For half-way up the walls of the entrance hall, as I must have noticed, there were stone escutcheons bearing symbolic sheaves of corn, crossed hammers, winged wheels and so on, with the heraldic motif of the beehive standing not, as one might at first think, for nature made serviceable to mankind, or even industrious labour as a social good, but symbolising the principle of capital accumulation. (Sebald Reference Sebald and Bell2002: 13)
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn1970: 256)
Virgil's Georgics have suffered too much and not enough. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, this poem, like many of its triumviral/Augustan poetry (or even Latin literature) cousins, was subjected to its fair share of impoverished historicism.Footnote 1 By impoverished, I mean that the ‘context’ slapped upon it was primarily that of the elite power struggles dogging the inauguration of the ‘age’; a version, that is, of the attention-seeking Augustan question (just achingly short of the moment ‘Augustan’ becomes truly kosher terminology).Footnote 2 This straitened understanding of ‘context’ will always be a big part of what we mean when we Latinists say or think we are doing historicism.Footnote 3 But the polemical purpose of this article is to derail the political historicism of the Georgics onto a less beaten critical track, something altogether more exposed to the volcanic forces of slavery and imperialismFootnote 4 boiling — consciously or unconsciously — in and under this violent poem.Footnote 5 I want to bring to bear a mode of close reading which takes stock of the well-documented bumps, paradoxes, gaps and formal tensions of the text not as cognitive challenges, or planted inconsistencies, or the divine bard's sublime transcendence of viewpoint, but as spasmodic flinches of a society predicated on the rawest, most brutal coercion imaginable.
If the critical traditions which tend to celebrate ambivalenceFootnote 6 or ‘multivalence’Footnote 7 for their own sake have something to do with the default liberalism of the modern academy, this article will take its lift-off thrust from another literary politics: Marxist, or at least Marxish, criticism. The key insight of this broad church for our purposes is the determining (yet complex) relationshipFootnote 8 between socio-economic life and artistic production (or base and superstructure, in older-fashioned Marxist parlance). My approach will be especially tinted by Pierre Macherey's A Theory of Literary Production, a form of Marxist ideology critique which treats the text as a kind of social and psychoanalytic subject, the glitches and silences of which reveal its dark political unconscious.Footnote 9 In the Georgics, for example, this approach helps us understand the ‘repression’ wiping slaves from direct mention as deeply related to the material repression of slaves in reality.Footnote 10
Closer to home, I shall also take cues from a growing ‘tradition’ within Latin literary studies. This trickle minority of scholars usually self-brands as ‘cultural materialist’. They may not be legion, but they are there. Beyond the Georgics, scholars such as Habinek and Leigh have tended the flame of a Marxish commitment to squaring textual ideology with material oppression.Footnote 11 Within Georgics scholarship, the tradition does not quite dare speak its name, but it can nevertheless be extracted with a little active digging.Footnote 12 Both Reay and Thibodeau (each following in Fitzgerald's footsteps)Footnote 13 have written brilliantly on how slavery is crowded out of the poem by an elite ideology (or, as Thibodeau more cutely puts it, ‘fantasy’)Footnote 14 that they are the ones doing the work as soon as they order the work to be done.Footnote 15 The addressee of the poem flits between absentee landowner and on-the-job slave bailiff, only occasionally letting into view (and then only implicitly) the infrastructure of underlings bearing the lion's share of contemporary villa agriculture;Footnote 16 the addictive concept of slave as bodily prosthesis meant the rich Roman could easily slip into deceiving himself that he was the brawn of the operation, just because he was its brains (sometimes not even that).Footnote 17 But what is lost from Thibodeau's account, and what is blanched out in the slightly deodorised concept of an elite ‘fantasy’, is how these fictions and substitutions do the work of violence on an ideological plane. By contrast, a ‘Marxish’ close reading helps us redirect our consciousness to the true Virgilian ‘cost of power’:Footnote 18 the victims of an economic system where many are forced to work for few, while those few do not have to work at all.
This article, then, will build on work which confronts head-on a stumbling block of Georgics criticism: the question of why slavery is elided out of the poem's field of vision.Footnote 19 But I shall try to lurch us forward in two ways. Firstly, the economic logic of slavery has to be linked to that of imperialism: both these spheres are bundled by the bare common denominator of compelling humans to produce wealth only to have it extracted from them, and then transferred to the compellers.Footnote 20 It is important to remember that the ultimate lubricant for these logics was violence or its threat.Footnote 21
Secondly, and more local to the Georgics, I want to show how this economic relationship — namely of stark oppression and exploitation — actually develops over the course of the poem; indeed, the poem can be seen as a story of how the Roman elite got to the point of not having to get their hands dirty. Reay and Thibodeau tend to treat the ‘fantasies’ (in my view sublimated power relations) of the poem as essentially static: the absentee landowner daydreams himself in and out of the figure of an old-school smallholder (or vice versa) all the way through. By contrast, I want to show how the Georgics tells, reaffirms, indeed trumpets the story of Virgil and posh reader/addressee moving from hard grind to slacking off; to a world where the first and second person of the poem can afford to luxuriate in leisure, precisely (and only) because their labour is now lumped onto third persons. Those third persons are the Roman equivalent of the third world: at home on the range, they are the enforced migrants the Roman elite (had) yanked around as their rightful property; abroad, the working populations those same governing ‘landlords’ wrung out for all the taxes they were worth.
These basic outlines of violent domination may be displaced, or mediated into different forms: farmer over earth;Footnote 22 trainer over animal; teacher over student; Aristaeus over Proteus; driver over chariot; sailor over ship; ploughman over plough.Footnote 23 Even, as we shall see, beekeeper over bees. While some of these regimes may seem labile during the poem, I shall argue that Book 4 dramatises their emphatic codification into natural law. To the Roman elite, at this point in history, the major affective frame was not just the trauma of civil war,Footnote 24 but the giddy thrill of seeing the globe as a gang chained to work for you. You, the elite Roman subject, are on top of the world; and the Georgics will be the triumphal poem of how you got there, pina colada in soft hands.
I THE HARD LABOUR OF DIDAXIS: BOOKS 1–3
My focus for this grand arc from labour to leisure will be Book 4, the most exceptional and, not coincidentally, least ‘didactic’ part of the poem. But first we must perform the legwork on Books 1–3. I would like to start by briefly unpacking the poem's didactic form and tethering it to social relationships.Footnote 25 Or asking, as Reay once put it, ‘why didactic?’Footnote 26 My answer to this is that didactic contains within it a radical asymmetry of authority between teacher and student, and a crude boot-camp model of command and execute. The genre's flagship speech-act of the order — although it ranges in degree of violence, from out-and-out imperative, to ‘exhortative’ subjunctive, to more neutral third-person descriptionFootnote 27 — has a degree of compulsion built in.Footnote 28 The violence often escalates through a patronising characterisation of the addressee as a mega nepios.Footnote 29 True, that violence is not always floating on the surface of the Georgics. But I would suggest that the didactic form's advantage is that its conditions of speech can be broken, undone, transcended, set free. Virgil gets going by imposing a lot of work directly onto his captive second-person audience; but as the poem's unequal civilisation evolves into the fully-automated-luxury slave empire of Book 4, the second person is tasked less with the daily grind.Footnote 30 We move from DIY hands-on, to hands-off managerial mode. Didactic is the ideal form in which to tell this story, because it allows a power differential between two parties (I and you) to be resolved, reconstituted and foisted onto a third (them).Footnote 31
Labor is a touchstone (or grindstone) of the Georgics’ universe; an existential state forced on men by the negative boons of the age of Jupiter.Footnote 32 In the earlier books, work is distributed fairly evenly across second and third persons. We are either the recipients of the command or the narratees of the didactic plot. There is slippage and continuity between first, second and third person; we are all in it together.Footnote 33 Most of the time, there is plenty of work to get on with. The teacher naturally gravitates towards tasks that require a lot of work, because that is where the fruits of his own didactic labour can be most usefully applied. The task of viticulture, for example, is little more than labor upon labor (the word appears three times in a particularly intense patch of vine maintenance: 2.397, 401, 412), split across the backs of second and third person alike. Virgil moves through different phases of command, from second-person singular imperative (sparge, 2.347; exerce, 370), to more general gerundives (parcendum, 2.363; texendae, 371; scindendum, 399), to a straight third-person description of the ideal farmer's actions (‘iam tum … extendit …/ rusticus’, 2.405–6), to the archaic ‘future’ imperative (fodito, cremato, 2.408).Footnote 34
This sort of unrelieved drag is certainly the norm in these earlier books, and has been a major hook for pessimist readers.Footnote 35 But of course, we also have moments of remarkable remission from toil, when nature seems to reprise her golden age function and do all the work herself (before Jupiter spoiled it all: ‘ipsaque tellus / omnia liberius nullo poscente ferebat’, 1.128).Footnote 36 After the vines come the olives, which basically grow themselves:
Conversely, no need to tend olives; they do not wait for the curved pruner and the clinging hoe, when they have got a grip on the fields and have toughed out the drafts. The earth herself produces enough moisture when she is loosened up with the curved tooth of the hoe, as well as swollen fruits, when loosened up with the plough. In this way, nurture the juicy olive, that friend of Peace.
That contra inaugurates a section of the book in which the farmer can go on vacation; the requirements shift from performing action to absorbing information. The key linguistic marker of golden-age auto-production is that intensive adjective/pronoun ipse (see below); ipsa … tellus is a signature of such spontaneous generation which needs no input from human hands (cf. the recurrence of the collocation at 2.459–60; or ‘ipsae … siluae’, 440).Footnote 38 Ipse becomes a marker of a ‘plus quam’ third person, or fourth person: that is, not the third-person agricola who often doubles for the second-person student, but a sign that that person can take a break, because the farm's non-human elements are now running themselves. Virgil makes a similar exhibit of other self-managing trees immediately below. The fruit trees (poma) do it for themselves without need of our help (‘ui propria nituntur opisque haud indiga nostrae’, 428).Footnote 39 In these moments, the labour of the addressee is scaled back to that of a recumbent witness, who just sits back and enjoys the ride (spectare, uidere, 437–8; cf. below). When there is no work for us to do, no pressing cura or labor, we take a load off.
These moments of slackery contribute to the view of Book 2 as one of the ‘optimistic’, shiny sides of the Georgics;Footnote 40 and we shall see how its conventional counterpart, Book 4, boosts that ‘optimism’ to unprecedented levels.Footnote 41 But it is part of my task to show that the optimist/pessimist debate in the Georgics is misconceived in so far as it fails to ask precisely how and for whom these relative rations of optimism and pessimism, benefit and curse, are distributed.Footnote 42 As I said above, both Reay and Thibodeau show well how the poem brokers an interchangeability between various agents: rich owner, poor smallholder, slave uilicus, agricola, colonus, pastor.Footnote 43 But that version of ideology as blurred identity is not the whole story. When we get to Book 3 — a notionally more ‘pessimistic’ book allowing little leeway for slackery, but still arguably a notch up the civilisational chain, in that it deals with labour foisted onto beasts — wealthy agricola and poor colonus part company.Footnote 44 It is here that Virgil splits society into a two-track system of privatised gains and socialised losses. The questions to ask are: who works (and what kind of work), who gains, who loses, and how?
Following the temple-building proem, the first half of Book 3 is reserved for instructions on cattle and horse maintenance. These operations with large and valuable livestock obviously do not apply to a peasant smallholder; they must go straight for the estate owner.Footnote 45 The labour involved in this section is largely intellectual, cognitive, managerial, custodial, ‘white collar’.Footnote 46 With cattle-breeding, for example, a central task is mere ‘choosing’ of prime female forms (‘corpora praecipue matrum legat’, 3.51); likewise with the horses (dilectus, 72). At first, it seems the generic second person at least has to see personally to the work of caring for these chosen animals: ‘praecipuum iam inde a teneris impende laborem’ (74). But in practice, the ‘special’ work of the second person becomes fairly light, consisting of, say, a touch of mental arithmetic to keep track of the horses’ morale and ages (‘ergo animos aeuumque notabis / praecipue’, 100–1).
Before long, the labour becomes purely spectatory (cf. above and below). Virgil invites his implicitly wealthy addressee to look on (‘nonne vides’, 103) as a special crew of horse trainers (iuuenum, 105 = illi, 106 = magistri, 118) take over the reins.Footnote 47 Suddenly the work of breeding racers and chargers is fobbed off onto these third persons (118–19). The verses following (123–8) maintain these third-person plurals, loading the magistri with the hard yards; while the horse itself is now being trained for labori (127). When the second person does return, it is for light-touch cameos: shooing the gadfly away (‘arcebis grauido pecori’, 155), or training up calves when they are nice and pliant (faciles, 165; this privileged adjective will flourish in Book 4). Following this, the second person essentially transfers the hard work onto the enslaved beast of burden (seruitio, 168 — the slaves in this poem are indeed visible, just not in human form).Footnote 48 The relationship of domination is reflected in the next labor relative: the chariot horse-in-training becomes the baseline worker of the situation (‘laboranti similis’, 193). In this section, at least, it is clear that the second person does not have to do much at all; the real onus of the labour falls on the beasts, to a lesser extent on their trainers, and you, good manager, are free to kick back.
The situation changes in the second half of the book. After the digression on animal amor, Virgil reins himself back to the task at hand: the humble job of (writing about) tending the sheep and goats. We are surely no longer on high ground, but have moved across to peasant acreage, hand-to-mouth subsistence.Footnote 49 Down the social scale we bump till at last, some real work, for some honest coloni: ‘hic labor, hinc laudem fortes sperate coloni’ (288). Virgil is marginally embarrassed, but he will do his best to dignify the topic (289–90). At this point, he modulates his didaxis to something slightly more aggressive, unafraid of issuing commands as first-person statements: edico (295) orders around both the sheep and the shepherd on the job; iubeo (300) must order the herdsman; and iubebo (329) tells the flocks directly where to go.Footnote 50 Both modest herdsman and lowly animal are on the receiving end of Virgil's noble diktat here. I am fairly sure he would not lord it over an absentee landowner of his own class like that.Footnote 51 An elite Roman city-slicker may be able to think himself into the role of a quaintly hands-on agricola — but how about the shepherd at whom Virgil barks to squash that pest of a viper (for him?) (420–2)?! When the diseases come thick and fast from 440, the dirty work involving direct contact with animals is executed again by magistri (445), or a pastor (455); and the pastores (pastorum, 477) are certainly the ones that suffered devastating losses to their stocks in the past plague Virgil uses to sign off the book.Footnote 52 This is a moment where civilisation, shorn of its animal power, grazes rock bottom:
That was the only time, they say, when cattle in those parts had to be sought out to perform Juno's rites, and chariots were led by ungainly buffaloes towards her high treasure chamber. So men laboriously tear up the ground with hoes, and dig the seed in with their own nails, and drag the creaky wagons over the high hills by putting their neck into it.
In a grim parody of golden-age style plus quam third person, the crops are now sown by grubby hidden agents, the nails themselves (ipsis). Who are these poor campers forced to act as slavish beasts of burden;Footnote 53 indeed, die like them too, by contracting the illness themselves (563–6)? I am not sure. But hic labor takes on a sour note now. We understand, retrospectively, why these lowly coloni had to be so fortes in the first place. They are scratching at the coalface of natural disaster, digging their nails into the earth, self-sacrificing to the plague when it bites. One thing is for certain: they are not gentleman farmers.Footnote 54 For they now understand why it is advisable to conduct one's affairs of estate hands-off, at a healthy distance, through dispensable proxies.
There is a lot of hard work to be done in the earlier books of the Georgics. Sometimes that work will do itself; and the rugged slog up the hierarchy of nature, which sees us increasingly able to delegate the real backaches to beasts, puts humans in a relatively strong position. But the apparent amalgamation of the poem's second- and third-person heroes under indistinguishable nomenclature — agricola becomes colonus becomes pastor et al., in the scheme of Reay and Thibodeau — does not mean that work is evenly assigned across the board. The head of the large farm can sit back and watch his trainers work up the next outstanding thoroughbreds; the poor peasant, exposed first-hand to the devastation of plague, must plough the earth with his bare nails, or come down with the black death himself. Virgil marks the transition from high to low; but the catastrophic side of the low is something we high readers can only experience from afar, in our lucky present (474–7; cf. dicunt, 531). It is this two-track society which Book 4 celebrates and sublimates into a fixture of enduring beauty.
II WORK OF DIDAXIS NO MORE: BOOK 4
I have argued that it is not quite adequate — nor politically responsible — to take refuge under ‘blurred identity’. At every point, we would do well to resist the poem's metamorphic spell by constantly probing: Who is addressed? Who is described? Who works? Who does not have to? Turning to Book 4, we shall now see where these questions can get us.
This book has always puzzled because of its bold formal implosion: it seems to break the mould of the primarily didactic poem it wraps up.Footnote 55 I shall argue here that this transcendence of form is enabled by the remarkable relief from labour which the book hymns: relief for some. The second person in this book has precious little work to do: maintaining the bees in the first half is a walk in the park, leaving him free to indulge in the exquisite Alexandrian poetry of the second half.Footnote 56 Virgil, too, is liberated from his command post of yelling orders, and free to spin a good descriptive yarn.Footnote 57 Direct address checks out; narrative checks in. But this is precisely because the farm is now ‘running itself’, money is growing on trees, honey is growing in hives and real high ‘poetry’ can be alchemised from the proceeds. Yet somewhere, somehow, third persons are at work.
The book famously announces a departure in its proem, and this is largely due to the rebooting of industrial relations. Note the kind of work now in question, as well as the agents involved:
Right now I shall talk about that gift of the gods, ethereal honey. Maecenas, watch over this part of my poem also. The gripping stage-shows of the slightest little universe, the brave-hearted leaders, the customs and hobbies and clans and battles of an entire nation — I shall tell you in good order. The work is on a miniature scale; but the glory is by no means negligible, provided malign powers let one be, and Apollo listens when called.
‘Caelestia dona’ signals a new kind of divine gift economy (cf. the numina and Apollo), where we will be treated to something for nothing.Footnote 58 Mollis Maecenas, the poem's poshest alternate second person,Footnote 59 has up until this point been a figure either helping Virgil with the task at hand, or squeezing him for all he is worth (‘haud mollia iussa’, 3.41). But now all he has to do is sink into the sofa and observe (aspicere will be important below). Now for entertainment hour, the bees the hottest ticket in town (‘admiranda … spectacula’). Again, the buzzword labor proclaims the shift. The work in this book will be in a very circumscribed area, i.e. not much at all; but the spoils (gloria) will be tremendous.Footnote 60 All Virgil has to do is keep up (exsequar); all Maecenas has to do is take his seat; and this micro-society will buzz to work, for them.
The other major second person in the didactic opening of Book 4 — the beekeeper — has a similarly light load. The best of the easy managerial and custodial roles of Books 2 and 3 turns an even kinder shade of golden once we come to the bees. The commands tend to involve light actions: scattering willows and stones (conice, 26) or leaves (superinice, 46) for good habitat; scattering scents (asperge, 62) or making a racket (cie, quate, 64); or non-actions/prohibitions (neu … sine, neue … ure … neu crede …, 47–8; prohibebis, 105). The work can also become strictly cognitive or hedonic, an experience of watching and marvelling not so far from Maecenas’ prime position (suspexeris, 59; mirabere, 60; contemplator, 61).
This kind of intellectual/emotional action is a hallmark of the book, and perhaps its central task (cf. mirabere, 197; poteris cognoscere, 253; and forms of mirari discussed below). Otherwise, the maintenance work required to keep the bees in order is kept to a minimum. The raging civil war which periodically erupts can be dampened with a dash of dust (‘pulueris exigui’, 87).Footnote 61 This beekeeper's storm in a teacup is easily calmed. When the bees look like they are slacking off in frivolous playtime (‘ludo … inani’, 105), all you need to do is de-wing the heads of state: ‘nec magnus prohibere labor: tu regibus alas / eripe’ (106–7). Easy as apple pie. Even when there is the small hiccup of a mini-epidemic, the remedy is simple: look for some amellus to boil, a plant that makes short work for its search party (‘facilis quaerentibus herba’, 272).
Not only is the work framed as unchallenging: the didactic flags used earlier in the poem to mark tedious grind are repurposed into billboards of how little there is left to do. Quod superest (2.346) and superest (2.354) back in Book 2 beat out a drab percussion of ‘ever more to do’. Look how the transitional phrase functions now:
As for the rest, when the golden Sun has driven winter out, flung it under the earth, and uncaged the sky with summer light, immediately they sweep across woods and groves, mow brilliant flowers, and with a light touch dip onto the surface of the stream.
Just as we gear up for some orders to carry out (‘next!’…), i.e. what to do in the summer, we quickly change tack to a string of third-person plural verbs. The bees take care of (it) themselves.
The remarkable relaxation of labour for the human second person (the beekeeper) is deeply related to this process of displacement onto (plus quam) third persons, in most cases the bees themselves. The intensive ipse dyes this book the colour of free-and-easy self-production.Footnote 62 After Virgil urges us to the light task of shake, rattle and roll to get the bees going, they will kindly do the rest (‘ipsae … ipsae’, 65). The reductio ad absurdum of the bees’ freakish self-sufficiency is their ability to reproduce asexually; and here too the process is marked by the magical ipse (‘ipsae … ipsae’, 200–1).
So powerful is this system of third-person voluntarist production that it rubs off on the world of human work too. I mentioned that the second person is largely relieved of his labour duties, upgraded to a light supervisory role alongside Virgil and Maecenas. This is because the bees themselves (ipsae) are everywhere self-regulating;Footnote 63 but also because whatever manual labour is left over is shunted onto another ipse:
It is no big hassle to control them: rip off the kings’ wings; no one will dare venture out into the air or sweep up the standards from the camp when the kings are stuck there. Let gardens vapoured with saffron flowers lure them, and let the caretaker on watch against thieves and birds, that guardian, Priapus of the Hellespont, keep them safe with his sickle of willow. Let that one — the one whose job is to look after such things — bring thyme and pines from up in the hills, and plant them widely round their dwellings; let him wear out his hand with hard work, let him stick fruitful sprigs in the ground, and sprinkle over some welcome spray.
Here again, I think, we press up against the limits of interchangeability between the second- and third-person workforces. The tu is tasked with the modest, delicate work of wing-clipping.Footnote 64 But the custodial work (even that!) goes to Priapus (cf. ‘ille operum custos’ of the bee-king, 215); and the real laborious curae, the gathering and planting, the action that ‘wears out the hand with work’, is outsourced to the third (world) nameless ipse. Tu and ipse are not equivalent here.Footnote 65 ‘Cui talia curae’ is effectively a dismissive wave from the leisured beekeeper who can barely see these tasks beneath him. Virgil reassures: ‘someone else will do it.’
But that is really the only touch of hard manual labour performed by humans in this whole first half of the book; otherwise, the bees are saddled with the grunt work. Their own disciplined labor is marked twice (laborem, 156; labor, 184). Their society is self-policing, and is itself divided into custodial and front-line roles (invigilators and agricultural labourers, 158–9; guards (custodia) vs. drones, 165–8);Footnote 66 but the sum effect is of a buzzing, harmonious operation (‘labor omnibus unus’, 184; ‘fervet opus’, 169). Certain imagery forces us to take the bees as the very hardest of workers: the famous simile at 170–8 compares them to those first sweatshop slaves of Greek mythology, the Cyclopes. The efficient production line seems to be the common denominator of tenor and vehicle here, until Virgil steers it in another direction:
Just so, if small and big are comparable, an inborn desire for possession keeps the Cecropian bees going, each one performing its own special function.
The inbuilt materialism of the bees supposedly makes them work … as the Cyclopes do for them? But this is a strange plane of comparison.Footnote 67 The Cyclopes work not from self-interest or greed, but from voluntary necessity, for someone else;Footnote 68 the bees, on the other hand, may have the desire for possession, but they are denied the right to keep any of the fruits of their labour. And that is just like the Cyclopes, in practice condemned to an eternal hell on the assembly lines of Jupiter's thunderbolt factory, even if they are understood as ‘willing’ workers.Footnote 69 The fiction of voluntarism implied by ‘amor habendi’ (also the rationale for the proliferating intensive ipse) is a textbook move in the ideology of oppression.Footnote 70 The bees want to work, they just love slaving away to forge our deluxe organic gold. They will give anything, just for the ‘love’ (205), just for the ‘glory’ of pumping out honey (205). And to this ‘natural’ love, just add an artificial squeeze:
The more the hoards are squeezed dry, the more intensely they all lean in to mend the ruins of their failed kind; they fill their cells and weave their barns with flower gum.
With a little bit of tweaking from the top, that is, productivity can be maximised. It is all about strategic incentives.Footnote 71
As I said at the beginning of this article, this form of relationship — despoiling the agents of production, the plus quam third persons, of the product they have toiled to produce — has the deepest historical roots. While I am swerving clear of one-to-one allegory (which has always been yet another way of putting the bees to work for us),Footnote 72 I must pause briefly to show what the rough historical symmetry I have in mind can do for them. The bees have seen two different camps of allegorising readership: let us call them close and distant readers.Footnote 73 The close readers see the bees as reflections on and of Rome, taking their cue from obvious signs like Quirites (201);Footnote 74 these bees, good honest workers, are a model of high-functioning Roman society, minus the odd lapse into civil war.Footnote 75 The distant readers reject that identification; they seize instead on the ethnographic language with which the bees are described, or the slightly slavish devotion of the bees to their king (worse than the worst of the Easterners, 210–12).Footnote 76 There are rough edges and loose ends in both versions. The bluntest of historical allegories, for example, can take the obvious road to read the warring bee-kings as the fresh civil conflict between Antony and Octavian, as above;Footnote 77 but then, who is this god-like beekeeper calling the shots from the shadows once the (minuscule amount) of dust has settled?Footnote 78 If these are Romans, who is stepping in to settle this? Who would be skimming the honey from our buzzing hives?
All allegorising readings fail at some hurdle,Footnote 79 as their stacked layers of meaning clash, grate and buckle; but some, perhaps, fail better. It is not my job to generate yet another algorithm which decrypts poetry into straightforward political history. Rather, I would like to index the deeper structural relationship between bee-farming and Roman imperialism. Neville Morley has already suggested the beekeeper's relationship to his miniature productive force can sometimes look like a rapacious Roman provincial governor shaking the pockets of his province.Footnote 80 There is something to this. Permit me to zoom out.
If we were to look anywhere for relevant newsworthy foreign affairs, we could do worse than Egypt: a freshly minted (30 b.c.e.) sui generis imperial province,Footnote 81 the jewelled prize of the civil war, and a land mythologised as a kind of endlessly abundant source of grain.Footnote 82 Egypt is dear to the heart of Book 4 not just because the bees walk like Egyptians (among other orientalised king-worshippers, 210–12),Footnote 83 but because it furnishes the context for the bugonia: the miracle which frees us from any remnant of didactic labour, and launches us into the deluxe (Alexandrian) epyllion of the Georgics’ twilight.Footnote 84 It is no coincidence that Virgil sites the founding practice of bugonia among the teeming soil of the Nile flood-plains (‘et uiridem Aegyptum nigra fecundat harena’, 291).Footnote 85 Here in Egypt, when the bee prospects look grim, another kind of plus quam third person naturally takes over the task of regeneration. The description of the Egyptian bugonia (295–313) glazes over the precise agents performing the process, but they are certainly third persons. Third-person plural actions (premunt, addunt, 297, etc.) — presumably assigned to generic Egyptians — are interspersed with straight passives (eligitur, 296; quaeritur, 300, etc.), yet another way to furnish the impression that this work is so easy, it really does itself.Footnote 86 And in any case, it is not long until the bees are back on the job, working through their own to-do list (e.g. carpunt, 311). The common denominator between these mystery Egyptians and the bees they (re)produce is the ease with which team Egypt seems to get things done. Among this gens fortunata (287), blessed with a means of bottomless regeneration of bee stocks, the work runs of its own accord: the string of passives is the verbal equivalent of ipse, implying that the objects are really the subjects of their own action: the calf tracks itself down (299–300), or the innards liquefy themselves (302). This is a golden age task list of easily performed or self-performing actions, written for a golden land, towards a golden end product. But my main point here is that this implied relationship — between bees and Egyptian farm hands — transcribes the sensation of how this newly annexed wing of the empire would feel to an elite Roman popping the champagne from afar.Footnote 87 As with his private estates, so with this new flagship land, and so with the bees: to the beekeeper beyond the fray or the toil, it would look like the product was effectively producing itself,Footnote 88 because the producers were just so damn willing to have their labour skimmed.Footnote 89
There may well be ways of pressing this connection even further: the manipulation of rival royal claimants sounds exactly like the dirty tactics of Roman diplomacy in Egypt in the years before it was finally coughed up as a province.Footnote 90 But for now, I merely hope to have shown up the radically different labour relations characterising this strange vacation of a book, and how that might harmonise with the soaring imperial high notes of c. 29 b.c.e. Virgil and Maecenas kick back and watch the show; the second-person beekeeper makes the occasional light-touch intervention; all the while, the bees are burdened with a workload that is somehow ‘alleviated’ by the aggressive fiction of voluntarism; and in this sense, they channel the ‘happy’ subjects of an expanding and renewable empire of infinite grain. It seems that, for a certain chosen chunk of society at least, the hard work is over, because others are now doing it for you themselves. So far, we have talked mainly of second and third persons/worlds. But before we look at how this relationship migrates into the last half of the book, let us see how this cashes out for the first person: the bard himself, Vergilius ipse.
III TAKING TIME OFF / TIME TO TAKE OFF: THE BARD HIMSELF
I have left purposefully blank one of the most overwritten slates of Georgics 4: the Corycian gardener ‘digression’ (116–48). Critics have worked hard to reconcile this curious praeteritio with the rest of the bees;Footnote 91 and even to nut out precisely who this lucky Corycian might be.Footnote 92 I shall argue that this is a key moment of Virgil's own self-positioning within the empire of leisure. I claimed above that the short work/rich reward combination (‘in tenui labor; at tenuis non gloria’) applied to Virgil's and Maecenas’ privileged role of mutual spectatorship right from the off, and that this position of relative leisure rubs off on the second-person beekeeper himself. But in this section, Virgil spells out the implications for himself; now is really the time to take time off.
You will remember that just prior to this passage, Virgil farmed out the hard labour to a nameless ipse (‘ipse labore manum duro terat’, 4.114); I read that ‘get someone else to do it’. This segues nicely into the announcement of the digression:
And truly, if I were not already drawing in my sails, right at the pointy end of my task, and if I were not racing to nudge my prow to land, perhaps I would be singing of rich gardens, what work of tending would embellish them …
The link here might go thus: the vision of a plus quam third person doing manual work reminds Virgil of the poetic work that he could/should be doing at this point. But he is actually at the very end of those labores. So he does not have to bother thrashing out another elaborate chapter on this random gardener. As scholars have repeatedly underscored, this senex is perched on surplus landFootnote 93 beyond the bounds of the Georgics:Footnote 94 the leftovers of the countryside (‘relicti … ruris’, 127–8). However magnanimous it is of Virgil to jam this section in, the framing device tells us that he does not have to do it. Indeed, there is an implicit contrast between the romanticised yet menial task-list of the senex himself, and Virgil's paraded freedom not to bother:Footnote 95
He also arranged late-season elms row-by-row, and hard pears, and blackthorns already sporting sloe berries, and plane trees already giving shade to people stopping by for a drink. But I myself skip over all that, shut in by straitening bounds, and I leave the job of setting it down to others after me.
While this geriatric wonder performs some bracing tasks on a bit of land nobody wants, the poet himself (note ‘ipse equidem’) flaunts his right not to work, or not to sing, for that is the contrastive force of uerum (answering ‘equidem … canerem’, 116–19). ‘Spatiis exclusus iniquis’ is usually taken to mean Virgil recusing himself because of the poem's shrinking space,Footnote 96 but we could also read it: ‘shut out from these small-fry lots’, or ‘exempted from having to write about this no man's land’; the world of the self-sufficient gardener is beneath him.Footnote 97 In any case, Virgil's actions as masterly ipse stem from the freedom to slack off and leave the job (garden or poem) to others (aliis). At the very moment we glimpse the Corycian hard at it, Virgil flaunts that he can delegate the tedious details to the invisible hands of the future.
There would be a touch more piquancy to this scene if we trusted Servius’ historical labelling of this poor old senex as one of the Cilician pirates resettled by Pompey after his famed sweep of the seas; we would see the empire's ruthless efficiency at putting the conquered to work.Footnote 98 But even without it, we can lay bare the structural similarities connecting this scene to the bees in which it is embedded. In bee-land, we have a second-person beekeeper loafing around without much work to do except observing his busy bees ‘happily’ giving it their all; in Tarentum, we have a first-person poet remembering how he saw an old Corycian, poor in acreage but rich in heart (animis, 132), merrily leaning in.Footnote 99 In both cases, the comfortable audience member, who does not have to work, aestheticises the work of the producer as something hard but rewarding, exhausting yet dignifying, not to mention pleasurable. In this world where all is humming along smoothly, Virgil seldom lets slip the violence greasing the wheels. But then we notice that the Corycian is also a beekeeper:
So that same man was first to overflow with breeding bees and a huge swarm, and first to force the foaming honey by putting pressure on the combs.
Here the language is blunt: the hot-off-the-press honey is forced from the combs under pressure. Rather than lapping up the old man for all his delicious golden age abundance, we can also thank him for laying bare the brute force at the frontline of extraction. We should bear this in mind as we move to the second half of the book: where labour — for Virgil, Aristaeus, and us, at least — seems to be a thing of the past.
IV WINDING DOWN
So far we have tracked a system where work is left to third persons; and where, with the help of a mysterious automation and universal voluntarism, the work seems simply to ‘do itself’; and thereby both first and second person are freed up to enjoy a very easy ride. In this last section, we shall see how these relationships are further pickled into the famous Aristaeus and Cyrene epyllion. I want to read this myth as an aetion not just for bee regeneration, but for the leisure, ease, divine favour and entitlement enjoyed at the top of Roman society: a happy bulletin that we can afford to slack off, because someone will always be around to pick up our slack.
At this hinge in the book, the work of ‘manual’ didaxis (i.e. the mode of first-person instructor issuing commands to second-person enactor) is formally put to bed — although, as we have seen, the bond of the grind had been weakening significantly anyway. Virgil is now in the mood for 100 per cent marvel, and so the speech-act frame turns from ‘do this light task’ to ‘enjoy this story time’. The transition is flagged with a remarkable invocation of a new set of second persons — the Muses — which itself indexes a privileged new access to the divine, and a new economy of gifts from on high.Footnote 100 Just after Virgil concludes his precis of the Egyptian bugonia, he scales up:
What god hammered out this trick for us, Muses? From where did this new practice begin?
Suddenly we are in another realm, where the Muses can be accessed on demand,Footnote 101 and a god is the one ‘smashing out the method’ for us. This follows through on the promise of Book 4's opening ‘caelestia dona’ (4.1). But the collocation extundere artem makes the point even more strongly. It remarkably rewires the very different relationship of Jupiter to the farmer in Book 1, which hailed the end of the ipsa tellus free-for-all (‘extunderet artis’, 1.133).Footnote 102 Back in that barren patch of earth, Jupiter only made things (including honey) harder to get so that human trial and error (usus, 1.133) could fashion skills for us; humans overcame draconian interventions from the top with their own hard labour. Usus was the craftsman. But now we are on holiday: a god is suddenly working for us (nobis), for free. Not only that, but the gods of poetry (Musae) are at hand to help the poet too. We are allowed to get fat off corporate charity from the skies above.
As we switch off the didaxis and live off the interest, Aristaeus becomes the ultimate Lord of Leisure.Footnote 103 The hero, having lost his stock of bees, immediately calls on mother Cyrene to bail him out; and the amount of help he will enjoy throughout makes it doubtful that ‘Aristaeus’ is actually the answer to quis deus? Footnote 104 Here our verb extundere strikes again:
‘My mother, my mother Cyrene, you who live right down the bottom of this pool, why did you give birth to me from that high pedigree of the gods (well, if my father is truly Thymbraean Apollo, as you say), to be the scorn of the Fates? Or where has your love for me been thrust? Why did you tell me to hope for heaven? Here, even this here prize of my mortal life, which the skilled tending of crops and flocks barely hammered out for me despite my best efforts — even if you are my mother, I let it go. But come on, tear up my lush woods with your hand, do it yourself, set a nasty flame to my stalls, murder my crops, burn my seeds, heave a hefty axe against my vines, if such powerful disgust for my honour has taken hold of you.’
This is an interesting moment, for it condenses within Aristaeus a kind of turning point in relations of work and power. Aristaeus claims his honor was wrought for him by genuine hard work, or at least the kind of custodial slog (note custodia again) that weighed down the modest pastor of Book 3 (and Aristaeus is introduced explicitly as pastor, 317).Footnote 105 But it is precisely this ‘prize’ — of tedious hard work — that he is now in a position to give up. Just as Virgil can leave behind his quaint period furniture of a Corycian labourer, so can Aristaeus now surrender his cross (relinquo again; cf. 127, 148). Now we see yet another hand onto which the work is displaced. Aristaeus’ commands, however ironic, hypothetically foist that work onto Cyrene, who becomes a destructive recast of the manual labourer in 114: ‘ipse labore manum duro terat’ becomes ‘quin age et ipsa manu felicis erue silvas’.Footnote 106 Look who will have to moliri now.
Here we have a clue that Aristaeus will be the hero of this story not despite, but in so far as, he does nothing himself. For the rest of the tale, we are treated to a world of perfect ease, where, thanks to the swift work of a goddess, things basically figure themselves out. Aristaeus’ call gets through as Cyrene sits among the nymphs, all of them performing a male fantasy of effortless domestic labour (‘mollia pensa/ deuoluunt’, 348–9) while they listen to charming poetry.Footnote 107 As soon as Arethusa confirms that it is indeed Aristaeus ipse (354) wailing like a baby, she hops to a decisive intervention for her precious little guy, her ‘maxima cura’ (354 — the word indicates that the burden of care, and labour in general, has passed from the hero's shoulders, and onto Mummy's). Cyrene takes on the didactic function with divine efficiency. She orders Aristaeus brought to her, and parts the Red Sea to swallow him into the fold without fuss (357–62). All the hero has to do is take it all in: mirans (363), stupefactus (365) and spectabat (367) are the orders of the day, as Aristaeus — like Virgil, Maecenas and the beekeeper — is relieved of all duties, apart from the task of sightseeing.Footnote 108
Cyrene is not just an enabler here: she is a doer, the latest in the long line of plus quam third persons to whom this book assigns nearly every difficult task. She is the one (ipsa, 381) who prays to Ocean and the Nymphs; she is the one (ipsa, 386) who gives Aristaeus precise instructions on how to capture and interrogate Proteus. But she does not stop at speech acts; she will be with Aristaeus all the way, so that the daunting task of locking up a god will seem like child's play:
First thing you will have to take him in chains, my son, so that he unleashes the full cause of the disease, and makes it all end up all right. For without violence, he will not give you any guidance, nor will you twist his arm by prayer; impose brute force and chains on the prisoner; on these alone will his vain tricks be smashed. I myself will take you into the old man's inner sanctum, when the sun has fired its midday heat, when the grass is parched, and the shade is now even more welcome to the flock, the sanctum where he repairs from the water, exhausted. That way, you can attack him easily as he lies there sleeping.
Violence will be required. But Cyrene herself (ipsa ego) will guide Aristaeus, to make things easy. Facile is in fact a watermark concept for this part of the Georgics, with its spate of easy actions, and everything eminently ‘doable’ (facile > facere; cf. facultas, 437).Footnote 109 The facility stems from the fact that Cyrene is spoon-feeding the hero silly.Footnote 110 She herself (ipsa, 424) puts Aristaeus in place for the ambush. When the focus moves to a less co-operative third person, Proteus himself (ipse, 391, 433),Footnote 111 Aristaeus forcefully pins the god down in order to fleece him of narrative treasure, and gives him absolutely nothing of verbal payment in advance:
He said: ‘But who told you, you cocky youth, to attack my house? Or what are you looking for here?’ But Aristaeus: ‘You are well aware, Proteus, you yourself are well aware; no one can get anything by you, but nevertheless, you should stop wanting to get one by us. We have followed the gods’ instructions, and we have come to seek from here an oracle for our deflated fortunes.’
From Aristaeus’ economising perspective here, there is no need to reply; Proteus knows the answer to that question himself. Aristaeus does not lift a finger for Proteus; in this way he figures Virgil, who now lets others take up the burden of direct speech in a poem whose speech acts have been hitherto the exclusive province of the poet himself.Footnote 112 Here, Aristaeus’ (mother-smoothed) action on the old man of the sea — who is also, in a sense, a kind of pastor (‘ipse uelut stabuli custos’, 433) — is another moment in which the world of effortless ease coughs up its own dark phlegm of force majeure; the violence on which such ease is predicated. Aristaeus either gets what he wants simply by asking nicely; or, if the world resists, he bends it to his will with chainsFootnote 113 (‘manicisque iacentem / occupat’, 439–40; cf. uinclis, 396, 405). In that sense, Aristaeus is a true imperial (not just a ‘culture’)Footnote 114 hero.
Aristaeus is not the only one pressing Proteus for a story. One of the most prominent narrative verbs of Book 4 is also a verb of ‘freedom’: expedire, to ‘unbind’ as well as ‘unfold’ in the sense of ‘tell a story’. Virgil claims he will free up some words twice: first of the bee natures (expediam, 149); then of the origins of bugonia (expediam, 286). Both of these moments mark a gear-change in discourse which can be understood as a form of ‘unbinding’: namely, the shift from second-person imperatival didaxis to third-person narrative, from ‘binding’ to ‘optional’, or ‘prescriptive’ to ‘descriptive’ in Gibson's terminology.Footnote 115 The third and final time the verb appears, it is part of Cyrene's instructions:
First thing you will have to take him in chains, my son, so that he unleashes the full cause of the disease, and makes it all end up all right.
I skipped over this above, but note the paradoxical combination of uinclis capiendus with expediat: Proteus must be imprisoned before he can ‘unleash’ the origin of the disease. This is a sign that Virgil, too, is assigning even this last and easiest task of setting words free, of storytelling, to a monkey god whom his exploitative avatar Aristaeus is about to chain to the stage and make dance.
So Proteus gives up his magic, and his words, in response to force (‘ui … multa’, 450); we shall come back to that act of force in a moment. First, let us race to the final resolution of history's first bugonia.Footnote 116 After hearing Proteus’ yarn, Aristaeus looks a little shell-shocked (timentem, 530).Footnote 117 He must have enjoyed watching Proteus squirm; but there is still the work to be done of deciding what this all means. Cyrene comes to the rescue yet again.Footnote 118 Mother tells son not to worry about anything (‘licet … deponere curas’, 531); she starts glossing the story nicely herself. The nymphs are to blame for this curse, but luckily, they are facilis (535) — tractable goddesses, so making it up to them will be a cinch. Cyrene leaves him with a textbook list of clear instructions for the first bugonia. Our hero discharges the orders without further ado, becoming the very model of effortless didactic leap from command to execution.Footnote 119 And Hallelujah! We have a Christmas miracle on our tables:
No dallying, immediately he carries out his mother's instructions: he comes to the shrine, raises the altars she had told him to, leads four of the best bulls, outstanding forms, and just as many heifers whose necks were unyoked. After, when the ninth dawn had brought on the sunrise, he gives Orpheus the rites of the dead, and comes back to the grove. But here they feast their eyes on a sudden sight, incredible to tell: throughout the melted innards of the oxen, in the whole stomach, bees buzzed and fizzed from the split sides, huge clouds dragged behind, and now they flooded the top of a tree, and drooped in clusters from the bending branches.
Aristaeus seems to perform all of this himself, at least from the look of those third-person singular verbs. Does he finally work through the chores his mother sets him then? I am not so sure. Firstly, there are gaps in the repetition of initial command in subsequent action:Footnote 120 no mention of the act of killing the animals, whether they be the four bulls and four heifers (538–43), or the black ewe targeted for Orpheus (546), or the calf for Eurydice (547). There may be a sense that Aristaeus does not bother doing everything he is told (naughty boy).Footnote 121 But there is another option. We could (should) take those verbs as delegative or causative: Aristaeus does not do these things, but has them done.Footnote 122 From Aristaeus’, Virgil's, our perspective, each step need not be mentioned, because the work is outsourced; it feels instantaneously done. The clue is in the sharp, abrasive transition to aspiciunt — one of the hanging threads by which the Georgics’ system of displaced labour is most spectacularly unravelled. For suddenly we realise that Aristaeus had helpers all along — and they were not just his mother.Footnote 123 Behind every good man, there is a good woman, but also a good team of delegated labour, with nothing to lose but their chains. A suite of slaves who make it all look easy.Footnote 124
Aspiciunt does one thing other than make the silent human underworld of the Georgics visible: it also renders it invisible again, in a puff. For it forces us to divert our gaze from this unfamiliar audience of master and slaves, together in the picture for a rare snap, and onto the sight at which they are marvelling, the ‘dictu mirabile monstrum’ (554) itself. As in the account of the Egyptian bugonia above, our attention is diverted from the impersonal hands behind the production, to the products themselves, which pump us metamorphically through several books of the Georgics: the cattle of Book 3 become the bees of Book 4, yes, but they also form clouds, which settle on top of a tree to become a bunch of grapes (Book 2) ripe for the plucking. That hardest of tasks — viticulture — which required some of the roughest preparatory work in the poem, is telescoped into an immediate supply. Human labour is finally suspended once and ‘for all’, as Aristaeus and his party join Maecenas (cf. aspice, 1),Footnote 125 Virgil and the beekeeper to see everything suddenly growing on trees. I can only imagine what an agricultural slave would be thinking when his master told him to slaughter ten precious animals in exchange for boutique bees.Footnote 126
Some may accuse me of reckless misreading here. That is a lot of weight for a little word (aspiciunt) to bear. There is also the problem that the Aristaeus of the Proteus fiasco did seem to work, and work hard. A sceptic might say, after all, that Cyrene's role was purely the opening of a door. Our hero still had to walk through it. He was the one who pinned the god down with fetters and force. Both Cyrene's command and Aristaeus’ execution were all in the singular:
First thing you will have to take him in chains, my son … impose brute force and chains on the prisoner; … but when you hold him seized fast by hands and chains,
He does not even let the old man gather his tired limbs, before he rushes him with a huge shout, and seizes him in fetters as he is lying there.
The fact that, notwithstanding mother doing most everything but the final step, Aristaeus is told to, and seems to, perform the crucial action of capture himself is a hugely significant twist to the Homeric Proteus episode, but the modification has largely been left untouched.Footnote 127 In the Odyssey, command and execution are necessarily plural. Overpowering Proteus is no mean feat, and it takes Menelaus plus three comrades. The presence of the comrades is marked hard throughout. The crucial moment of capture, for example, falls in the plural: ‘ἡμεῖς δὲ ἰάχοντες ἐπεσσύμεθ᾿, ἀμϕὶ δὲ χεῖρας / βάλλομεν’ (‘We rushed upon him with a shout, and threw our arms about him’, Odyssey 4.454–5). So we are trained to expect a team effort here. Which is why I suspect that even these singular verbs (tenebis; occupat) in Virgil have a darkly ‘delegative’ force; instead of poetic plurals, then, perhaps we can talk of ideological singulars. They are claims to the performance of a work shared by many hands in Homer; and as I suspect here, work actually performed by everyone but Aristaeus. For the hero may well let something comparable to aspiciunt slip when he briefly explains his purpose to Proteus:
‘We have followed the gods’ instructions, and we have come to seek from here an oracle for our deflated fortunes.’
With the first-person plural, Aristaeus admits the presence of others; to read it as ‘poetic’ would be to implicate ourselves in the craft of disappearance. The lapse lays bare what Virgil has sliced from Homer in order to make his hero serviceable to the poeta creator myth of elite labour,Footnote 128 the cheek of framing command as synonymous with execution. Suddenly ui … multa looks more like the ‘force of many people’ than Aristaeus’ singular power; and Cyrene's manibus seem not Aristaeus’ hands, but the hands of those around him, perhaps even whole companies of helpers (manibus = collectives of men?). Despite efforts otherwise, the Georgics does not manage to lock away these workers within the cell of invisibility so cleanly after all.
I have argued that looking (aspicere) is a key act here; but also that we should not always see what Virgil means us to look at. There is one more confluence of looking and luxury to mention, which brings us to Orpheus. This lengthy built-in tale is another one of the many features of Book 4 which is ‘surplus to requirements’. Here we have a labour(er) of love, and a story wherein a certain form of luxury looking is explicitly prohibited. The poem's last occurrence of labor is a case of labour undone:
He stopped fast, and at the very cusp of the light, cast his eyes back to his Eurydice — so forgetful, alas! — his purpose undone. At that moment, all his hard work melted away, the awful tyrant's deal fell through, and a burst of thunder made itself heard three times through the pools of Avernus.
‘omnis / effusus labor’, a riff on the programmatic ‘labor omnia vicit / improbus’ (1.145–6),Footnote 129 is no reprisal of the Georgics’ earlier iron law of entropy,Footnote 130 which demanded a lot of work for little headway. It is the flip side. The phrase advertises that we are now at a point where labor can be left to bubble over; it is a resource no longer needed by the poem's first and second person, for other people have been conscripted to do it for them. Labor is now overflowing, or magically self-regenerating, like the Nile in spate (‘effuso stagnantem flumine Nilum’, 288), or the stream of bees pouring from the ox's corpse (‘donec ut aestiuis effusus nubibus imber / erupere’, 312–13). We are now sitting pretty: labor can be wasted and the labor of poetry produced in its stead. And for that, we do not even need a living agent. Orpheus can be scattered on the fields for fertiliser (522),Footnote 131 his decapitated head will float along the Hebrus, and we will still have his poetry, the uox ipsa (525). The song will keep on singing … itself.
The idea that poetry is a luxury product which is directly dependent on the labour of others is brought home at the end of the poem. We have seen many heroes slack off, and enjoyed our own second-person leisure time in tandem. But Virgil clocks off by explicitly pointing out the unbreakable co-dependency between literature and leisure:Footnote 132
I was singing of this on top of the cultivation of land, cattle and trees, while the great Caesar was thundering out his wars by the deep Euphrates and — qua victor — was granting laws throughout the willing nations, and striving to make the path to heaven. At that time, sweet Parthenope was mothering me — Virgil — as I bloomed with the arts of workaday leisure, and messed with shepherd tunes, and as a bold youth sang ‘you, Tityrus, under the cover of a spreading beech’.
Here Virgil finally sketches the blueprint for an empire of leisure. Caesar the victor stomping all over the world, distributing ‘laws’ among ‘willing’ (uolentes) peoples,Footnote 133 a growing stock of humans that would just love to pay for the privilege of being ruled. All the while our poet gets to kick back,Footnote 134 not a care in the world; all the while his Cyrene, the very maternal Naples, i.e. Parthenope, was taking good care of him (alebat).Footnote 135 The temporal relationship between empire-building and singing — one of mere synchrony or contrast, implied by dum — fudges a deeper causality. That is the point of this article. Conquest has raked more grain into Rome than ever; and it has brought slave labour to work the land which profit-prophets like Virgil owned.Footnote 136 So this was the otium of the Eclogues all along, despite the apparent about-face from bucolic leisure to georgic labour. Lest we forget, the sphragis clinches it: Virgil's poetry was the fruit of someone else's labour.Footnote 137 And I am not talking about Caesar's.
V CLOCKING OFF, CHECKING OUT, KICKING BACK
I have tried to show how the distribution of the Georgics’ labour pattern shifts until it ends on a ‘civilised’ high note. The poem starts low and slow, counselling us at the level of iron-age tribulation. Second person must work the land while first person yelps instructions at him on how to do it, or sometimes claims we are all doing it together. Occasionally, we have a day off (Book 2); until we see that the labour force we presumed unified in fact forks into a cushy quasi-custodial class of big estate owners, and down below them the little-guy pastores using their fingernails as last resort weapons in ‘the war on terra’Footnote 138 (Book 3). Such a schism prepares us for the relationships of exploitation which are dolloped with honey in Book 4. In the land of leisure lounge Virgil, Maecenas, the beekeeper, us readers, Aristaeus; we are granted light work, or no work, or merely that of our viewing pleasure, if we can call that work. On the other side of the picket — mostly performing their duties silently and ‘happily’, but sometimes snapping back into resistance — are the third-person workers who make it all happen: the bees, the random ipse ‘someone else’, the resettled senex, the Egyptians, Cyrene, Proteus and the unseen subjects behind aspiciunt whose names and faces must melt forever into the fancy magic trick which they are cuffed to focalise into the limelight. The leisure of the former rests easy on the hard work of the latter. You may redistribute your optimism and pessimism accordingly.
