Matthew Leigh (Oxford University)
Ancient writers on apiculture from Aristotle through Varro, Vergil, Columella and Pliny typically describe the lives of bees in terms reminiscent of human political communities: they have kings and commoners; the kings enjoy the devotion of their subjects, but division between rival kings can lead to civil strife; the movement of a group of bees to a new hive is equated with the establishment of a colony; guards are set over the hive to ward off the incursion of robber bees (Dahlmann 1954; Hardie 2020). Vergil's 4th Georgic is a particularly noteworthy example of this mode of describing the life of bees, which underpins the similes in Books 1 and 12 of the Aeneid, where first the Carthaginians and then the Latins are in turn compared to bees (Griffin 1979).
The question posed in this paper is whether this equation of bee and human communities extends to the notion of slavery. Inasmuch as the bees themselves are thoroughly willing workers, they appear - like Vergil's farmers in the rest of the Georgics - to live in a world that has no need and no place for slavery (Buchheit 1972). Yet in the form of the drone the bee community does possess a stranger within, and Vergil describes how the bees form a column in order to ward off this idle herd from the hive (Verg. G. 4. 167-8 = Aen. 1. 434-435: aut agmine facto | ignauum fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent). In these lines Vergil in fact conflates two categories of bee commonly related to one another by size and proclivity but nevertheless separate (Whitfield 1956): the robber bee (φώρ, fur, latro) that seeks to enter the hive and steal the results of others' labour (Arist. HA 625a14-19, 625a34-b6) and the drone who resides within the hive but does not contribute to the collective endeavor (Arist. HA 553b7-14, 624b20-27). Shiftless and running to fat, the drone could come across as the parasite of the apian world, but to Pliny the Elder they are rather the slaves (Plin. HN 11. 26-28). Nor do either the bees themselves or human beekeepers treat them with the good-humored indulgence afforded to the comic parasite. They are rather subject to strict measures of control and to periodic acts of collective killing (Arist. HA 625a14-19; Democr. at Geopon. 15. 9. 1-3 Plin. HN 11. 56-57; Colum. Rust. 9. 15. 1-4). The ascription of indolence to the drone corresponds to hostile accounts of the attitude of slaves to their own unfree labor. Both are out-groups living within their respective communities and subject to the arbitrary brutality of their superiors.