The farmer wants a wife: ecofeminism, domestic violence, and coercive control in Roman agricultural writing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the explicit and implicit depiction of domestic violence and coercive control in a range of texts from different genres, all dealing with agriculture: a farmer’s attack on his wife after a rustic festival in a Tibullan elegy, the Elder Cato’s instructions to his overseer on how to control his wife coercively in De agricultura, and the portrayal—and suppression—of anthropomorphized domestic violence against nature in Virgil’s Georgics and Columella’s De re rustica 10. These texts throw different lights on the realities and ideologies of domestic abuse and environmental exploitation in ancient Rome, as well as their transhistorical and transcultural continuities. By examining them through a range of ecofeminist lenses, we can see how the nature–woman connection can both give a voice to the victims and contribute to their subjugation.

All ecofeminist approaches—to political activism, to social policy, to economic theory, to literary criticism—are united by a shared, central concept but starkly divided by their responses to that concept. The concept is the existence, on some level, of an affinity, parallelism, or equivalence between women and nature, and of the concomitant subordination, exploitation, and abuse of both by men. However, some ecofeminists embrace the woman–nature link and use it, not only to deprecate male, cultural abuse, but to challenge the conventional valorization of culture and masculinity as inherently superior.¹ Others see the woman–nature link as itself a cultural construct that can be used to reinforce, justify, and even enact that very subordination, exploitation, and abuse of both women and nature, each diminished by a viciously circular argument that characterizes women as natural and nature as feminine.² Both approaches, in their different ways, are especially suited to the examination of domestic abuse through an ecofeminist lens and in particular its presence in agricultural writing, which will be the subject of this article.

Domestic violence is surprisingly little discussed in ecofeminist and especially feminist ecocritical scholarship, at least as an explicit focus.³ This may be the result of a tendency in ecofeminism to characterize the male oppression of women and cultural exploitation of nature primarily as an external, invasive force rather than an abusively domestic one. Indeed, it is striking that a recent ecofeminist study of contemporary Spanish novels which does foreground the issue of IPV (intimate partner violence) discusses a case of exogamous marriage, where the wife moves to the husband’s village and is thematically aligned with wild rather than domesticated nature. In Concha López Llamas’ 2015 novel Beatriz y la loba, a young woman’s embrace of the wolves that inhabit her husband’s native region and of that region’s traditions stands in opposition to the domestic, ecological, and cultural abuse by her husband and his grandfather. As Junquera (2018: 141) puts it, ‘López Llamas clearly and repeatedly makes the point of the parallel violence and oppression of women, wolves, and rural lifestyles … [D]omestic violence against women is rooted in a similar logic as hatred against wolves (and other species) and against traditional lore.’ The imposition of male ‘rationality’ and cultural ‘order’ on ‘wild’ women and nature is a key aspect of the depiction of domestic abuse in the agricultural texts that we shall be exploring. However, ideologies of agriculture can also be made to emphasize the justification and need for coercive control and the threat or performance of violence, not just to domesticate the wild, but to maintain the subservience of that which is already domesticated, already claimed, already owned. It is in this respect that the relationship between the exploitation of one’s own field and the domination of one’s own wife is particularly telling. The farmer’s and the husband’s proprietary rights over nature and woman justify their domination of them, and the exercise of that domination is in turn presented as proof of their proprietary rights.

Ecofeminism has until recently made relatively little impact in Classical scholarship. The approach has much in common with earlier feminist studies that emphasized the parallelism between female subjugation and the colonizing or other military conquest of land, though such studies tend to conceptualize the feminized land more as political territory than as ecological entity.⁴ More recently, the related field of ecocriticism has begun to gain traction in Classics, and ecofeminism itself is the focus of a handful of studies over the last few years.⁵ This article will explore the depiction—explicit or implicit—of domestic violence and coercive control in a range of texts from different genres, all relating to agriculture: a farmer’s attack on his wife after a rustic festival in Tibullus’ first book of erotic elegies, the Elder Cato’s instructions to his overseer on how to control his wife coercively in his treatise De agricultura, and the portrayal—and suppression—of anthropomorphized domestic violence against nature in Virgil’s didactic poem, the Georgics, and its spin-off, Columella’s De re rustica 10. These texts throw different lights on the realities and ideologies of domestic abuse and environmental exploitation in ancient Rome, as well as their transhistorical and transcultural continuities. By examining them through a range of ecofeminist lenses, we can see how the nature–woman connection can both give a voice to the victims and contribute to their subjugation.

1. TIBULLUS, NATURAL WOMEN, AND THE REIFICATION OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE

One of the most famous acts of intimate partner violence in Latin literature comes in the final poem of the Augustan elegist Tibullus’ first book.

(Tib. 1.10.51–58)⁶

Although we must be careful not to be seduced into taking the realistic quality of this vignette at face value, it remains a chillingly textbook depiction of intimate partner violence. The countryman’s drunkenness (male sobrius) fits the well-established connection between alcohol and domestic violence.⁷ The presence of children (progeniem) is not only a distressing feature of many cases of IPV but has even been identified as a potential risk factor contributing to the victim’s vulnerability and danger of revictimization (Langley 2017; Petersson and Thunberg 2022). The blurring of the distinction between ‘rough sex’ (Veneris … bella) and abusive violence, a blurring often imposed by the abusive partner, is a feature both of specific acts of IPV and of a wider pattern of coercive control.⁸ The dissociation of the perpetrator from the act, blaming externalized hands (manus) and calling them (temporarily) insane (dementes), though more frequent among victims who insist ‘that isn’t the real him’, is also employed by abusers themselves.⁹ The abuser’s characteristic moment of remorse (victor et ipse | flet) is a standard feature of the cycle of violence in domestic abuse.¹⁰ There is even a degree of emotional complexity in the depiction of the interaction between the farmer and his wife. I would not go as far as Lee-Stecum (1998: 280) in asserting that ‘[w]hile the male has the physical power, the female has the emotional control, and the outburst of violence is effectively turned against him’, which teeters on the brink of victim-blaming. However, Tibullus certainly does not offer an oversimplistic picture of abusive male agency and passive female victimhood. This passage, even with its elegiac topoi and personified god of love, is excellent evidence that Romans in the third decade bc could construct and recognize a sophisticated depiction of the causes, nature, and ramifications of domestic violence. However, there remains the question as to how it relates to ecofeminism, beyond the apparently contingent and arbitrary detail that it takes place between a farmer and his wife.

The answer to this question is, of course, that the identity of the abuser and abused as farmer and wife is in no way contingent or arbitrary. It stands at the very heart of Tibullus’ construction of the relationship, not only between this man and woman, but between his own elegiac persona and its beloved Delia, between war and peace, between violence and love, between culture and nature. Rich and insightful as these five couplets are even in isolation, they need to be read in the wider context of the elegy 1.10, of the carefully constructed Gedichtbuch that is Tibullus book 1, and of wider Roman attitudes to gender, violence, and agriculture. Elegy 1.10 establishes an antithesis, carried over and developed from the collection’s first poem, between war and peace, associating the latter strongly with an idealized image of agriculture. It is widely and correctly observed that there is a constant tension between ideal and reality in Tibullus’ elegies and especially in his fantasy of an idyllic, erotic agrarian existence.¹¹ However, the problem is not merely that his agrarian ideal is unattainable, but that the antithesis between war and agriculture is a false one.

The figure of the farmer–soldier was central to both the realities of Rome’s military manpower and the self-construction of its cultural imaginations, perhaps most famously encapsulated in the figure of Cincinnatus leaving his plough to fight the Aequi.¹² Even more tellingly, the practice of agriculture is regularly conceptualized as a form of warfare, against weeds and pests, against the land, against nature, warfare that frequently involves violence and always aims at domination.¹³ This parallelism—it is less hierarchical than a metaphor—is particularly prominent in Virgil’s Georgics, which was published shortly before Tibullus’ first book and with which the latter closely engages.¹⁴ However, even within 1.10 itself, in the very lines in which the poet is anaphorically hymning the agricultural blessings of a personified peace, those blessings are the violent imposition of coercive control upon nature. Peace, as prōtos heuretēs, invented ploughing and in doing so initiated the literal subjugation of nature, forcing oxen beneath the yoke (pax candida primum | duxit araturos sub iuga curva boues, 10.45–46). In Peace, agricultural tools, the mattock and the ploughshare, gleam, while rust covers the grim arms of the tough soldier in the shadows (pace bidens vomerque nitent—at tristia duri | militis in tenebris occupat arma situs—, 49–50), but the unstated antithesis reminds the reader that these tools are the arms of the equally tough farmer.¹⁵ Virgil explicitly calls them arma in a georgification of the Homeric arming type-scene of the explicitly tough farmer (duris agrestibus arma, 1.160), while the tough mattock has to be hurled like a missile (duros iactare bidentis, 2.355). In this triangulation of war, agriculture, and sex, the image of the ploughshare suggests not only military violence against the enemy, Nature, but the procreative ‘ploughing’ of the female body, as in Lucretius’ warning that unnecessary gyrations can divert the furrow from the ploughshare (vomer) and prevent conception (4.1268–74).

Even if those editors who posit a short lacuna between the praise of Pax and the scene of domestic violence are correct, these subtle reminders of the parallelism between the farmer and the soldier nevertheless prepare the ground for the depiction of a man whose embodiment of the Tibullan ideal of the farmer–lover cannot ultimately be kept separate from its supposed antithesis, the soldier–lover. If, on the contrary, the manuscripts accurately preserve the sudden irruption of this scene of rustic, erotic violence into a self-deconstructing fantasy of rustic peace, the dissonance is even greater. The violence that soldiers inflict upon the enemy is indivisible from the violence that farmers inflict upon the land, and that interpersonal and environmental violence intersects in the figure of the farmer who attacks his wife.

One of the greatest challenges in exploring Roman domestic violence—and that of many other cultures—is in determining the boundary between abuse that is societally endorsed and that which is, however ineffectually, deprecated. On the surface, Tibullus strongly condemns the farmer’s actions: ‘Ah! he is stone and iron, whoever can beat his own girl!’ (ah lapis est ferrumque, suam quicumque puellam | verberat, 1.10.59–60). However, the behaviour that he presents as preferable and normative is both distressing and illuminating.

(Tib. 1.10.61–64)

Tibullus draws a fine distinction between violence against the woman’s actual body (scissosque capillos, 10.53; teneras obtusa genas, 55) and violence that ‘only’ damages her clothing and produces sufficient fear and distress to make her cry. While the latter behaviour is acceptable, anyone who perpetrates the former should be excluded from love (miti sit procul a Venere, 66) and become a soldier instead (scutumque sudemque | is gerat, 65–66). One last time, Tibullus tries to maintain the antithesis between the soldier and the lover (and implicitly the farmer), even though this warlike behaviour is exactly that displayed by the farmer–lover a few lines earlier. However, what is most striking here is the acceptability of carefully circumscribed levels of domestic violence. Not only to modern sensibilities, but even elsewhere in Roman elegy and also in comedy, the distinction between bodily violence and intimate terrorism is so fine as to be non-existent.¹⁶ Even if any such distinction were to be accepted, the potential for acceptable violence to escalate into unacceptable violence is immense, to the point of being a virtual certainty. Finally, even if the distinction both existed and could realistically be maintained, the very act of terrorizing and coercively controlling a partner in itself constitutes domestic abuse. It is here that the parallelism with the farmer—and indeed the soldier—is closest. Although all three do indulge in acts of violence, sometimes ‘acceptable’, sometimes not, their ultimate aim is that of control: the forcible pacification of conquered lands and peoples (the desert Pax of Tacitus’ Calgacus is closer to the Roman ideal and reality than Tibullus’ rustic idyll), the aggressive cultivation of the soil, its crops, and livestock, and the coercive control of domestic partners.¹⁷ That control is maintained, sometimes by intermittent acts of violence, but more consistently by the emotional effectiveness of the underlying threat of force, be it the holding of chieftains’ sons as hostages, the use of the whip, bit, and bridle, or the tearing of a dress to induce tears. Tibullus, in his idolization of the agrarian life of peace, condemns domestic violence, yet he not only condones but positively encourages the culture of control—of nature and of women—that both causes domestic violence and is in itself an even more pernicious form of domestic abuse.

2. CATO, THE VILICA, AND THE COERCIVE CONTROL OF NATURE

The abusive exercise of coercive control is even more evident in our next text, which has no explicit indication of actual violence whatever. It comes from one of the earliest extant works of Latin prose, the Elder Cato’s De agricultura, in a passage where he instructs his male overseer (vilicus) how to instruct in turn the subordinated female overseer (vilica).¹⁸

Vilicae quae sunt officia, curato faciat. si eam tibi dederit dominus uxorem, ea esto contentus. ea te metuat facito. ne nimium luxuriosa siet. vicinas aliasque mulieres quam minimum utatur neve domum neve ad sese recipiat: ad cenam ne quo eat neve ambulatrix siet.

Those duties that belong to a female overseer, take care that she does them. If the master gave her to you as a wife, be satisfied with her. See to it that she is afraid of you. Let her not be too luxurious. Let her associate with neighbouring and other women as little as possible and let her receive them neither into the house nor into her own quarters: let her not go out anywhere to dinner nor be a flâneuse.

(Cato, Agr. 143)

The coercive control of the vilica is specifically connected to her status as wife.¹⁹ Only if—and, by implication, because—the master has given her to you as a wife, should you enact this campaign of intimate terrorism upon her.²⁰ Eleanor Cowan has, in this volume, delineated the features of coercive control and their presence in Roman culture, but it is worth noting that Cato’s programme for the vilicus and vilica presents, if anything, an even more textbook scenario of coercive control than Tibullus 1.10 does of domestic violence.²¹

Cato does not merely recommend actions which might lead to the intimidation of the vilica, but specifically orders the vilicus systematically to make her fear him (ea te metuat facito). As Barlow and Walklate put it (2022: 45, original emphasis), ‘A key feature of a relationship being coercive and controlling is the presence of fear, that is, one person (usually a woman) restricts, changes, or limits their behaviour in response to a partner’s demands because they are afraid of them’. Cato is likewise clear—perhaps even explicit, if the subsequent phrases (ne … neve … neve … ne … neve) are construed as purpose clauses rather than negative jussives—that the specific purpose of the fear that the vilicus should engender in the vilica is to restrict and control her actions. Those restrictions also, with surprisingly little need to make allowance for cultural distance and difference, bear a strikingly close resemblance to modern definitions of coercive control, such as a recent formulation by the scholar who brought the concept to prominence, Evan Stark:

prohibiting contact with friends, family as well as health services; monitoring and/or constraining her movements into and through social space (e.g. ‘never letting her go out alone’); continual belittlement; regulating what she wore, her sleep, hairstyle and makeup; … These behaviours are deemed harmful … because they compromise women’s autonomy, cause them ‘fear’ and ‘distress’ and contribute to their ‘subordination’.²²

With the exception of ‘continual belittlement’, which implicitly underlies all the others, each of these harmful behaviours is explicitly prescribed for the vilicus by Cato: clothes, hairstyle, and makeup are regulated so as not to be too luxurious (nimium luxuriosa);²³ contact with friends is prohibited (vicinas aliasque mulieres quam minimum utatur neve domum neve ad sese recipiat); movement into and through social space is constrained (ad cenam ne quo eat neve ambulatrix siet); and, of course, these behaviours do not just incidentally serve to, but are consciously designed to contribute to the vilica’s subordination.

As the object of coercive control, Cato’s vilica is just as much the victim of domestic abuse as the physically assaulted farmer’s wife of Tibullus 1.10. However, as with the Tibullan femina, it may appear that the vilica’s contingent status as an agricultural worker has no significant connection with her status as a victim of domestic abuse. This in no way diminishes the interest or importance of her experience, or rather of the real women whose experience must have been shaped by the ideologies reflected in Cato’s words about the hypothetical vilica.²⁴ However, it does raise a question about the relevance of an ecofeminist lens to examining this instance of coercive control. As with Tibullus, context is everything.

Cato’s surrogate coercive control of the vilica is enacted, not merely through the proxy of the vilicus, but by means of enacting a comparable exercise of coercive control upon the vilicus himself. Although the status of both overseers as free or enslaved is uncertain, it is certain that they stand in a subordinated and even subjugated position to Cato. The vilicus is to function—in the coercive control of the vilica as in all other aspects of estate management—as, in Reay’s vivid image of Cato’s use of enslaved persons more generally, ‘the extension … of the master’s body, everywhere all the time through servile prostheses with which he “performed” various tasks and transactions’.²⁵ Cato, not the vilicus, is the one who is truly guilty of coercive control. Yet, while Cato’s own discourse tends to elide the agency and personhood of his servile prostheses, that very elision is effected by his parallel control of the surrogate controller. This parallel between the master’s control of the vilicus himself and of the vilica through the vilicus is most clearly signalled by the way in which Cato, in chapter 143, ‘virtually repeats verbatim’ (Hallett 2022: 65) his instructions for the vilicus’ own behaviour: ‘Let the vilicus not be a flâneur … let him not go anywhere to dinner’ (vilicus ne sit ambulator … ad cenam ne quo eat, 5.2). Cato’s prescribed coercive control of a wife by her husband is virtually indistinguishable from his own coercive control of his slaves. Although the cultural, social, and ideological differences between ancient institutional slavery and modern slavery must be taken into account, it is striking that the explanatory notes of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 include among examples of abusive behaviour that which ‘treats the victim as a domestic slave’ (Scott and Ritch 2021: 598).

The coercive control of the vilica, both that prescribed to her husband by Cato and that enacted by Cato through the husband as servile prosthesis, is analogous to and part of the same abusive system as the master’s coercive control of his (other) slaves. However, it is not—or not solely—exerted for its own sake. Cato controls his servile prostheses so that they can control the land and its produce and ultimately generate profit for him.²⁶ This is where the ecofeminist lens becomes useful. Both the chain of control and the network of overlapping and parallel controls originating from Cato extend beyond the vilicus, the vilica, and even beyond the labouring slaves subordinated to them, to the control and exploitation of nature.²⁷ If Hallett is correct that Cato’s control of his slaves’ sexual behaviour reflected, not only his own sexual preferences, abusively indulged, but the commodification of their bodies’ fertility for profit (Hallett 2022), then the parallelism between his rapacious exploitation of the land and of the female body is even closer. The coercive control of the environment may seem a long way from the violent abuse of an intimate partner, a distance that can only be bridged by the essentialist assumptions of ecofeminism. However, the pernicious power of abuse, even in the absence of actual violence, even in situations outside the sphere of intimate partner relationships, demands to be recognized in the sort of intersectional way that Hearn (2021: 29) outlines:

there is a great need for more empirical work on IPV, but the methodological-ontological-epistemological problem of violence remains: that direct physical violence is not always ‘necessary’ following earlier violence or threat, or simply the existence of structural violence and major power imbalances, as in slavery, forced and indentured labour, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and of course patriarchy.

Structural violence and major power imbalances were fundamental features of Republican Rome and its microcosm in Cato’s estate, and they manifested themselves in the coercive control imposed on the person of the vilica, on the familia of slaves, and on the land that their dominus cultivated through them.

3. VIRGIL, FEMINIZED NATURE, AND THE ELOQUENT ABSENCE OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE

Tibullus’ femina and Cato’s vilica can broadly be characterized as ‘naturalized women’, representations of human females who stand in a metaphorical or synecdochic relationship to the natural environment. We turn now to two closely interrelated texts, Virgil’s Georgics and Columella’s De re rustica 10, featuring, in equally broad terms, ‘feminized nature’, the natural environment depicted, conceptualized, and constructed as female or feminine, with implicit or explicit similarities to human females. The distinction between naturalized women and feminized nature is a convenient taxonomy, but it has little significance for ecofeminism as an approach. The essence of ecofeminism, whether embraced or deprecated, is the affinity and parallelism of women and nature, rather than any sense that one or other is the ‘real’ object of inquiry, only illuminated by the other. The distinction is even more problematic in texts like the Georgics which constantly play with the relationship between the literal and the allegorical, toying with the reader’s interpretation of whether a farmer is ‘really’ a farmer, or rather a metaphorical soldier, citizen, everyman, whether or not a heifer, an olive tree, a field, the earth is ‘really’ a metaphorical woman.²⁸ This constant slippage, ambiguity, and indeterminacy make the poem particularly susceptible to an ecofeminist reading, or rather the multiplicity of readings that diverse and conflicting ecofeminisms produce.

I have sketched some such ecofeminist readings of the Georgics elsewhere (Cowan 2021) but without focusing on domestic violence, for good reason. The Iron Age of labor (and the oft-ignored cura) that Jupiter ushers in in the so-called theodicy and that dominates the world of the Georgics requires an assiduous, controlling, and often violent engagement with the entropic forces of post-Saturnian Nature. A number of these do resonate with abusive acts and patterns of behaviour. One notable example is the coercive control of the partially anthropomorphized broodmare, deliberately starved and compelled to take exhausting exercise against her will, as part of a male control of her reproductive rights.²⁹ The agricultural metaphor representing the mare’s reproductive organs as a furrow in a ploughed field (genitali arvo et sulcus, 3.136) asserts the parallelism between the explicit animal, the implicit human, and the metaphorical land. The fertility of all three must, like Cato’s vilica and his estate, be coercively controlled and protected from being dulled by the purely personal liberty of excessive luxury (nimio … luxu, 3.135) which might compromise their usefulness and profit (usus) to their male exploiter.

Nevertheless, although success in the Iron Age is predicated on the exercise of control through the threat and performance of violence, very little of that control or violence is constructed, even metaphorically, as occurring in a domestic or intimate context. We have already noted the poem’s complex interplay between systems and modes of imagery, and this is particularly prominent in the ways that it depicts the relationship of the farmer to nature. The farmer is frequently depicted as doing (‘necessary’) violence to the land or its produce, but only as a soldier waging a bellum externum against a foreign foe, not as a husband assaulting his own wife.³⁰ The land and its produce are often depicted in feminine, especially maternal, terms, but then they are (generally) the object and reciprocator of tender, erotic passion. Some mothers and families are victims of violence, but it is violence from outside rather than from within the domestic environment. Mother trees have their shoots-cum-children brutally ripped from their tender bodies so that they can be propagated (plantas tenero abscindens de corpore matrum, 2.23). A family of birds has its long-term home ruthlessly demolished by an angry ploughman (iratus … arator) to clear idle woodland for productive farmland, rendering the victims homeless refugees (2.207–11). The farmer here is brutal and violent, but his violence is, if not necessarily that of the soldier, then that of the slave-trader, the slum landlord, the property developer, rather than that of the abusive husband. When the land is depicted as an intimate partner, most elaborately in Virgil’s version of the hieros gamos between anthropomorphized sky and earth at 2.323–31, the sexual and cosmic union ‘is consensual and, if anything, she proactively initiates the coupling by demanding the seeds of generation (genitalia semina poscunt, 2.324). There is no overt indication here of sexual or ecological violence’ (Cowan 2021: 192).

Virgil, then, largely excludes the depiction of ecological domestic violence from the Georgics, but that very exclusion expresses an anxiety about the issue. The overemphatically positive picture of the exploitation of feminized nature and the equally overemphatic suppression of suggestions of violence underpinning that exploitation inevitably draw attention to the elephant in the farmhouse. Even the ostensibly ‘optimistic’ depiction of Mother Earth’s willing and proactive engagement in the hieros gamos reflects an underlying ideology of subordination and control, since ‘such a construction is perhaps exactly what a patriarchal discourse would wish to produce in order to legitimate the subordination of woman and nature to man and culture, with the added suggestion that they both desire and enjoy their own subordination’ (Cowan 2021: 192). The dark—or even darker—side of this idealization of woman and nature’s cheerful acceptance of and complicity in their own subjugation is the unstated recognition that, if woman and nature refuse to accept or comply, then they must be made to by the exercise of coercive control and the threat or performance of violence. The Georgics acknowledges—or rather asserts—that, in the Iron Age, violence is necessary for the cultivation of nature. The Georgics acknowledges—or rather asserts—that there is an essentializing parallelism between nature and woman. For all the poem’s complex deployment of diverse and often contradictory systems of imagery—the farmer as soldier, general, husband, the land as ally, enemy, wife—it is impossible for the reader at the point of reception to avoid a blurring of those systems. She cannot read of violence against the land-as-enemy-soldier alongside consensual sex with the land-as-wife-and-mother without thinking of their intersection in violence against the land-as-intimate-partner and feeling its absence from the poem. Virgil’s suppression of ecological domestic violence in his poem produces a deafening silence. Columella heard it.

4. COLUMELLA, FEMINIZED NATURE, AND THE ANXIETIES OF ESSENTIALISM

Book 10 of Columella’s De re rustica is a wonderful oddity. The Neronian agronomist decided to accept the challenge rhetorically laid down by Virgil in Georgics 4. In a praeteritio, Virgil claimed to have no time to write about horticulture and so left the task to future writers. Columella therefore composed the tenth book of his prose treatise on agriculture in hexameters. DRR 10 has been the object of considerable scholarly interest over the last quarter-century, and his poetic—and even metapoetic—artistry has been rehabilitated.³¹ Among its other qualities, DRR 10 is a peculiarly insightful creative commentary on the Georgics. Columella is a remarkably sophisticated reader of Virgil and, if his poetic annotations of those readings sometimes lack subtlety, they clearly articulate how the Georgics could be and was read in the principate of Nero, and perhaps something of how they were composed in proto-Augustan Rome.³² Virgil subtly depicts a cucumber in language that implicitly connects it to the deadly snakes of book 3, and Columella loudly signals his apprehension of this move by explicitly comparing a cucumber to a snake in a simile.³³ Virgil subtly expresses anxiety about the relationship of intrusive agriculture to domestic violence by excluding any depiction of it from the Georgics, and Columella addresses the issue head-on.

The first anxiety that Columella addresses is that, since the earth is our mother, there could be something impious about our violation of her. Columella’s solution is to prove that the earth is not our mother:

(Col. 10.58–62, 65–67)

Columella’s ‘proof’ that the earth is not the mother of the current human race is bizarre, strident, unparalleled, and based on at best a very strained interpretation of the mythological and poetic tradition. The image of the world bereft of mortals (viduo mortalibus orbe) clearly evokes Virgil’s depiction of Deucalion hurling rocks into an empty world (vacuum lapides iactavit in orbem, Verg. G. 1.61–62), and it is just about possible to conceptualize Deucalion himself, broadcasting his semen-rocks, as the inseminator, the fertile hand that fathered us. However, if Deucalion is the inseminator, the rocks are surely the semen, which Virgil states were cast into the (implicitly mother) earth (in orbem). It is very hard to see how the rocks themselves could be the gestating mother who gave birth (peperere) to us. Even if they were, an equally authoritative version, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, identified those very rocks as the bones of Deucalion and Pyrrha’s mother, the earth (magna parens terra est: lapides in corpore terrae | ossa reor dici, 1.393–94).

The stridency, eccentricity, and forcedness of Columella’s justification all attest to a strong and difficult-to-assuage anxiety—whether self-consciously staged or underlying—about the ethics of agriculture, when conceptualized as violence against the mother. Although it is just possible that the anxiety is about incest, the language used is almost exclusively that of violence rather than sex. There was of course a deplorable overlap between the two in Roman thought, but Columella shows no embarrassment later about configuring the hieros gamos as an explicitly and joyously incestuous union. The sexual congress of the Sky-god Jupiter as a shower of rain with the Earth Mother is presented as analogous to that with Danae as a shower of gold (Acrisioneos veteres imitatur amores, 10.205) to the extent that mother and son are coupled in juxtaposition, as ‘the mother her son’s love does not now spurn’ (nec genetrix nati nunc aspernatur amorem, 10.207). Rather it is violence against the mother which is unthinkable and which must be dissociated from agricultural violence. Elder abuse was far from unknown in the Greco-Roman world, as Tim Parkin shows in this volume, but there remained a strong social, legal, and religious taboo against the figures of the parricida and the patroloias. Orestes and Alcmaeon aside (or perhaps inclusive), violence towards the mother was even more terrible, as indicated in Aristophanes’ Clouds, where the pernicious influence of the Phrontisterion on Pheidippides is first signalled by his beating of his father, Strepsiades, but becomes intolerable at the point when he threatens to beat his mother as well (Ar. Nu. 1443–53). Virgil—again, self-consciously or not—dealt with anxiety about the conceptualization of agriculture as domestic violence by pretending it did not exist. Columella vocalizes that anxiety by tying himself in knots to prove that, though it is violence, it is not an act of filial impiety.

Columella addresses Virgil’s anxiety only partially, by dissociating agriculture from mother-beating, but not from domestic violence per se. He does not offer a rationalization of the land as an inert geological structure, nor even an alternative allegorization of the earth as a foreign woman to be assaulted, colonized, and cultivated. Instead, he offers one of the most detailed, point-for-point representations of the land as woman, combining it with an equally detailed—and brutal—representation of agricultural cultivation as gendered violence. Moreover, it is clear that this woman is an intimate partner, whether a wife or an elegiac puella:³⁴

(Col. 10.67–73)

Columella presents a scene of intimate partner violence, no doubt all too common in the lived experience of many Roman women whose voices have been silenced, but also strongly reminiscent of Augustan elegy, with its torn hair and ripped clothes.³⁵ The gouging or even stabbing of the earth-wife’s back goes beyond elegy and includes a telling note of agency in her resistance (cunctantia), while the scraping of the innards hints at sexual mutilation. Columella reassures us that we shall not be assaulting our mother when we dig up the earth, but he is not simply unconcerned by the idea that in doing so we will be attacking an intimate partner: rather, that is the positive justification for horticultural violence. So firmly entrenched is the acceptability and even normativity of IPV, so pernicious the ends to which the nature–woman parallelism can be applied, that anxieties about attacking the earth can be alleviated by the assertion that it is just like—and just as acceptable as—attacking one’s wife. Or perhaps rather it tacitly and insidiously asserts the acceptability of IPV by granting it the unargued-for authority of a premise that can be taken for granted: attacking one’s wife must be OK because it is the reason that attacking the earth is. This is the dark side of ecofeminism and the essentialist fallacy. The association of women with nature and nature with women can be used to rationalize and justify the subjugation of both.

5. CODA

Ecofeminism is a conflicted field, but it has much to contribute to the study of domestic abuse. This article has looked at four texts which illustrate the diversity of the relationships between environmental exploitation and domestic abuse, in the form both of acts of intimate partner violence and of patterns of coercively controlling behaviour. They also demonstrate the different ways in which ecofeminism can illuminate those relationships, whether one embraces the nature–woman link or rejects it as a patriarchal essentialist fallacy that reinforces ideologies of subjugation and abuse. Tibullus’ femina and Cato’s vilica are representations of real women, victims of IPV and coercive control respectively, who both symbolize and inhabit a wider system of ecological exploitation. While Cato at least is employing the essentialist discourse to justify his coercive control of vilicus, vilica, slaves, and nature, it is possible to read against the grain to sympathize with and decry his parallel exploitation of all four. Virgil and Columella express, one through silence, one through stridence, a profound anxiety about the ethics of agriculture and the control of women, but the latter at least resolves that anxiety by using a circular essentialist argument to justify the most invasive forms of cultivation and the most brutal forms of IPV. Behind all these representations lie the unrecoverable lived experiences of real women on Italian farms and in Roman households. Ecofeminism has limited power to reconstruct those experiences, but it can offer insights into the mentality of the men who inflicted them.

REFERENCES

Footnotes