Tom Geue (University of St. Andrews)
The scandal of the Georgics’ silence on slavery is notorious. Hence: this panel. But there is a small poem, written in its wake, that has sometimes been seen as a partial antidote (cf. Fitzgerald 1996). The Moretum – a 122-hexameter ditty about the smallholder Simulus making bread and pesto for breakfast – seems to get real where the Georgics flutters about in fantasy land. Not only is it antiquity’s most sustained ‘day-in-the-life’ portrait of the rural poor; it also features a (seemingly?) enslaved African woman called Scybale, faces her (almost) square-on, and sneaks us flashes of her actual labour (e.g. Moretum 49-50). Compared to the Georgics’ tunnel-vision blinkeredness to the contemporary conditions of agricultural labour in Italy, the Moretum’s sobering realism can feel like a breath of fresh air.
This paper will argue that this is not quite the case, for the reasons of all those operative near-misses above (seems, seemingly, almost). For the Moretum flirts with slavery, but falls just shy of coming right out and saying it. Firstly, the supposedly enslaved Scybale is never called ‘slave’, but treated to the fudging and decorous terms custos (31) and famula (91). This has prompted recent work to question whether Scybale is in fact enslaved – or whether we scholars are loading her with our own racial and sexual prejudices (see Bellei forthcoming, after Haley 1993).
Secondly, the poem’s protagonist Simulus seems himself to scrape the murky territory of near-slavery, without ever enjoying a clarification of his status (for the ambiguity of which, cf. Kenney 1984 on gravis aere, 80). This confusion of status is bound up with a key elasticity in the Moretum’s poetics, slacking and tensing between parody and realism. Through metaphor, it props the humble Simulus to the level of dominating hero: he ‘liberates’ (liberat 22) his arms from his cloak, calls (advocat 24) his hands to work and divides their labour as if they were house help, orders (imperat 37) Scybale about, and ‘subdues’ (domat 82) his hunger. But in other moments, Simulus comes off reduced to the slavish position of the quasi-bestial: kitted out in a goatskin (22) or bearing the burden of carting produce to market on his shoulder (79). At one moment, he courts animality even more dangerously, as he digs his fingers into the ground to pull out his garlic (86) – a terrifying approximation of the point in Georgics 3.535 where desperate farmers, their animals dead from plague, plough the earth with their fingernails. It is only when Simulus reasserts his place in the natural order at the end – no less than by yoking his oxen to ready them for ploughing (120-22) – that we have the roles of subjugator and subjugated re-ratified (thus we enter the Georgic mode).
The Moretum, then, dangles yokes over its characters’ necks, gets their hands dirty, without ever saying slave. It may seem like a correction to the Georgics, but it may well be an even bolder crush against the hard limits of slave representation in hexameter: there, almost, but not.