Ever since Abel went for shepherding and Cain for farming—and then founding cities after murdering Abel—the human race has divided over the superior virtuousness of the agrarian versus the urban lifestyle. But the Bible’s first word about cities is hardly its last; eventually, there’s even divine favor for the city of Jerusalem.[1] By the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is deliberately seeking out cities in a way that would horrify the Hesiod-imitating Virgil of the Georgics, intent on praising the pious farmer who harkens back to the Saturnine Golden Age, before “anyone had heard…the clanging of a sword on the hard anvil.”
In dramatic curtsey to the pastoral ideal, Marie Antoinette of Versailles liked to play shepherdess. Meanwhile, the sometime American diplomat to the French Court, Thomas Jefferson, thundered denouncements against that “modern Carthage,” commercial Great Britain, but waxed eloquent about Virginia farmers: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God…whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for genuine and substantial virtue.” When Ram Trucks debuted its 2013 Super Bowl commercial set to Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer,” the now American commercial powerhouse paused, thrilled by the romantic feels of Jeffersonian pietas.
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