his poem and in its finer episodes, will show that they all contribute to produce this representative character. Where some of the details of the poem seem to fail in poetic interest, they still have the interest of being characteristic of the Italian mind.
1. The poem professes to impart practical instruction on the best method of cultivating the land, of propagating trees, of breeding cattle, horses, etc., of profiting by the industry of bees:--
Quare agite, O, proprios generatim discite cultus, Agricolae(401).
This is the obvious and ostensible purpose of the poem; and the truth and accuracy of the instruction were important elements in the estimate which the countrymen of the poet formed of its value. Columella and Pliny, while controverting him on a few minor points(402), attest his practical knowledge as an agriculturist and a naturalist. Similar testimony is given by some modern writers competent to speak with authority on these subjects(403). Neither ancient nor modern critics regard him as free from liability to mistake, and the tendency of his mind to believe in marvellous deviations from natural law exposed him to errors into which less imaginative writers were not likely to fall; but the substantial accuracy of his observations and acquired knowledge seems to be attested both by positive and negative evidence. It is not a question as to whether the operations described in Virgil satisfy the requirements of skilled or even of unskilled farming in the present day, or whether he does not fall into mistakes in natural history which a modern reader, with no scientific knowledge of the subject, may easily detect; but whether he has adequately represented the methods of ancient Italian agriculture, and whether he is a trustworthy exponent of the scientific beliefs of his age, and an accurate observer of those phenomena which were as accessible to an ancient as to a modern enquirer. On these points he satisfied the best critics among his countrymen. The general truth of his observation is further attested by the survival in Southern Europe, into comparatively recent times, of some of the processes described by him, which seem most remote from our ordinary experience(404). It is attested also by the accuracy of his description of the unchanging phenomena of Nature, and of the habits of animals.