Sphinx

Who works in the text? According to Tom Geue, in an excellent paper in the Bristol Classics Research Seminar last week, this question is at least as important for our understanding of Roman culture as the more familiar “Who speaks in the text?”. He took as his case study Georgics IV, a poem ostensibly devoted to old-fashioned Italian small-holding in which remarkably little real work gets done. Slavery is of course more or less invisible throughout the Georgics, with the slave treated as a mere prosthesis so that his labour is credited to the owner, but the fourth book takes things still further. Half of it is devoted to bee-keeping: a gift of heaven, a slight field of toil bringing great reward, in which the owner’s labour is limited to tearing off the wings of the ‘kings’ so that the bees are not inclined to give in to their tendencies to idleness…

Whereas other commentators on Roman bee-keeping (including yours truly) have emphasised the Roman tendency to see bee society as a reflection of their own (military organisation, civil wars etc.), this reading suggests an alternative interpretation: the bees as slaves, or as Rome’s conquered subjects. Tom favours the latter, suggesting that Vergil’s bees are portrayed as an eastern people, constantly feuding and needing the firm hand of the Roman state to bring order – and it’s probably significant than bougonia, the truly bizarre idea that one can obtain a new flock of bees simply by slaughtering a bullock, comes from Egypt. (Incidentally, it hadn’t occurred to me before how far bougonia makes sense only as a possibility for the super-rich, slaughtering an extremely valuable animal). I’d be nervous that offering such a specific identification of Vergil’s bees as the newly-conquered Egyptians rather narrows the potential of this Marxish critique, but I need to think about this further.

The Roman elite lived off the produce of others; poetry was not an alternative to the world of labour and exploitation, but a product of it, revealing traces of its origins if interrogated in the right way however much it tries to deny it – indeed, it’s worth noting how far poetry is supposed to conceal the work involved in its production (adjectives like “laboured” and “workmanlike” are as damning as they come in criticism), and even Vergil concludes his praise of self-sufficiency by remarking that someone else will have to make the effort to describe it properly (IV.147-8). A number of my colleagues were, in the discussion, concerned that Tom was assuming an imagined reader who was a typical smug, comfortable middle-aged Roman landowner; what if the reader was instead a young, impoverished aristocrat, feeling deeply insecure within an economic and political system that had undergone massive transformations in recent decades. I’m not sure that this is quite the devastating critique of a Marxism-inspired reading that they seemed to think; we don’t have to obsess about Vergil’s intentions and intended audience if we situate the poem in the broader context not of poetry alone but of Roman economic thought, including (most obviously) the agronomists like Varro, equally concerned in a different genre with reconciling traditional values (including the low status of labour) and the new realities of the Augustan economy. This sort of literary study needs to be rooted in material realities, or at any rate in the parallel ideological processes in less literary areas of culture – just as, still more obviously, the study of Roman economic conceptions, values and behaviour needs this sort of sophisticated reading of complex, multi-layered texts.

Obviously the combination of economic analysis and beekeeping, with a bit of Marx, was catnip to me from the start, but I was also especially impressed by Tom’s willingness to contextualise the study in his own frustration with the working conditions of the insecure early career academic (and I desperately hope that he doesn’t cut this from the version revised for publication, though it will undoubtedly make it harder to get accepted). Concern with whether or not intellectual activity is ‘work’ (whether valued positively or negatively) is not confined to Roman poets, it’s one of the main mechanisms by which academics are disciplined (mostly by getting us to discipline themselves, of course). The main reason why I’ve already broken my resolution to blog more frequently this year has been the flood of ‘work’ in the form of tasks that demand to be prioritised because of the imperatives of others and/or the demands of an apparently autonomous system. Is blogging work? Not enough for me to feel that it’s a legitimate use of my time beyond the odd ten minutes in between other, vastly less stimulating but more unavoidable tasks…