Philip Thibodeau (Brooklyn College)
Vergil’s Georgics touches on a wide variety of agricultural practices and describes farms of vastly different scales, from marginal holdings like that of the Senex Corycius to the notorious Italian latifundia. Yet wholly missing from the poem are direct representations of the slave workforce – a remarkable omission, given the poem’s obsession with labor, and the fact that enslaved persons performed a huge share of the agricultural work in Roman Italy. Slaves are never named either individually or as a class in the Georgics. Of the various Latin words for slavery, only those based on the root serv- appear, turning up in the poem just twice, in passages (1.30, 3.168) where they are used metaphorically. This omission is all the more puzzling given the sustained attention that Cato and Varro pay to the slave workforce, and the way Vergil’s contemporary Horace adverts to individual slaves in his poetry. How then to account for Vergil’s silence?
This paper will argue that the poem does in fact take the realities of slavery into account, but at a much more abstract level which lumps together all sorts of natural beings who would normally fall under the farmer’s purview – slaves, tenants, livestock, bees, vines, crops, and the land itself – into the generic category of subordinate. The relationship of the dominus to his subordinates, and the perils of seeking to exercise control over others, are then dramatized by the poem in a holistic manner. From the outset Vergil’s narrator gives orders to human subordinates who can be understood to be tenants, bailiffs, or slaves (Thibodeau 2011, 30–33). The narrator makes clear that these orders frequently come to naught (e.g. 1.155–9, 181–6, 325), and thus shows the limits of the effectiveness of the farmer’s imperium. A remarkable scene from book 2 describes various kinds of soils being exposed to tortures like those that might be inflicted on slaves (2.226–58); the narrator adopts a strangely ambiguous position, ordering but also lamenting the imagined pain. In books 2 and 3 Vergil’s cultivators are urged to exercise dominium over vines, trees, and animals endowed with human characteristics; the victimization of these same plants and animals is also depicted with considerable emotional color (2.362- 70, 3.95–6, 157–178). In book four the impulse to control reaches its limits twice: first when the cultivator deals with the recalcitrant, autonomous bee community, and then in the epyllion, when Aristaeus seeks to take advantage of Eurydice, and is forced to recognize the humanity of his victims.
The conflict just noted between the imperatives and the limitations of dominium has long been recognized, with some scholars seeking to settle the divide by ascribing either an ‘optimistic’ Weltanschauung (Buchheit 1972, Morgan 1999) or a ‘pessimistic’ tone (Putnam 1981, Ross 1981, Perkell 1989) to the poet. This paper argues an alternative position: the dynamic provides a study of the emotional components of the relationship between master and subaltern, anchored in the subjectivity of a rural dominus.