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Slavery is a glaring and deliberate absence in Vergil’s Georgics. As a practice with psychological, social, and material consequences, the ownership and control of human beings was a fundamental aspect of Roman identity, insinuating itself into every part of life. It is an obvious corollary to didactic socialization. However often the poem strays from its central theme, the Georgics are emphatically exercises in habituating the reader to a certain way of seeing and interacting with the world, as an agricola and a (free, male, landholding) citizen. Taking the poem’s omission of slavery, one of the “baser” aspects of Roman culture, as the natural result of Vergil’s humanitarian sensitivity (Heitland) or generic decorum (Mayer), does not stand up to scrutiny. The silences and omissions in the text are themselves meaningful: they illustrate not only what has been taken for granted, but also, even more significantly, what has intentionally been mystified.

This paper provides a model for reading the poetics of slavery in the Georgics by bringing the poem into dialogue with its agronomic sources, where the management of enslaved and hired workers is foregrounded. Continuing a long-standing tradition of reading the poem qua agricultural treatise, and following more recent studies by Reay, Kronenberg, and Thibodeau, my analysis is specifically attentive to the problems of enslavement and inequity, augmenting and complicating Geue’s “Marxish” reading of the Georgics’ politics of representation, which foregrounds the exploitation of labor on which the world of the poem increasingly depends.

Discussion focuses on select descriptions of farmers and workers in G. 1.94-350, each of which is paralleled in Cato and Varro. There is a clear discrepancy in modes of address and conveying information: Vergil is given to imagistic vignettes and third-person impersonal constructions (e.g. the five qui clauses at 94-114). Of course, these stylistic differences may be explained with recourse to form and genre (Thomas; Trevizam; Henkel), but as Hine shows, the agronomists’ own construction of authoritative personae is less straightforward than one might imagine. The failure to depict subordinates may be part of a tendency, traceable from Cato to Atlantic sources, to reinforce the fungibility of enslaved bodies by interpellating them as prostheses (Hartman). By using these narrative strategies, including eliding the vilicus, Vergil does far more than the agronomists to obfuscate the dynamics of agricultural labor.

Rather than denying the existence of these hierarchies, Vergil trains the reader’s focus elsewhere. The language of mastery (exercet/imperat 1.99; domatur 1.169) is applied to the land and instrumenta, as servitium to cattle at 3.168; consequently, the master’s voice is affirmed even as Vergil constructs an illusory vision of valorized labor that omits the dynamics of enslavement. Similarly, in moments where labor is self-regulated (259-310) or displaced in festal celebration (338-50), the agronomists’ emphasis on the dominus’ omnipresent oversight and control is transformed into nearly Foucaultian discipline. Read against the sources which Vergil manipulates, in the Georgics the violence of enslavement is partially obscured, but the dehumanization of the process is absolute.