Unlevelling the Fields of the First Georgic
By Katherine Dennis (Princeton University)
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.
The Tormented Master of Vergil’s Georgics
By 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.
The Social Status of the Drone in Vergil and other Ancient Writers on Apiculture
By Matthew Leigh (Oxford University)
Ancient writers on apiculture from Aristotle through Varro, Vergil, Columella and Pliny typically describe the lives of bees in terms reminiscent of human political communities: they have kings and commoners; the kings enjoy the devotion of their subjects, but division between rival kings can lead to civil strife; the movement of a group of bees to a new hive is equated with the establishment of a colony; guards are set over the hive to ward off the incursion of robber bees (Dahlmann 1954; Hardie 2020).
Getting our hands dirty / Digging Moretum / What if this is as good as it gets?
By 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.
Laboring in the Garden: Exhortations to Horticulture in Columella’s Garden Poem
By Steven Gonzalez (University of Southern California)
Even if one does not consider the Georgics an agricultural treatise, Vergil’s poem achieved authoritative status among the later agronomists, including Columella (Doody 2007). Unlike the Georgics, however, his De Re Rustica, a comprehensive, prosimetrum treatise on Roman agriculture, does not hesitate over the representation of enslaved labor. Nevertheless, Columella takes up where Virgil left off in the recusatio of Georgics 4 for the garden poem of DRR 10.
Virgil in the Cane Fields of Brazil
By Erika Valdivieso (Princeton University)
Brasiliae segetes, hyblaeoque aemula melli
Sacchara, arundineis stillantia sacchara nodis
Hinc canere aggredior.
“The fields of Brazil, and sugar, the rival of
Hyblaean honey, sugar which drips from the
joints of reeds: these are themes of my song.”