lines to produce meanings that are different, or inverted from their initial meaning in the Georgics. Additionally, some of these reproduced lines are themselves adapted from works by Virgil's earlier literary models, including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica, Ennius' Annals, and Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. With a single line or two, Virgil links (or distances), expands (or collapses) themes of various texts treating various subjects to create an Aeneid that is a richly intertextual. Reception and influence Reception in antiquity The work on Georgics was launched when agriculture had become a science and Varro had already published his Res rusticae, on which Virgil relied as a source—a fact already recognized by the commentator Servius. Virgil's scholarship on his predecessors produced an extensive literary reaction by the following generations of authors. Seneca's account that "Virgil ... aimed, not to teach the farmer, but to please the reader," underlines that Virgil's poetic and philosophic themes were abounding in his hexameters (Sen., Moral Letter 86.15). Reception in the 18th century John Dryden’s 1697 poetic translation of Virgil's Georgics sparked a renewed interest in agricultural poetry and country life amongst the more educated classes during the 18th century. In the same year, the young Joseph Addison published his “Essay on Virgil’s Georgics”. In his eyes Virgil's poem seemed the principal model for this genre, which he defined as “some part of the science of husbandry, put into a pleasing dress and set off with all the beauties and embellishments of poetry”. In the context of the 18th century, however, interest in the georgic, or the choice of it as a model for independent works, was “profoundly political”, recognising an affinity with Virgil's treatment of rural subjects after the social and political disruptions through which he had lived. The tone of Virgil's work represented a longing for the “creation of order out of disorder” to which the Roman Augustan age succeeded, much as the British Augustan Age emerged from the social ferment and civil strife of the 17th century. The cultured of a later age were quick to see the parallel, but there was also an altered emphasis. Whereas for Virgil there was an antithesis between town life and country simplicity, in the view of the gentry of the 18th century, city and country were interdependent. Those who created specialised georgics of their own considered the commodities about which they