This article engages with the bee as a social insect. The description of the hive in Book 4 of the Georgics persistently employs language suggestive of a human political community, but any sense of the autonomy of the bee-state is undermined by the external, controlling presence of the beekeeper. While Pliny the Elder treats the drones as the slave population of the bee community, Columella depicts the entire hive as enslaved to the beekeeper. Columella’s model suggests a division between worker bees and drones: the former equate to the good and willing slave; the latter to those slaves whom slaveholders ancient and modern demonize as growing fat through indolence and a refusal to work. When Vergil “erroneously” attributes the qualities of the drone and the robber-bee to what Aristotle presents as the worse sort of king bee, he holds up a mirror to the slaveholder who grows fat on the labor of the unfree.
A seventeenth-century didactic poem on Brazilian sugar, De sacchari opificio carmen (DSOC), offers a glimpse of the intersection between Atlantic slavery and the reception of the Georgics. This essay considers how Virgil’s poetics of slavery took on new life in the Americas, where it was used to sing about profit, sweetness, and the management of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Reading four representative passages from DSOC against a contemporary manual on plantation management, on the one hand, and against the Georgics, on the other, shows how planter poets can help us tune in to the murmur of ancient slavery in Virgil.
When Tertullian mocked Romans for dressing up criminals as Attis and Hercules to have them executed in the amphitheater, he was referring to the practice that Kathleen Coleman termed a “fatal charade.” The irony missed by Tertullian and his many interpreters lies in his scorning this mimicry while admiring the executed Christians who imitated Jesus. This paper argues that early Christian martyrdom was a reimagined form of a fatal charade. Unlike the Roman practice that was designed to humiliate the victims, Christians desired to become the god that they imitated. Contemporaneous anxieties concerning ontological blending through performance fueled the martyrological fantasy. By placing spectacular execution within the wider sphere of imperial and late antique performance culture, this paper demonstrates how the imitatio Christi in early Christian martyrdom can be understood as the result of the imaginative collation of fatal charades and transformative mimesis.
This article elucidates a disturbing enigma of Plato's thought: the idea that the happiest homoerotic lovers are the ones that do not consummate their love. An analysis of the central speech of the Phaedrus (243e-257b) reveals that Plato expressed that idea in the form of the paradox of "madness restrained." It is a love without sex because the soul of the philosophic lover, upon being reminded of the Form of Beauty by the sight of the beloved, is rationally possessed by the Form of S & ocirc;phrosun & ecirc; ("Self-Restraint"), which induces, instead of bodily pleasure, the divine practice of care. In order to justify such altruistic abstinence, the dialogue disambiguates s & ocirc;phrosun & ecirc; in a series of agonistic speeches, and thus subtly illustrates how this ancient Greek value could be variously co-opted in the field of erotics. I conclude that despite a prominent strand of interpretation, Plato's rhetorical paradox amounts to not much more than a sublimation of repression, and that this view was probably well received by his aristocratic audience because it is opposed to the liberal but decadent sexuality of the Athenian democratic ethos.
