Hannah Čulík-Baird (Boston University)
At the end of a winter's night, a poor man grasps for the hearth to coax a flame and proceeds to gather ingredients for a small meal of cheese, garlic, and herbs. Simulus "sings his country songs" (rustica carmina cantat, Mor. 29) as he works and with that same "clear voice" (clara uoce, Mor. 91) he "calls" (uocat, Mor. 36) to Scybale -- a woman of "African descent" (Afra genus, Mor. 32) who is also identified as Simulus' "slave" (famula, Mor. 91; a word derived by Roman lexicographers from the Oscan famel (whence familia, "household") = Latin seruus (Fest. 87,5 M)) — to "command" (imperat, 37) her action. While the Moretum, once attributed to Vergil but now generally believed to have been composed by an "anonymous" (Kayachev 2021) Latin poet in the 1st c. CE, does not enjoy a position of prominence within the mainstream classical curriculum, the poem has nonetheless received attention in premodern race studies for its brief (less than 5 lines: Mor. 31-35) physical description of Scybale's body, repeatedly hailed as "the most complete portrait" of an African individual in Greco-Roman literature (Snowden 1970, 1983, McCoskey 2012, Kennedy et al. 2013). While the Moretum's objectification of Scybale, contextualized alongside racialized objectifications in other Latin texts (e.g. Vitruvius De Arch. 1.3.4) and interpreted via the principle of eroticized sight (DuBois 1988), could be understood as an example of the phenomenon identified by Shelley P. Haley (2021) as "racialized gender" or Moya Bailey's (2008, 2010) "misogynoir", the racializing attitude of the poet towards Scybale has nonetheless been magnified by classical scholarship's assent to the premise of anti-Blackness. Indeed, Haley (1993, 2009) has demonstrated that (predominantly but not solely) white male classicists have encoded modern racial attitudes into the ancient record. In sum, the figure of Scybale is met at the crossroads of ancient and modern objectification and at the intersection (Crenshaw 1989) of race and gender as well as social status. Scybale is visible in the Moretum only through Simulus' eyes and only seen by us in the poem when he needs her. While we hear that Simulus sings -- we never hear Scybale's song. Scybale's presence in the Moretum may therefore be understood as an ancient parallel to the process identified by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark (1992) whereby "Africanist presences" are coopted and ventriloquized at the same time as African voices are denied. This paper seeks to outline the history of the interpretation of Scybale in the Moretum in classical scholarship while simultaneously attempting to move that interpretation into the sphere of Black feminist criticism wherein "redeeming" (Derbew 2019) the voices of Black women is the principal aim. Viewing Scybale within the context of Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) "critical fabulation" and alongside figures from the Black feminist literary tradition -- Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Psyche/"Sack" in Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth (1994) -- helps us see Scybale beyond ancient and modern objectifications and brings us closer to hearing her own voice.