Publius Virgilius Maro is better known to us as Virgil. He is also best known as the chronicler of the adventures of Aeneas and his merry men in the Aeneid, but many think his Georgics rather better. The latter, written in four parts, is a work of great poetic charm and deals with the dignity of rural husbandry and the eternal struggle between man and nature.
Two are of particular interest: Georgics I, which is devoted largely to the weather, and Georgics III, which we will come to later.
Here from Georgics I, for example, is a nice description of a summer thundershower:
Foedam glomerant tempestatem imbribus atris
Collectae ex alto nubes; ruit arduus aether, Et pluvia ingenti sata laeta diluit;
Implentur fossae, et cava flumina crescunt.
Roughly translated, it reads:
"The clouds produce a tempest, heaped and threatening With angry showers; the lofty heavens fall, And with a great rain flood the smiling crops; The dikes are filled, the empty river-beds engorged."
And Virgil was a shrewd observer of the signs of stormy weather; it can be expected
"When swift the gulls from distant seas
Come winging, and their shrieks are heard upon the shore;
When ocean-loving cormorants above the land
Besport themselves, and herns, their marshy haunts
Forsaking, climb high, and higher still, above the soaring clouds."
But in Georgics III, the poet strikes an even more familiar note when he tells us of a plague affecting livestock in the north of Italy in the first century BC:
Hinc laetis vituli volgo moriuntur in herbis
Et dulcis animas plena ad praesepia reddunt;
Hinc canibus blandis rabies venit et quatit aegros
Tussis anhela sues ac faucibus angit obesis.
"And so amidst the springing grass, young cattle die," it reads:
"And yield their gentle lives at loaded stalls;
Hence rabid, fawning dogs, and the sick swine
Shake with a debilitating, panting cough,
'Till men dig deep and bury them in earth.
The hides are useless, nor can water cleanse
The tainted flesh, nor raging fire subdue
The progress of the plague;
Nor is it possible to shear the fleece,
So damaged is it with disease and filthiness."
Or as Virgil puts it in the original:
Ne tondere quidem morbo inluvieque peresa
Vellera nec telas possunt attingere putris.
His words have today a very sad, familiar ring.