Mason Wheelock-Johnson (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Digging in the Dirt (?): Seneca, Columella, and the Value of Res Rustica
As Giancarlo Mazzoli (1970) has catalogued, Seneca the Younger’s favorite poem to quote is Virgil’s Georgics, though as the Roman Stoic himself points out, the accuracy of the farming advice contained within Virgil’s poem is meant to delight more than to instruct (Ep. 86.15). As such, the relationship of Seneca to the agricultural setting and imagery has been examined by Aldo Setaioli (2000), John Henderson (2004), and others, but in this paper I want to examine Seneca’s consideration of the literal physical space of the countryside and the lifestyle of farms in his philosophical prose. Despite his appeal to ideal yeoman farmers like Scipio Africanus in his exile-cum-retirement in Ep. 88 and his jab at the fastidious poets who think a sundial is “too rustic” (nimis rustice) early in the Apocolocyntosis (2.3), in offhand remarks he also seems to denigrate the lifestyle of those outside the city, such as in his lumping together of “rustic heads of house and those ignorant of true pleasure” at Ep. 122.6. Thus, this paper seeks to clarify Seneca’s relationship to country life in actuality and not just as a conservative ideal.
Seneca’s affinity for the agricultural didactic of the Georgics is also understandably shared by Seneca’s contemporary and countryman Columella, who among the twelve books of De Re Rustica takes it upon himself to update the advice of the Georgics with a verse book on contemporary Roman gardening joined with a subsequent prose version, as analyzed by John Henderson (2002). For Columella, the discussion of life on the farm and in the garden offers not just food for technical prose and didactic verse, but his chosen subject also delves more deeply into the universe. As the agronomist laments in his opening preface, compared to all other areas where experts are sought out, “Only the topic of the countryside, which without a doubt is nearest and almost a sibling to wisdom, lacks learners just as it does teachers” (I.pr.4, sola res rustica, quae sine dubitatione proxima et quasi consanguinea sapientiae est, tam discentibus egeat quam magistris). For Columella, the connection of poetry and actual farming go hand in hand with a larger pursuit of wisdom.
Seneca’s work appears primed to address such matters, given the way in which he weaves together the various domains of Stoic philosophy together throughout his corpus in the same way that the Stoics conceived of the sympathetic link of the universe and their own teachings, as illuminated by Shadi Bartsch (2006), Harry Hine (2010), and Jula Wildberger (2012) among others. Seneca certainly spends time on many estates throughout his Moral Epistles, as discussed by Henderson (2004), but as highlighted above, his appraisal of rusticitas is not consistent throughout the corpus. By collecting the instances of rusticus and its cognates from throughout Seneca’s prose works and comparing their use with the glowing importance of res rustica hailed by Columella, I aim to show how Seneca negotiates his urban literary ideal of farming with the realities of Roman agricultural practice.