How deeply the thought expressed in these lines--the thought of the hard struggle which man is forced to carry on with an unsympathetic Power--sank into the mind of Virgil, is evident from the various passages in the Georgics in which the phraseology as well as the idea expressed by Lucretius is reproduced. These lines in which the struggle between the 'vis humana' impersonated in the husbandman, and the resistance offered by Nature to his energetic labours, is vividly described, suggest whatever there is of speculative thought in the Georgics. And though it would be misleading to speak of that poem as, in any sense, a philosophical poem, yet, as in all other great works of genius, some theory of life--of man's relation to his circumstances and of his place, either in a spiritual or natural dispensation--pervades and gives its highest meaning to the didactic exposition.
Lucretius further regards this state of things, so far from being remediable by man, as necessarily becoming worse. Each new generation of husbandmen and vinedressers finds its burden heavier:--
Iamque caput quassans grandis suspirat arator Crebrius, incassum manuum cecidisse labores(314), etc.
The earth which, under the genial influence of sun and rain, produced fair crops without the labour of the ploughman and vinedresser(315), can now scarcely produce its fruits in sufficient quantity, though the strength of men and oxen is worn out by labouring on it(316). The cause of this decay in productiveness he attributes to the waste or dissipation of the elemental matter of our world, which has become much greater and more rapid than the supply of new materials. 'In the long warfare waged from infinite time'--
the destructive forces are gaining the superiority over the restorative forces of Nature; and this process is hastening on the advent of that 'single day' which will overwhelm in ruin the whole framework of earth, sea, and sky(317).
What then under these irremediable conditions is it best for man to do? Lucretius has no other answer to give him than to study the laws of Nature, so as to understand his position, and thus to limit his wants and reconcile himself to what he cannot alter. Yet in other passages of the poem, which Virgil also remembered(318), he did recognise the fact that human skill and the knowledge acquired by observation had done much to enrich and beautify the earth:--