It’s spring in Prague and as I write my desk is covered in pollen. Morning bees browse around my window, foraging for materials. I was recently translating some verses of Virgil, Book IV of the Georgics, which is dedicated almost entirely to bees, the myth of Aristaeus (the minor, beekeeper deity) and the role they play in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Virgil recognized that bees had what we might call social being–co-dependent, organized, enterprising–and he praised them for having all the virtues of a Roman citizen: industrious, hardworking, loyal, and a willingness to die to defend the colony.
Aristotle argued that bees had something of the “divine spark” in them, since they too were social animals with something like a polis and something like a language. Petronius wrote, “Apes…ego divinas bestias puto” (“I believe bees are divine creatures”), and in The Phaedo, Socrates says that it is possible for souls in metempsychosis (transmigration) to pass into creatures such as bees before returning again to humans. It was said that bees landed on the lips of Pindar, Sophocles, Plato, Socrates and Virgil as children, blessing them with mellifluous mouths and honeyed-tongues. Beeswax is associated with craftsmanship (Dedalus fashioned wings from wax) and poetic technique is often likened to honey. In On the Nature of Things, Lucretius compares his verse to a sweetening agent, meant to help the reader digest the bitter pill of materialism and mortality:
as when doctors administer bitter medicine to boys,
they smear the mouth of the cup with that red-gold glue
to fool the kid’s lips into keeping the wormwood down
We also see bees associated variously with reading, education, memory and the intellect. In one of my favourite passages from Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, he discusses how one gathers and synthesizes ideas, quoting a verse from the Georgics:
Some say we should imitate the bees, who browse the flowers, culling those most favourable for making honey, then ferry back and deposit everything in the honeycomb. As our Virgil says, they:
down the honeyflow
and swell their cells with nectarsweet
It’s an image I often find myself turning back to, serving as a perfect metaphor for the consumption and production of ideas. We flit about, sample, pilfer, comb, cadge what we wish from our reading, sort and deposit it in our minds, then spit it all back out as something of our own. Seneca continues:
[W]hatever materials we gather up from our wide reading (separating out whatever serves us best), we can, through the use of our natural gifts, our care and intellect, blend them together into a singular style. Even if it’s clear from where we’ve taken these things, they will nevertheless appear different.
Our influences, Seneca counsels, will be “drawn up and distilled in the pen.” The reed’s beak sucks ink from the well just as bees suck up nectar from thousands of flowers. The analogy is quite literal here: honey was commonly used as a binding agent in ancient recipes for ink. We must “store” and “digest” what we read, Seneca says, much as bees do nectar in their capacious combs, otherwise what we learn will “remain merely in the memory and not in the intellect,” and that this process requires a certain “fermentation.” Seneca goes on to say that it’s not clear whether bees are simply gatherers, possessing no knowledge of how to make honey themselves, or whether they transform the substance “through some aspect of their breath.” The idea that there is a certain breath of life involved in the production of honey suggests that its role in myth, prophecy, ritual, and education are due to some kind of transubstantiation, something divine in the substance.
Beeswax, too, had a role in ancient literacy. It was used to make deltos, a diptych tablet on which people made notes by carving them into its soft surface. These could then be left to dry, or wiped clean, leaving a blank slate. The image of the wax tablet and its association with memory appears in a story that Cicero recounts in On the Orator about the poet Simonides of Keos, who is credited with inventing a mnemonic device, the “method of loci,” or “memory palace,” where one uses the technique of visualization to place objects in mental space in order to call upon them.
Our influences, Seneca counsels, will be “drawn up and distilled in the pen.” The reed’s beak sucks ink from the well just as bees suck up nectar from thousands of flowers.
As the story goes, Simonides was dining in Thessaly at the house of a wealthy nobleman. After the performance, he was called outside by two men who claimed a message was waiting for him. While outside, the roof of the dining hall collapsed, crushing everyone at the banquet. The families were unable to inter their dead according to proper rites, since the bodies could not be told apart. Only Simonides, who remembered where everyone had been sitting, was able to identify the remains. Cicero likens Simonides’ technique to the placement of notes on a writing surface. The memory, he writes, “makes use of these locations like letters on a wax tablet.”
This same imagery appears in The Theaetetus, in which Socrates likens the memory and the intellect to a wax block:
[W]henever we want to remember something we’ve seen or heard or conceived on our own, we subject the block to the perception or the idea and stamp the impression into it, as if we were making marks with signet-rings. We remember and know anything imprinted… but we forget and do not know anything which is erased or cannot be imprinted. (trans. Robin Waterfield)
The image is based on a pun: the Greek for “wax,” kērós, is phonologically similar to kēr (chest), which in pre-literate Greece, was regarded as the repository of sense impressions, memory and understanding. Socrates, of course, is waxing philosophical here.
Seneca’s bee analogy pops up again during the Renaissance. Indeed, the whole project of studia humanitatis, as articulated by Petrarch, whereby one absorbs the virtues of the ancients through immersion in classical texts–“the words that sting”—then transforms one’s learning to meet the demands of the time, can be thought of as an extension of the bee metaphor. We see it echoed clearly in both Bacon and Montaigne. In Novum Organum, one of the earliest explications of the scientific method, Bacon likens the scientist, a new man, to bees culling flowers, sucking up data, facts, phenomena and changing them from their raw state into knowledge:
Empiricists, in the manner of ants, use only what they pile up; others like spiders, spin webs of their own making. The bee is the true mean: it draws material from flowers in the garden and the field, but digests and changes it through its own unique skill, not unlike the true work of the philosopher. For it relies… on cultivating and transforming it through understanding.
Bacon, who wrote essays on miscellaneous subjects, was much influenced by Montaigne (and both men were much influenced by Seneca). Montaigne’s Essays (which are kind of self-addressed epistles) pilfer liberally from Seneca and indulge in every thought, distraction and triviality, not unlike a promiscuous bee drifting from topic to topic. Montaigne too makes use of the bee analogy in “Of Educating Children,” in which he writes that a young student should “drink in the humours” of what he learns and “confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his…”
Montaigne, whose first language was actually Latin, was raised on Seneca and Virgil, and he regarded the Georgics as “the most perfect achievement in poetry” over the Aeneid. Which brings us back to the poem, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from Book IV. The story begins with Aristaeus, a Thessalian shepherd and beekeeper who has fallen afoul with nymphs who in turn destroy his hive. Aristaeus’ mother, Cyrene, tells him to descend into a subaqueous cavern and capture Proteus, the shape-shifting god, who will give him the answer to what happened to his apiary. Proteus tells Aristaeus that Orpheus is the source of all his woes. Most people remember that Orpheus descends into Hades to retrieve Eurydice because she was bitten by a snake while running through a field on her wedding day, but it is often forgotten that it was because randy Aristaeus was chasing her.
Critics have speculated about why Virgil would choose to end his didactic pastoral epic with such a story. A few parallels emerge: bees were regarded as divine messengers, capable of ferrying information in and out of the afterlife. Thus, they are able to undertake the archetypical descent into the underworld (katabasis)—reserved only for gods and heroes—that defines the epic mode. (In the Aeneid, Virgil compares the numberless murmuring souls floating down the Lethe to a swarm of bees.) And of course, Orpheus, the prototypical bard, who is later torn to pieces in his grief and has his dead head sent down the river, is the foundational myth of the entire Western poetic tradition. It’s not surprising then that Virgil chose the story as a coda to his poem, the final image of which is the poet himself, basking in the pax Augustus has given him, lounging beneath a beech tree, on which a swarm of bees hang “like bunched grapes from swaying branches.” These same honeybees are now listed as endangered by the European Union, which has warned that if their ecosystem collapses, so will ours. Our fates, as the ancients understood, are intertwined.
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