Character guide

Julius Caesar

supporting

Also known as Caesar, mighty Caesar

The murdered ruler whose comet and prodigies haunt the fields, invoked as a new god who might bless or abandon Rome's farmers.

Jove

supporting

Also known as almighty Jove

The thunderer who rules seasons and storms, appealed to as the ultimate guarantor of order in a world of unpredictable skies.

Orpheus

major

Also known as Sad Orpheus

The singer whose grief for Eurydice becomes the poem's darkest counter-melody, proving that art cannot always undo what love has lost.

Maecenas

supporting

Virgil's patron and dedicatee, the cultured statesman whose name opens the poem and whose favor underwrites its every line.

Bacchus

supporting

Also known as Great father Bacchus

The wine-god whose vines and revels make agriculture sacred, invoked alongside Ceres as a patron of both harvest and poetic frenzy.

Arcadian master

supporting

He belongs to the poem's gallery of rural experts, the men whose hands teach what the soil and the hive demand. His Arcadia is a place of old-fashioned sufficiency, where skill is measured not in conquest but in keeping a fragile colony alive through winter. In Book IV his methods anchor the poem's vision of apiculture as a small commonwealth, making his quiet competence the standard against which Aristaeus's losses will be felt.

Cyrene

supporting

She is a sea-goddess and mother, at home among rivers and nymphs but bound to a mortal son whose losses she cannot simply undo. When Aristaeus comes to her in distress, her tenderness and her command of hidden knowledge pull the poem from surface farming into the deep causes beneath it. Her intervention matters because it turns private grief into a quest for ritual reparation, linking the human world of bees and fields to the mythic order that governs them.

Virgil

minor

Also known as Book IV Virgil

The poet-narrator, occasionally self-referential as the author of the Georgics.

Ceres

minor

Goddess of agriculture and grain, honored as the first to teach mankind farming.

Proteus

supporting

He is the poem's most elusive informant, a prophet who must be caught and held while he writhes into fire, flood, and beast. His resistance is not malice but nature: truth here is something wrestled from a reluctant world, never given freely. In the Georgics' final movement he embodies the cost of knowledge, forcing Aristaeus and the reader to pin down what will not stay still.

Neptune

minor

God of the sea, associated with horses and maritime power in the poem.

Aurora

minor

Goddess of dawn, whose tears are said to create dew each morning.

Nereus

minor

Ancient sea god, father of the Nereids, mentioned as a prophetic figure.

Ixion

minor

Mythological king punished in Tartarus, mentioned as a cautionary example.

Tanagrus

major

The poem's guiding voice, a farmer-poet who turns plowing, grafting, and beekeeping into a meditation on labor, loss, and the gods.

Alcinous

minor

King of the Phaeacians, referenced for his legendary orchards in Homer's Odyssey.