It is not even unambiguously clear from the text that he [Simulus] is a free man…There seems to be a deliberate vagueness on the poet’s part. Then there is Scybale. Is she serua, conserua, contubernalis, or what?Footnote 1
For the vast majority of Roman literature, the notion that a text was produced by a single nameable individual is quite problematic. Take, for instance, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Did Augustus write it entirely by his own hand, or was it more likely that he relied on secretaries (notarii), scribes (librarii) and slaves to turn his ideas and words into a full-fledged text and then a series of monumental inscriptions across the empire?Footnote 2 When Pliny the Elder boasts that he read 2,000 volumes and accumulated 20,000 facts in the process of composing the Naturalis Historia (HN pr. 17), what he really meant––but manages to successfully obscure––is that he achieved this feat with the assistance of literate workers.Footnote 3 But it is not just fact-laden prose texts that utilized the labour of slaves and freedmen: Horace, for example, offers the tantalizing possibility that an enslaved scribe can have a role in the composition of poetry too, when he dispatches a puer to add a few verses to his poem (i, puer, atque meo citus haec subscribe libello, ‘go, boy, and quickly add these lines to my little book’, Sat. 1.10.92).Footnote 4
Of course, collaboration comes in different shades and can entail ‘various configurations of gender and social status’.Footnote 5 Most literate workers were men, though we do occasionally find references to female scribes and secretaries;Footnote 6 and some collaborators probably had more creative input than others.Footnote 7 Our fleeting glimpses of collaboration, if it is represented at all, suggest that different representational regimes adopted different stances towards it, and create the impression of a far from straightforward system of literary production. Sometimes, as in the case of Cicero and Tiro, co-production is romanticized and idealized;Footnote 8 sometimes, as can be seen in Horace’s blunt orders to his puer, it is denuded, stripped of gloss and presented purely as exploitation. While scholarship is still getting to grips with the extent of collaboration and the range of possibilities,Footnote 9 there is little doubt that, in Roman culture, multiple people were often required for the physical and intellectual labour of literary production.
This brings me to the Moretum, a 122-line hexameter poem of uncertain authorship and date, found in the Appendix Vergiliana. The poem captures the homely activities of two country-dwellers in the early hours between waking and setting out for ploughing.Footnote 10 Simulus bakes bread and makes pesto from the ingredients he found in the garden, so that he will have something to eat when he works in the fields; meanwhile, his companion, Scybale, a black woman of African origin (so the text tells us at line 32, Afra genus), offers a helping hand here and there. For some time now, scholars have been attuned to the potential of the Moretum as a locus for thinking about issues of labour and its representation. While there remains an interpretative strand that views the Moretum squarely as a humorous literary jeu d’esprit Footnote 11 or as parody targeting poems like Callimachus’ Hecale,Footnote 12 many others––starting with Heinze’s seminal studyFootnote 13 ––have focussed on the poem’s depiction of rural labour, probing its apparent realist quality,Footnote 14 and exploring its metaphorical and metapoetic possibilities.Footnote 15 Whereas Virgil’s sentimentalized vision of the countryside in the Georgics lacks any real acknowledgement of the slave labour which underpins the productivity of the land,Footnote 16 the Moretum, it is said, offers something of a correction to this picture.Footnote 17 The poem spotlights the harsh toil demanded by even the smallest act of production,Footnote 18 and throws into sharp relief the power dynamics of gender and race in the context of labour––so much so that the Moretum has in recent years become a central text in the study of racialized gender in Graeco-Roman antiquity.Footnote 19 The poem is far from a dosage of realism, however. As Fitzgerald points out, given that the Moretum was most likely produced by a learned hand for an elite urban readership, the poem rather allows us ‘to explore the cultural norms that tend to make the life of a Simulus unrepresentable’.Footnote 20 In other words, the Moretum is not so much a sympathetic account of the authentic experience of the rural poor but a space for us to locate why a poet (of all people) might have an interest in addressing this subject matter.Footnote 21 For Fitzgerald, the answer to that question is that ‘the laborious preparations of Simulus described by the poet serve to materialize the otherwise invisible work of writing poetry.’Footnote 22 As for Scybale, Fitzgerald contends that the way in which the poet of the Moretum gives her the short shrift while elevating every moment of Simulus’ labour shines a telling light on how, even though Simulus’ work is dependent on the labour of an enslaved black woman, she herself is ‘driven out as culturally other’ from the high mimetic world of concocting a poem.Footnote 23
Building on Fitzgerald’s study, and taking into account the recent scholarship of Howley and Moss on the use of enslaved or formerly enslaved literate workers in Graeco-Roman antiquity, I want to suggest that the Moretum tells us more than just the invisible labour of one poet: rather, as I shall argue, the poem lends expression to the difficulty of distinguishing between exploitative labour and collaborative labour in Rome’s literary economy. I will show that, throughout the Moretum, exploitative labour is presented as collaborative, and vice versa; and that the poem thrives on the ambiguous socio-economic status of, and relationship between, its two principal characters. In this respect, my reading fleshes out the important (but hitherto unexplored) observation made by Kenney, which I quoted above at the beginning of this article. But my main contention is that, by refusing to demarcate collaboration from exploitation and by toying with the reader’s expectations of the status of Simulus and Co., the Moretum makes the Roman reader do the hard mental labour of figuring out whether there can ever be collaboration without exploitation in the Roman literary world. The difficulty of recognizing the difference between willed and coerced co-production not only serves as a fresh interpretative lens for the Moretum, but also sheds new light on the question of the poem’s authorship, which I shall explore in the final section of the article.
I. ANIMALS AND OBJECTS
The Moretum is bookended by animal labour. The poem begins (1–2):
Already the winter’s night had completed its tenth hour and the watchman bird had by its song heralded the day.Footnote 24
And it ends with (121–2):
He [Simulus] mustered his obedient bullocks under the thonged yoke, drove them fieldwards and plunged the ploughshare into the earth.
While it is not particularly surprising that a poem about rural activities opens and closes with descriptions of farm animals, it is worth noting that the nature of these two instances of animal labour are subtly different. The cockerel is introduced as an excubitor (‘watchman’, 2), and its crowing is delivered with the pomp of a high, official, public announcement (praedixerat, 2),Footnote 25 and takes on the quality of a ‘song’ (cantu, 2). The bird is immediately sublimated into an advanced human with a proper Job Title,Footnote 26 and, through ‘song’, is aligned with both the poet of the Moretum and Simulus, who later sings a tune in the kitchen (rustica carmina cantat, 29). By contrast, the bulls at the end of the poem receive no such elevation: sub iuga (‘under the yoke’, 121), these ‘obedient’ animals (parentis, 121) do the bidding of their master in dutiful silence, unsublimated and forced (cogit, 121) into performing an essential task. One farm animal kickstarts both the poem and the day in a role that brings to mind a human collaborator, while the other remains an exploited resource even though they too have a generative role as the bulls initiate the day’s ploughing and, by their sheer force, yank the Moretum into the grander plains of the Georgics. To anthropomorphize something is to ascribe it a will; and the more that a non-human entity is ascribed a will, the more it seems likely that it is capable of acting voluntarily.Footnote 27 The Moretum’s anthropomorphizing of certain (but not other) animals thus raises questions about how the poem perceives shared labour. It would appear that, while some animals are no more than figures of domination in the poet’s imagination, evoking the domestication of farm animals which stands in for the system of slavery in agricultural texts such as the Georgics,Footnote 28 others are imagined as actively contributing to labour in their own right.
Even inanimate objects are put through this system of representation. At lines 19–21, we see Simulus getting ready to grind some grain into flour:
Next he went and took up his position by the millstone and on a small shelf kept fixed to the wall for such purposes he placed his trusty lamp.
Commentators do not think much of the everyday objects mentioned in these lines. Ross turns his nose at the ‘empty grandeur’ devoted to this description of homely fixture;Footnote 29 Kenney detects merely ‘a mock-heroic touch’ in the words lumina fida (21).Footnote 30 What Ross and Kenney see as aesthetic pretension, I would rather see as another instance of pointed sublimation and personification, through which the poet muddles the collaboration–exploitation dichotomy. seruabat (20), which usually means ‘watch over’ or ‘protect’ and shares the same etymology with seruus, is used here to elevate the humble wall (paries, 20) to somewhere between a guardian and a slave.Footnote 31 The lamp too is seemingly anthropomorphized. On the one hand, it is invested with a quality––trustworthiness (21)––that is often found in a good friend or a wife;Footnote 32 on the other hand, as Sabnis points out, the lamp in Latin literature can function as a stand-in for the slave holding it,Footnote 33 and there are instances in Roman comedy where a slave describes himself as fidus (cf. Plaut. Mostell. 785; Mil. 1015; Rud. 953). Later in the poem, the fire and the hearth that Simulus uses to bake his bread also get a facelift, morphing into the gods Vulcan and Vesta, respectively: suas peragit Vulcanus Vestaque partes (‘as heat and hearth were performing their functions’, 51); but gods or not, they are here to do a job (suas peragit…partes).Footnote 34 Everyone and everything, animate or inanimate, is imagined as having a role in Simulus’ world. But more than that, it is the way in which the Moretum presents even the most ordinary process––putting a lamp on a shelf, heating up the fireplace––as somewhere between a near-imperceptible instance of resource utilization and a collaborative coming-together of various parts that should draw our attention to the poem’s interest in the finer dynamics and shared nature of production.
II. SCYBALE
Next, I come to the figure of Scybale. The poem’s description of her physical features has been the subject of intense scholarly debate (31–5):
She was his only companion, African in her race, her whole form a testimony to her country: her hair twisted into dreads, her lips full, her color dark, her chest broad, her breasts flat, her stomach flat and firm, her legs slender, her feet broad and ample.
The translation I reproduce here is that of Haley, whose pioneering study potently challenges the long-held idea that this is an unflattering portrait of a black African woman and offers instead a redemptive reading that seeks to empower Scybale’s ethnicity.Footnote 35 Importantly, Haley also notes that nowhere in this description is Scybale explicitly identified as a slave;Footnote 36 and her suggestion that Simulus and Scybale might be ‘companions out of mutual affection’ finds further expression in Bellei’s recent reading of the Moretum as an erotic satire, where it is argued that the relationship between Simulus and Scybale is not that of a white male master and his black female slave but of two equals, possibly both black, since the poem does not disclose the ethnicity of Simulus.Footnote 37
While Haley has shown compellingly that there is nothing inherently negative about this portrait of Scybale,Footnote 38 I am somewhat hesitant to subscribe to the view that the Moretum presents Scybale as Simulus’ equal and that it refrains from depicting her as a slave. Rather, I would suggest that the poem works to convey that Scybale is not merely a slave, which in turn blurs the boundary between exploitation and collaboration in the context of shared labour. We may note, firstly, that Scybale is introduced into the poem as custos (31), before being later referred to as famula (cf. clara famulam poscit mortaria uoce, ‘he loudly called to the servant for mortar and pestle’, 91). While famulus/famula always denotes an enslaved person in literary and epigraphical texts, custos does not and is certainly not as clear-cut as serua or ancilla.Footnote 39 Some critics have pointed out that the phrase erat unica custos (31) recalls Ovid’s description of the goose living on Philemon and Baucis’ farm (unicus anser erat, minimae custodia uillae, ‘they had one goose, the guardian of their tiny estate’, Ov. Met. 8.684), and the intertextual insinuation that Scybale is comparable to poultry may be dehumanizing.Footnote 40 Yet, as I have argued above, the Moretum offers the possibility of seeing even farm animals as contributors to labour in their own right. The poem’s broad understanding of shared labour thus leaves open the possibility that Scybale’s role in both Simulus’ life and the life of the farm is not simply that of a dominated slave.Footnote 41
However, Scybale’s appearance elsewhere in the poem suggests that she is far from an equal partner in Simulus’ production. Immediately after her physical description, we hear about Scybale being ordered ‘to put logs on the hearth to burn up and to heat cold water on the flame’ (arsura focis imponere ligna | imperat et flamma gelidos adolere liquores, 36–7); however, unlike the extended descriptions of Simulus’ activities which make up the bulk of the Moretum, Scybale’s execution of these orders are unnarrated and remain invisible. Lines 49–50 are even more revealing:
Thence he inserted it into the hearth (Scybale having first swept clean a suitable place for it) and covered it with crocks, heaping the fires on top.
Every modern edition of the text puts the sentence Scybale mundauerat aptum ante locum in parenthesis, as if to suggest (or perhaps highlight?) that Scybale’s cleaning of the oven––an important act of forward-planning––is not really part of the poem. Indeed, it is not hard to see why editors made this choice. These words have a flat, descriptive, interjectory quality that is characteristic of scholarly gloss. Moreover, while all the actions of Simulus the Head Chef are in the historic present (infert, 49; tegit, 50; aggerat, 50), Scybale the kitchen porter did her job in the past, mundauerat (49).Footnote 42 Notably, the only pluperfect verbs prior to this point are those describing the passing of the night in line 1, peregerat (‘had completed’), and the crowing of the cockerel in line 2, praedixerat (‘had declared’), which in turn suggest that Scybale got out of bed and got to work well before Simulus did. In other words, even though Scybale performs a vitally important role in Simulus’ agroculinary production, her contribution is conceived as having been carried out outside of the poem’s visual and temporal range.
Should we then consider Scybale a symbol of ‘hidden labour’?Footnote 43 Not quite. At the end of the poem, we finally encounter a brief description of her labour (117–22):
Meanwhile Scybale, also active, dug out the bread, which Simulus joyfully received in his hands, and with the fear of hunger banished, and free from care for that day, he wrapped his legs in a matched pair of leggings and with skin cap on head he mustered his obedient bullocks under the thonged yoke, drove them fieldwards and plunged the ploughshare into the earth.
The verb eruit (117) is quite loaded. Not only is it somewhat unceremonious, perhaps even pejorative, to describe taking bread out of the oven as ‘digging’, this verb is also set in contrast with another verb for earthwork five lines later—namely, Simulus’ ‘plunging’ (condit, 122) of the plough.Footnote 44 Whereas condit elevates the status of Simulus’ labour on the field, since condit can also mean ‘founded’ and is precisely the last thing that Aeneas did at the end of the Aeneid when he ‘plunged’ the sword into Turnus’ chest and thus ‘founded’ Rome (hoc dicens ferrum aduerso sub pectore condit | feruidus, ‘saying this, burning with rage, he buried his sword deep in Turnus’ breast’, Verg. Aen. 12.950–1), Scybale’s labour in the kitchen receives no such heroic and ktistic sublimation.Footnote 45 If anything, eruit downgrades rather than elevates her, reducing her status to that of a manual labourer in the purest sense. And this is all the more astounding if we consider that even inanimate objects in the poem––wall, lamp, makeshift domestic oven—are elevated through anthropomorphizing language.
To return to the question of what kind of role Scybale plays in Simulus’ world of production: the answer is not so easy. Scybale is a labourer, possibly an enslaved one, but the Moretum subtly reminds us that she is not just a labourer: she is also a collaborator, a planner and––to reclaim a word from the increasingly bewildering vocabulary of the modern university managerial class––a stakeholder. At times Scybale takes orders from Simulus (imperat, 37), giving the impression that her part in the shared labour is coerced; but other times she seems to offer her labour willingly, anticipating things (mundauerat…ante , 49–50) and zealously helpful (sedula, 117).Footnote 46 We may well read this ambiguity as a reluctant poetic admission of Roman rural economy’s reliance on free peasants and slave labour.Footnote 47 However, ancient economic scholarship has pointed out that the use of household labour (including women and children) was essential for peasant farming enterprises;Footnote 48 that exploitation was a daily reality for not only slaves but also lower-class free workers;Footnote 49 and that, above all, both slave labour and free labour, as workforces in the Roman economy, were options open to those with exploitative ambitions.Footnote 50 Set against this backdrop, I would suggest that the ambiguity of Scybale’s socio-economic status and the way in which the Moretum fudges the issue of whether her labour is willing or coerced serve to underscore the salient point that in Roman society––where the enslaved, the formerly enslaved and the free could all be labourers––the process of co-production often entails exploitation and that one’s status in this process is never quite straightforward.
III. SIMULUS
Finally, we come to the poem’s protagonist. From Simulus’ very first appearance, we are told not to imagine him as anything but a farmer: Simulus exigui cultor…rusticus agri (‘Simulus, a rustic tiller of a small plot of land’, 3). But what this little tagline conveniently fails to tell us is whether Simulus is the owner of that small plot of land or a tenant worker or an enslaved farmhand.Footnote 51 The question of Simulus’ exact status becomes no clearer as the poem proceeds. The next two lines reveal that he ‘fears hunger’ (metuens ieiunia, 4) and sleeps on a ‘poor bed’ (uili…grabato, 5), which suggests that he is not a well-off landowner. But Simulus also appears to have a slave(?)-girl, a casula (66), a larder or storeroom (15–16), oxen and presumably a stable (121), and a kitchen garden that yields marketable produce (60–84)––a topic to which I shall return later. The quantity of Simulus’ possessions, along with his use of draft animals and (slave?) labour, whilst not incompatible with a peasant lifestyle, certainly suggests that he is not rooted to the bottom of the socio-economic ladder either.Footnote 52 In fact, the Moretum even occasionally gestures towards Simulus’ master-like status. We see him ‘freeing’ his arms (lacertos | liberat, 21–2) like a dominus emancipating his slaves, ‘summoning’ his hands to work (aduocat…manus operi, 24) like an employer, and ‘ordering’ Scybale about (imperat, 37) as if he possessed significant power.
We learn the most about Simulus’ social status in the poem’s description of his garden (60–84), a highly artificial narrative digression typically found in Hellenistic and neoteric poetry.Footnote 53 As is well recognized, this garden ekphrasis corresponds specifically to the garden of the old Corycian at Verg. G. 4.116–48.Footnote 54 In addition, the proliferation of sexual vocabulary in the description of vegetables (fertilis, 62; fecundus, 72; uirebant, 72; radix as metaphor for penis, 75; cucurbita as metaphor for womb, 76), culminating in the identification of rocket as an aphrodisiac (Venerem recouans eruca morantem, ‘rocket which recalls flagging potency’, 84), has led many to recognize the latent sexual energy of the garden and the role it plays in fashioning Simulus into a Priapic figure.Footnote 55 Above all, however, the garden ekphrasis sheds important light on the world outside Simulus’ farm and on its impact on Simulus’ life on the farm, and as such it is one of the sociological cruces of the poem. Critics have pointed out that, while the garden of the old Corycian is praised by Virgil for its quiet aestheticism and serves to idealize the image of an independent smallholder unaffected and untroubled by what goes on outside his little rural world, the garden of Simulus by contrast has practical and commercial use.Footnote 56 Following a catalogue of all the wonderful things that grow in his garden (71–6), which creates the impression that Simulus is entirely self-sufficient (nil illi deerat, ‘he lacked nothing’, 63), the poem delivers a twist: uerum hic non domini (quis enim contractior illo?) | sed populi prouentus erat (‘this produce, however, was reserved not for its lord––nobody could have been narrower than he––but for the public’, 77–8). It turns out that Simulus, who cannot even claim to be the master of his vegetables, sells surplus produce at the market in town (78–81). However, this revelation in no way illuminates his social status. We are told that Simulus returns to his farm ‘light of neck but heavy with money’ (ceruice leuis, grauis aere, 80), but what does he need the money for? The possible allusion to Virgil’s first Eclogue (1.31–5, especially line 35), in which Tityrus similarly sells farm produce in the city in order to obtain libertas and peculium (Ecl. 1.32), may suggest that Simulus likewise needs money for manumission, which would make him a slave.Footnote 57 However, if Simulus is only selling his surplus, which implies that this is just a ‘side hustle’ for him, it would suggest that he is a free peasant with other forms of income and subsistence.Footnote 58 As the text fudges the issue of why Simulus sells his produce, it would appear that the poet of the Moretum wants us to find out no more about Simulus’ social status than that of Scybale.
Moreover, the garden ekphrasis even complicates the definition of work.Footnote 59 The poem tells us that Simulus’ garden requires no more than recula curae (literally, ‘a small matter of care’, 65) and that he only tends to it on non-ploughing periods and holidays (si quando uacuum casula pluuiaeue tenebant | festaue lux, si forte labor cessabat aratri, ‘if ever rain or a holiday kept him unoccupied at home, if by any chance there was a respite from ploughing’, 66–7). Indeed, ancient agricultural texts often recommend that one should only work on the garden during spare time, which implies that the activity is of low priority––‘a side-line, an inessential off-shoot maybe, of whatever constitutes the “essential” agricultural sphere’.Footnote 60 Yet Simulus’ garden is a source of income: it is ostensibly a pastime that generates revenue for him. The conflation of trade and leisure, profit and pleasure paints an ideal image of making money from one’s hobby; but it also raises the question what exactly constitutes work for Simulus. Is he technically working even when he is ‘off the clock’? At what point does work stop and leisure begin? Where do we draw the line?
In spite of these ambiguities, however, the fact that this passage situates Simulus’ life and produce in relation to the elite society outside his farm––something which we do not find in the case of Scybale––should encourage us to interrogate what the Moretum can tell us about labour production in a broader economic context. An instructive moment is the description of the lettuce in line 74: grataque nobilium requies lactuca ciborum (‘and lettuce that affords relief from rich foods’). Fitzgerald reads the lettuce as an image of the present poem: a little taste of the Cottagecore that the Roman elite readers fetishize, a welcome break from the cloying epic feasts consumed by posh readers all the time.Footnote 61 I want to press this reading further but nudge it more towards a socio-economic direction. If the lettuce is a stand-in for the poem, then Simulus––the farmer who sells the fruit of his labour in the city––may be seen as not only a producer of poetry but also someone who trades his art. Indeed, we find similar representations of the trading of poetry in Martial (1.2, 1.117.9–17, 3.38.7–10, 4.72, 5.15, 5.16, 5.36, 11.3, 11.108, 13.3).Footnote 62 However, whereas the lettuce makes its way into the dining room of the Roman elite, the human labour force that produced it is excluded from High Table. Simulus is merely a transient presence in the cityscape (nonisque diebus, ‘every eight days’, 78); for the rest of the time, he is largely invisible to the consumers of his labour, and his crew of farm animals, domestic help, exploited labour force––whatever we might wish to call them—are even less visible to the consumers than him. The repeated references to the urban rich in the garden ekphrasis (nobilium, 74; urbem, 79; urbani…macelli, 81) remind the poem’s contemporary Roman readers of their lofty status and the fact that they get to enjoy the product without having to do any of the work themselves.Footnote 63 But if the consumer really thinks that the sustainably sourced lettuce that they are chewing on is the undertaking of one artisanal farmer-grocer, then the poet of the Moretum seems determined to challenge that picture by complicating the social status of Simulus and by drawing attention to the breached boundaries between productivity and pleasure, employment and exploitation. By inviting readers to recognize agricultural labour as a metaphor for literary composition, the glimpses of hidden, coerced and collaborative labour in the Moretum can be seen to direct the reader’s gaze towards the un(der)-appreciated work that goes into poetic production, and the poem as a whole may be read as a rustic refraction of Rome’s literary industry.
Against this backdrop, the poem’s final agroculinary product, the moretum, which is made by mixing together different ingredients, gains a new significance. While the pesto could, of course, function as a metapoetic object––that is, an image of poetic creation through the activities of verbal echoes, allusions and borrowings which constitute the very essence of Latin literature—I would suggest that the making of the pesto may also be read as a microcosm and symbolic image of a larger, less clear-cut, creative process. The detailed description of Simulus’ pesto-making begins by highlighting the almost violent power with which he has to smash everything together: mollit (‘mashed’, 99), terit (‘pounded’, 100). The individual components start to combine but not without putting up some resistance first: only ‘little by little’ did the ingredients ‘lose their own strength’ (paulatim singula uires | deperdunt proprias, 101–2) and some ‘held out in vain’ (frustra repugnant, 103). Soon enough, color est e pluribus unus (‘one colour emerged from several’, 102), but the true identities of the individual components are no longer visible.Footnote 64 As if to reiterate this process of obtaining uniformity from variety, the description of pesto-making concludes with the words inque globum distantia contrahit unum (‘[he] brought together the parts into a single ball’, 115). Things that resolutely ‘stand apart’ (distantia)––another subtle anthropomorphizing moment––are ‘drawn together’ (contrahit), but there is a sense of loss: uniformity (con-) is achieved through dragging (-traho) and kicking;Footnote 65 variety and difference are subsumed under reassuring oneness (unum). The finished product, rounded and smooth (globum),Footnote 66 has a new appearance and name (species nomenque, 116), which leaves no clue to its maker, whose social identity is already far from clear. If we are to understand pesto-making as a metaphor for poetic composition,Footnote 67 then this description not only materializes the labour of writing poetry but also draws attention both to how the whole may be less than the sum of its parts and, more importantly, to how ‘collaboration’ smooths out and effectively erases the individual contributions that make up complex and multiply authored products.
IV. THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE MORETVM / CONCLUSIONS
To conclude, I would like to return to the question of authorship and literary collaboration. Just as we know very little about Simulus, we have practically no information on the author of the Moretum either. Critics think that the author was probably active during the Early Principate. Kenney, for example, tentatively assigns a date range of 8–c.25 c.e. for the Moretum on the basis of its allusions to Ovid’s poetry and of Martial’s claim that eating lettuce as a digestive (Moretum 74) was the custom of ‘grandfathers’ (auorum, Mart. 13.14).Footnote 68 Similarly, Perutelli postulates that, while the Moretum could have been written at any point during the Late Augustan to Neronian periods, the poem’s literary characteristics would point to a composition date not much later than Ovid’ time.Footnote 69 In truth, however, we have absolutely nothing on the author. It would seem that the poet’s identity was obscure or obscured, and therefore that their social status and social relationship to the readership were also obscured. One might say that the author fudged their own relationships in a way that they fudged Simulus’ relationship to the urban elite. If we wish to sustain this parallel between the anonymous poet and Simulus, then we might say that the Moretum encourages its readers to see the author as someone of a lowly but unspecified status, and to reflect on the involvement and subsequent erasure of collaborative literary labour in the process of its production.
Can we then imagine a scenario where a text like the Moretum was produced by someone who was learned but not elite, perhaps a professional man of letters familiar with (or working in) a setting where collaboration or slave labour might have contributed to the production of literature? It is worth noting that a significant number of the grammarians mentioned in Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus were freedmen;Footnote 70 and that some of them, especially those active in the Early Principate, were considered by Suetonius to be the leading authorities on Latin literature, in particular poetry.Footnote 71 For example, Caecilius Epirota opened a school and was ‘the first to begin lecturing on Virgil and other modern poets’ (primusque Vergilium et alios poetas nouos praelegere coepisse, Suet. Gram. et rhet. 16.3);Footnote 72 Lucius Crassicius ‘assisted the writers of mimes’ (mimographos adiuuat) before producing a commentary on Cinna’s Zmyrna (Suet. Gram. et rhet. 18.2);Footnote 73 C. Julius Hyginus, a freedman of Augustus and later the head of the Palatine library, not only wrote a work called De agri cultura, according to Columella (1.1.13, 3.11.8, 11.2.83, 11.3.62), but also expounded on the poetry of Virgil (GRF frr. 3–11) and ‘was on very friendly terms with Ovid’ (fuitque familiarissimus Ouidio poetae, Suet. Gram. et rhet. 20.2).Footnote 74 The portraits of these freedmen grammarians of the Augustan era offer a rich picture of the kind of poetry that gradually became part of their pedagogical and literary repertoire––the kind of poetry that constituted the intertextual fabric of the Moretum. More than that, however, these biographies also present us with an image of a group of ‘knowledge-workers’ who crafted, grafted and traded their intellectual labour. These men were once enslaved and had the experience of working collaboratively; in time, they commercialized their literary activities and produced a body of highly refined texts that were widely known and well regarded; above all, they lived a fully ‘amphibious’ life moving fluidly between the worlds of the ‘super elite’ and the ‘not so elite’. Of course, ‘celebrity grammarians’ such as Hyginus were few and far between.Footnote 75 But it is not out of the question that someone in the mould of a Hyginus or a Crassicius could have composed the Moretum.
Indeed, the picture we have of the life of the ‘typical’ grammaticus in the Early Principate bears some resemblance to Simulus. Martial’s image of students setting out before cockcrow for their schooling (Mart. 14.233) suggests that a grammarian, like a farmer (Moretum 2), might have started his day at the crack of dawn. Only the most in-demand grammarians taught in their own villa or in their clients’ private villa: the majority taught in hired premises or in public areas in the city (cf. Simulus trading at the town market, Moretum 79–81), which implies that they shared working spaces with others––shopkeepers, slaves and other teachers perhaps.Footnote 76 Some grammarians worked collaboratively by going into partnership (Dig. 17.2.71); the more enterprising ones outsourced part of their work to others (Juv. 7.220–4).Footnote 77 Humorous depictions of schooling from Roman antiquity show that images of agricultural and animal labour were frequently used: a sketch (possibly first century c.e.) of a donkey dragging a mill, with the graffito ‘Work, little donkey, as I have worked, and it will benefit you’ (labora aselle quomodo ego laboraui et proderit tibi), was found at a paedagogium on the Palatine,Footnote 78 while a terracotta relief of a school-scene from Pompeii showed the master’s head as the head of a donkey and his students with the heads of monkeys (cf. σιμός–Simulus).Footnote 79 When it comes to the settlement of fees, few grammarians could demand an initial payment in advance; for most, their fee was paid retrospectively and it was hardly generous (Juv. 7.215–17, 7.242–3; compare this with the limited income generated by Simulus’ selling of surplus produce in Moretum 80–1).Footnote 80
In short, the anonymous grammatici of the Early Principate were part of a larger literary economy who contributed to Roman intellectual culture but remain largely invisible to us. Despite (or precisely because of) their relentless and repetitive labor, grammarians could be subjected to mockery. On top of that, they were certainly not rich and could be financially exploited. Behind every Virgil and Ovid, there was someone (or, more likely, a group of someones) who taught them how to read and compose poetry––and that someone was often without a name or social identity. What I have shown in this article is that the depiction of labour and social status in the Moretum, especially the ways in which the poem muddles the distinction between collaboration and exploitation in a creative context, nudges the readers to take notice of a ‘class’ of literate workers who contributed to the intellectual culture of the Roman elite, and whose creative output may gesture at their own role in the production of Roman literature. By churning out a Moretum, the poet seems to be lifting the lid, just a little, on the hidden economy of Roman literary education and production.
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