Excerpt from The Eclogues, Georgics, and Moretum of Virgil: With Explanatory Notes and a Lexicon The most finished work of Virgil, his Georgica, an agricultu ral poem, was undertaken at the suggestion of Maecenas. Its object was to recommend the principles of the ancient Romans, their love of home, of labor, of piety, and order; to magnify their domestic happiness and greatness; to make men proud of their country on better grounds than the mere glory of its arms and extent of its conquests. To comprehend the moral grandeur of the Georgics, in point of style the most per feet piece of Roman literature, we must regard it as the glori fication of Labor. 1 While writing this poem, Virgil composed many verses in the morning, but by evening reduced them to a very few; so that he used to compare himself to a bear, which licks its shapeless offspring into form. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.