Abstract

This article analyzes the didactic method of the first book of Vergil’s Georgics to show that the poem habituates the reader to engage with the world of the farm as a landowner and enslaver. By comparing the Georgics to works of agronomy (Cato, Varro) and agricultural didactic (Hesiod) with which Vergil consciously aligns his poem, I show that Vergil invisibilizes slavery by omitting explicit discussions of enslaved persons or slave management while nevertheless amplifying those discussions’ discursive tendency to instrumentalize enslaved persons as tools or extensions of their enslaver, and thus to elide distinctions between them. I look closely at the modes of instruction Vergil uses in Georgics 1, dividing them broadly into the categories of “command” (active and passive commands; impersonal and gerundive constructions) and “observation” (third-person depictions of labor being performed). Vergil’s commands alternately obscure the agents of agricultural labor, displace the exercise of domination onto nonhumans or abstractions, and model the performances of epistemic mastery expected of a dominus in the agronomic tradition. The observations, though generally further removed from agricultural labor hierarchies, similarly privilege knowledge derived from surveillance or management. Such a poetics naturalizes slavery despite (or even because of) its apparent absence in the text.