Page "Georgics" Paragraph 15

Within Virgil's later epic work the Aeneid, there are some 51 lines that are recycled, either whole or in part, from the Georgics.

There is some debate whether these repetitions are ( 1 ) intrusions within the text of later scribes and editors, ( 2 ) indications pointing toward the level of incompleteness of the Aeneid, or ( 3 ) deliberate repetitions made by the poet, pointing toward meaningful areas of contact between the two poems.

As a careful study by Ward Briggs goes a long way to show, the repetition of lines in the Georgics and the Aeneid is probably an intentional move made by Virgil, a poet given to a highly allusive style, not, evidently, to the exclusion of his own previous writings.

Indeed Virgil incorporates full lines in the Georgics of his earliest work, the Eclogues, although the number of repetitions is much smaller ( only 8 ) and it does not appear that any one line was reduplicated in all three of his works.