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.”
The beginning of De Sacchari Opificio Carmen (DSOC) shows a clear debt to the language and structure of Virgil’s Georgics (Fonda 1971, Fonda and Rodrigues 1975). Yet unlike the Georgics, Prudêncio do Amaral’s didactic poem on the growth, harvest and refining of sugar in eighteenth-century Brazil includes explicit instructions about the management of enslaved labor. After a brief introduction to the poem and its poet, this paper examines four passages to illustrate Virgil’s role in this description of life and labor on a Brazilian sugar plantation.
Written in the tradition of early modern didactic (Haskell 2003), this poem offers a window to the intersection of Atlantic slavery and the reception of the Georgics. Like Virgil, Amaral presumes that his audience is familiar with the administration of large plots of land, worked by enslaved persons (Thibodeau 2011). Furthermore, DSOC exhibits the interplay between two forces recently identified as central to Virgil’s Georgics: slavery and imperialism (Geue 2018). The tight coupling between the production of sweetness, chattel slavery and sugar capitalism are central to the poetics of this Brazilian text (Mintz 1986, Schwartz 1985, Tompkins 2019).
This paper examines four passages of DSOC in which Virgil’s Georgics serve as a guide to the versification of a controversial but influential Portuguese treatise, Cultura e Opulência do Brasil (Mansuy 1968). First, Amaral’s description of the best soil for cane (vv. 12-19) rearranges his source material to follow the structure of Georgics 1. Second, the poet embellishes his account of the growth of cane (vv. 93-100) with a passage from the Laudes Italiae. Third, the enumeration of common pests (vv. 204-208) allows Amaral to imitate the fire in the orchards of Georgics 2. Finally, Amaral turns to Virgil to describe the water wheel’s motion as it destroys enslaved limbs.
A plantation owner’s reading of the Georgics offers a different intellectual paradigm from which to approach the murmur of ancient slavery in Virgil. DSOC is one of many poems from the Atlantic world that use Virgil to describe the administration of enslaved persons. Their frank discussions of the day-to-day mechanisms of chattel slavery, expressed in polished Virgilian hexameters, indicate an awareness of the Georgics as the product of an agricultural system predicated upon forced labor.