Getting Our Hands Dirty / Digging Moretum / What If This Is As Good As It Gets?

On the issue of slave visibility in Latin poetry, it is tempting to see the Moretum—a 122-line hexameter poem about a peasant and his domestic servant making breakfast, tangled up in the Appendix Vergiliana—as the straight-talking, humble antidote to Vergil’s Georgics. On digging deeper, however, the poem’s representation of enslaved labor is hardly straightforward. It is instead a vortex of the “nearly,” “almost,” “not quite,” and “sort of” qualifications that constitute the wider limits of enslaved representation in the hexameter verse of ancient Rome. This article reads the Moretum through this asymptote, using it to think through the thorny problems thrown up by reading slavery in Latin literature: visibility, invisibility, and the modern critic’s censoriousness chief among them.