verse translation of the first book of the Georgics; and even in modern times it was made a commendation of Peter Fallon's 2004 version that he is “both a poet and a farmer, uniquely suited to translating this poem”. However, Hoblyn could only support his stance at this date by interpolation and special pleading. Throughout Europe, Virgilian-style farming manuals were giving way to the agricultural revolution and their use was supplanted by scientific data, technical graphs and statistics. Contemporary readings The overtly political element in Virgil's poem attracted some translators, who applied it to their own local circumstances. The translation of the Georgics into Ancient Greek by Eugenios Voulgaris was published from St Petersburg in 1786 and had as one aim the support of Russia’s assimilation of the newly annexed Crimea by encouraging Greek settlement there. Virgil’s theme of taming the wilderness was further underlined in an introductory poem praising Grigory Potemkin as a philhellene Maecenas and the Empress Catherine the Great as the wise ruler directing the new territory's welfare. The inference is also there that Voulgaris himself (now archbishop of Novorossiya and Azov) has become thus the imperial Virgil. In Britain there was a tendency to grant Virgil honorary citizenship. In the introduction to his turn of the century translation for the Everyman edition, T. F. Royds argued that "just as the Latin poet had his pedigree, Virgil is here an adopted English poet, and his many translators have made for him an English pedigree too". So too, living in Devon as World War II progressed, C. Day Lewis saw his own translation as making a patriotic statement. As he commented later: "More and more I was buoyed up by a feeling that England was speaking to me through Virgil, and that the Virgil of the Georgics was speaking to me through the English farmers and labourers with whom I consorted." Among a multiplicity of earlier translations, his new version would be justified by avoiding "that peculiar kind of Latin-derived pidgin-English which infects the style of so many classical scholars" and making its appeal instead through an approachable, down-to-earth idiom. In the 21st century, Frédéric Boyer's French version of the Georgics is retitled Le Souci de la terre (Care for the earth) and makes its appeal to current ecological concerns. "For me as a translator", he explains in his preface, "I find today’s tragic paradigm in relation to