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Even if one does not consider the Georgics an agricultural treatise, Vergil’s poem achieved authoritative status among the later agronomists, including Columella (Doody 2007). Unlike the Georgics, however, his De Re Rustica, a comprehensive, prosimetrum treatise on Roman agriculture, does not hesitate over the representation of enslaved labor. Nevertheless, Columella takes up where Virgil left off in the recusatio of Georgics 4 for the garden poem of DRR 10. This paper argues that the representation of labor in the garden poem functions as a protreptic to horticulture, parallel to the treatise’s protreptic to agronomy.

Throughout his garden poem, Columella explicitly cites Vergil as his inspiration, but does not shy away from the representation of enslaved labor—just as he is quite explicit about the organization of labor in his treatise. Building on previous treatments of the garden poem (Gowers 2002; Henderson 2002; Pagan 2006; Reitz 2017; Formisano 2018), this paper argues that Book Ten is an attempt to carry out Columella’s solution to one of the main problems discussed in the preface to his treatise: the damaging social, cultural and economic effects of Roman agriculture’s dependence upon enslaved labor (Rust. 1 pref. 3). He proposes a pedagogical program to encourage elite participation in agriculture, which I suggest lies behind the poem’s emphasis on labor.

The paper establishes a connection between the garden poem and the treatise through Columella’s statements about the versification of Book Ten, which figure the process as a kind of poetic labor (Rust. 10 pref. 5; 11.1.1), anticipating the poem’s later exhortations to labor. Examples of these exhortations include the poetic persona’s direct address to the reader to drive away sleep and plough the earth (Rust. 10.68-76); they culminate in the poet’s assumption of a rustic identity engaged in labor (10.425). Columella references Vergil as the impetus behind his inclusion of horticulture under agriculture (Rust. 10 pref. 4; 215-220; 433-436) and uses him to delimit his narrower poetic focus: an emphasis on the practice of horticulture (10.338-41).

Columella is clear that his project is not free from reliance upon enslaved labor and dependents. Although he perpetuates hierarchies within the labor process, the exhortation to labor in the poem, rooted in Stoic ideas about living in accordance with nature, challenge these hierarchies.