The Georgics is a poem in four books, likely published in 29 BC. It is the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil, following his Eclogues and preceding the Aeneid. It is a poem that draws on many prior sources and influenced many later authors from antiquity to the present. As its name suggests (Georgica, from the Greek word γεωργεῖν, geōrgein, "to farm") the subject of the poem is agriculture; but far from being an example of peaceful rural poetry, it is a work characterized by tensions in both theme and purpose.

The work consists of 2,188 hexametric verses divided into four books.

Virgil begins his poem with a summary of the four books, followed by a prayer to various agricultural deities as well as Augustus himself. It takes as its model the work on farming by Varro, but differs from it in important ways. Numerous technical passages fill out the first half of Book 1; of particular interest are lines 160–175, where Virgil describes the plow. In the succession of ages, whose model is ultimately Hesiod, the age of Jupiter and its relation to the golden age and the current age of man are crafted with deliberate tension. Of chief importance is the contribution of labor to the success or failure of mankind’s endeavors, agricultural or otherwise. The book comes to one climax with the description of great storm in lines 311–50, which brings all of man’s efforts to naught. After detailing various weather-signs, Virgil ends with an enumeration of the portents associated with Caesar’s assassination and civil war; only Octavian offers any hope of salvation.

Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Anglo-Irish poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.

Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, Stradbally, Queen's County (now known as County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (died 29 July 1937) and Kathleen (née Squires; died 1906). After the death of his mother in 1906, Cecil Day-Lewis was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay.^{[citation needed]} He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford. In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925.

Elaine Fantham is a British classicist. She was Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University from 1986 to 1999. She was chair of the Department of Classics at Princeton from 1989 to 1992 and the president of the American Philological Association for 2004.

Fantham is an expert on Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and Roman religion and the social history of Roman women. She is classics commentator on NPR's Weekend Edition.

Fantham studied classics at Oxford University and then proceeded to the University of Liverpool where she received her doctorate in 1962. For some time, she taught classics at Indiana University. From 1968 to 1986 Fantham was professor of classics at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 1986 she joined the classics department at Princeton University, where she taught until her retirement in 1999.

Fantham is part of the advisory boards of different scientific periodicals, amongst others Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici.

Lynne Sachs (born August 10, 1961 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American experimental filmmaker who makes films, videos, installations and web projects exploring the relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. She is known for weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. After graduating from Brown University and majoring in history, she developed an interest in experimental documentary filmmaking while attending the 1985 Robert Flaherty Documentary Film Seminar through a scholarship. There, she was particularly inspired by the works of Bruce Conner, who would later become her mentor, and Maya Deren. That same year, Sachs moved to San Francisco to attend San Francisco State University and later the San Francisco Art Institute. It was during this time that she studied and collaborated with Trinh T. Minh-ha, George Kuchar and Gunvor Nelson.

In 1989, she returned to Memphis, her hometown, to shoot Sermons and Sacred Pictures, her first long format experimental documentary. The film is a portrait of Reverend L. O. Taylor, an African-American minister and filmmaker from the 1930s and 40s. This film screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Margaret Mead Film Festival that year.

Daniel Wesley is a Canadian alternative rock musician from White Rock, British Columbia.

Singer and guitarist Wesley was born c. 1981 in White Rock and raised in Brookswood, British Columbia, singing in choirs since elementary school and being part of ukulele and concert bands in high school. At age 15 he formed his first band, The Dropouts, and later was front man of the bands General Mayhem, Audiophile, and Replica. He previously worked as an electrician prior to his success as a musician. He now lives in Vancouver. He recorded the 2006 album "Outlaw" in Langley and the follow-up "Sing & Dance" in 2007. Also later in 2007, he recorded the solo disc "Driftin". The band's influences are Mason Jennings, Bob Marley, The Beatles and Pearl Jam.

His most successful single has been "Ooh Ohh", from the album Sing and Dance.The Province rock music critic Tom Harrison wrote: "Sing and Dance has a prominent reggae element but there is also an unvarnished rock sound that sometimes recalls Neil Young." In December 2010 the band released a Christmas song titled "Our First Christmas".