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Vergil's poetry abounds with plant-life, yet much criticism underestimates its significance beyond attractive background detail or the occasional symbolic set-piece. This in-depth study reveals how Vergil used plants to reflect both on ancient religious attitudes to the natural world and on ideas of the human role as cultivator and controller. Cover -- Vergil's Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine -- Copyright -- Preface -- Contents -- Introduction -- 0.1. ANCIENT BOTANY AND WAYS OF SEEING PLANTS -- 0.1.1. Definitions of Nature -- 0.2. HUMANS AND PLANTS: FROM ANTHROPOCENTRISM TO ECOCRITICISM -- 0.2.1. Plants and an Anthropocentric Worldview -- 0.2.2. Ancient Environmentalism? -- 0.2.3. Ecocriticism and Ancient Literature -- 0.3. GODS AND PLANTS -- 0.3.1. Approaches to numen -- 0.3.2. Plants and Everyday Religion -- 0.3.3. Forms of Association: Nymphs and Trees -- 0.4. PLANTS AS SYMBOL AND METAPHOR -- 0.4.1. Plants, People, and Analogy -- 0.4.2. Plants and Politics -- 0.5. POETIC PLANTS -- 0.5.1. Poetic Plants Before and Beside Vergil -- 0.5.2. Plants and Poetics in Vergil (a glimpse of a road not much taken) -- Part I: Numen -- 1: Numinous Habitats -- 1.1. FORESTS AND WOODLAND AREAS (SILVA, SALTUS, NEMUS, LUCUS) -- 1.1.1. Backgrounds -- 1.1.2. Habitarunt di quoque siluas: Gods and Woods in the Eclogues -- 1.1.3. Present and Absent numen in the Woods of the Georgics -- 1.1.4. Religio dira loci: the Aeneid's Woodland numen -- 1.1.4.1. Underworld Woods: numen and Confusion -- 1.1.4.2. Echoes of the Underworld: Aeaea, Tiber, Albunea, Amsanctus -- 1.1.4.3. Woodland numen and the City -- 1.2. NUMEN AND PLANTS IN CULTIVATED LAND: FIELDS, MEADOWS, PLANTATIONS, AND GARDENS (AGER, ARVUS, CAMPUS, NOVALE/-IS, PRATUM, RUS, SEGES, ARBUSTA, HORTUS) -- 1.2.1. Expected and Unexpected Agricultural Divinity in the Eclogues and Aeneid -- 1.2.2. Ceres, Bacchus, Corn, and Vines in the Georgics -- 1.2.3. Plants and Divine Metonymy -- 2: Gods' Special Species -- 2.1. OAK (AESCULUS, QUERCUS, ROBUR, AND ILEX) -- 2.1.1. The Oak Transformed: Votive Tree and Trophy -- 2.2. POPLAR (POPULUS) -- 2.3. PINE (PINUS, PICEA) -- 2.4. OLIVE AND WILD OLIVE (OLIVA, OLEASTER) -- 2.5. LAUREL/BAY (LAURUS).
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