Virgil's Georgics, translated by James Rhoades

Virgil · Down to Earth Series · 67 pages

The Georgics of Virgil, second edition, translated by James Rhoades, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd., 1891, reproduced complete at sixty-seven pages. The frontispiece is José Escofet's Pomona, Roman goddess of fruitful abundance of 2011. The same translator's own prose is held separately in this series as “Rhoades on Training the Imagination,” and the note here lists his published poems.

The series editor's note explains the choice. The Georgics were brought into the Down to Earth Series because Virgil's love of the earth is uplifting as well as instructing, and the note quotes the poem's own phrases to show what it offers — lawns and glades for pleasure and repose, fields that unlock their bosoms to the warm west winds, the barren woods that crown the scalp of Caucasus, Milesian fleeces dipped in Tyrian reds that repay the barterer, and an idyllic life untroubled and knowing no falsehood. Two contemporary judgments are cited: the Academy on such passages breathing a classic atmosphere and suggesting a lively appreciation of Virgil's courtly cultured muse, and the Times of India on Rhoades's rendering into English blank verse entitling him to a high rank among poets. James Rhoades, 1841–1923, is described as an English poet, mystic and accomplished translator, and a footnote lists his own volumes from The Death of the Prince Consort, which won the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge in 1862, through to Words by the Wayside of 1915. The note is signed by Julia Korres as series editor.

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