Virgil's didactic poem on farming — covering crops, vines, animals, and bees — simultaneously a technical farming manual, a meditation on Italian landscape, and a poem on labor and its rewards.
The greatest didactic poem in Latin: Virgil transforms the Hesiodic tradition of farming poetry into a meditation on Italy, the Augustan peace, and the relationship between human labor and nature. Book IV — on bees — achieves an extraordinary effect: the bee society as an image of a possible human society (though Virgil notes the bees mistake their mortal king for a god). 'Labor omnia vincit' (work conquers all) — one of the poem's governing maxims.
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