Vergil's de Rerum Natura

The first lines of Vergil's Georgics make clear the literary debt: Vos, o clarissima mundilumina, labentem caelo quae ducitis annum;Liber et alma Ceres … (G.1.5-7)(You, brightest lights of the firmament, who lead the year as it glides its course through the heavens, Bacchus and nurturing Ceres …)The reader recalls immediately Lucretius' invocation to Venus: Aeneadum genetrix hominum divumque voluptasalma Venus caeli subter labentia signa …(De Return Natura 1.1-2)(Mother of Aeneas' sons, delight of gods and of men, nurturing Venus, who, beneath the gliding standards of the heavens …)Parallels of subject are obvious. Lucretius' famous pessimism about the earth's ability to renew herself, at the conclusion of his second book, is behind Vergil's insistence, in Georgics I, that the farmer prepare all his resources to bolster a faltering soil; the famous picture of rustic celebration and the pleasures of soft grass and jovial interchange with which Georgics II ends is an elaboration of Lucretius' spring-time, when men stretch at leisure on greening grass inter se prostrati (‘relaxing with each other’); the hideous account of Athens' plague in Lucretius, Book VI, is matched by Vergil's description of Noricum at the end of his third book.