He certainly took care writing [The Georgics], according to Suetonius, who claimed that every day Virgil would dictate a large number of verses, which he had thought of that morning: ‘Then he spent the whole day reducing them to a tiny number, wryly saying that he wrote his poem like a she-bear, finally licking it into shape.’
—Natalie Haynes, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
She follows that up with this interesting nugget: “If you’ve ever wondered where the phrase ‘lick into shape’ comes from, wonder no more. The Romans believed that a newborn bear wasn’t yet bear-shaped, but a furry blob which needed some work. The mother bear licked her cub, not to clean it, but to turn it from protean bear-matter into the shape of a small bear. This may seem like a foolish thesis, but the Romans had the good sense not to get too near a mother bear with a new cub. And the phrase has stayed with us to this day.”
Last week: Yeats returns for St. Patrick’s Day.
Next week: Craig Raine becomes a Martian.
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