VERGIL ’S PHYSICS OF BUGONIA IN GEORGICS 4 PETER OSORIO B UGONIA REFERS TO THE BIRTH of bees from a deceased bull. It appears often in the corpus of Greek and Latin literature, 1 though nowhere more famously than in the latter half of the fourth book of Vergil’ s Georgics (281–314, 538–58). There is no consensus as to how bugonia, historically, be- came a common notion, 2 or to what extent ancient writers like Vergil were skep- tical of it. 3 I do not set out to resolve these problems. Instead, I argue that Vergil’ s descriptions of bugonia contain physical features that also recur in a range of phil- osophical texts on spontaneous generation (hereafter abbreviated “SG”). I infer either that the bugonia tradition already explained this phenomenon in light of philosophical theories of SG, which Vergil here repeats, or that bugonia is com- plemented by the SG texts for the first time in the Georgics. In either case, bugonia in Vergil is in a sense overdetermined, containing both a mythic (through the Aristaeus epyllion) and a material etiology, but this latter half of the duality has been largely overlooked and underspecified. In section 1, I outline the bugonia tradition and defend the view that bugonia enters Greek literature in the Hellenis- tic period. I then address prior views of Vergil’ s treatment and its place between paradoxography and ancient philosophy and science in section 2. I define the physical features of Vergil’ s two bugoniae and outline my argument about them in section 3, provide the philosophical SG texts and summarize their models in section 4, and demonstrate the relation between Vergil’ s physical features and the SG models in section 5. I conclude in section 6 by considering how future readers may wish to extend my line of thought to the Aeneid. I owe thanks to advisors and friends, not least Fred Ahl, Tad Brennan, Charles Brittain, Kathleen Garland, Nate Pilkington, and Courtney Roby; to CP’ s two generous reviewers; and to the organizers of and respondents to pre- sentations of this paper given at the University of Notre Dame, Cornell University, and the 2017 SCS Meeting. All translations are my own unless noted. For the text of Vergil’ s Georgics and Aeneid, I use Mynors 1969; of Aristotle’ s Meteorology, Fobes 1919; of Aristotle’ s History of Animals, Balme 2002; of Aristotle’ s Generation of Animals, Drossaart-Lulofs 1965; of Lucretius, Martin 1969; of Cicero’ s On the Nature of the Gods, Ax 1968. 1. For a catalogue of references to bugonia in Greek, see Olck 1897, 434–35. For references in Latin, see the TLL on apis under the heading procreatio. For an introduction to Vergil’ s bugonia, see Mynors 1990, 293–96. 2. Osten-Sacken (1894) famously holds that it developed due to a misidentification of a species of fly, whereas Kitchell (1989) figures it as a religious belief derived partly from Minoan Crete. More recently, McDonald (2014) posits Indo-European influences. 3. I review the literature on this topic in section 2. Classical Philology 115 (2020): 27–46 [q 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved] 0009-837X/20/11501-0002$10.00 27