Quoium Pecus: Representations of Italian Identity in Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics By Kevin E Moch A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ellen Oliensis, Chair Professor Kathleen McCarthy Professor Dylan Sailor Fall 2019 Quoium Pecus: Representations of Italian Identity in Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics © Copyright by Kevin E Moch 2019 Abstract Quoium Pecus: Representations of Italian Identity in Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics by Kevin E Moch Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Ellen Oliensis, Chair While Vergil is often treated as the quintessential Roman poet, it is frequently overlooked that he originated from the province of Cisalpine Gaul in what is now northern Italy, a region granted Roman citizenship and incorporated into Italy in the 40s BCE, well into the poet’s adulthood. This dissertation project illuminates the ways in which a local, specifically non-Roman Italian identity informs the works of the poet Vergil in the first century BCE. Building on recent archaeological and cultural historical work on Roman Italy, the project brings a more Italocentric approach to Vergil’s poetry by shifting the point of entry from one privileging Roman and Augustan considerations to one emphasizing regional identity and experience. This perspectival shift opens a space to explore the changes and tensions in local identities in this period—to track ever more closely how these identities were diminished, fortified, or otherwise impacted by Roman encroachment and Roman ideas of a unified Italy. Beginning from Vergil’s references to Mantua and Cicero’s discussion of the “two fatherlands” (duae patriae) of Roman municipal citizens, in the introductory chapter I situate the study amid the ongoing acculturation of Roman Italy in the first century BCE; I then propose that modern psychological and sociological theories of acculturation can be beneficial in understanding the negotiation of local, Roman, and panethnic Italian identities that is a central concern of Vergil’s corpus. In the second chapter, through a close study of Vergil’s use of linguistic indexicals signifying inclusion or exclusion in relation to various ethnic or civic communities, I show that there exists an ideological gap between the municipal Italian and Roman civic perspectives in Vergil’s Eclogues; the creation of this gap between identities allows the poet to illustrate vividly the creation and breaking up of cultural communities in the wake of Roman encroachment. In the third chapter, I argue that the constant interplay between nature and culture in the Georgics deliberately reflects the tension between local origin and acquired Roman civic identity, the integration of which the poem repeatedly attempts to imagine through its exploration of grafting and transplantation as potential metaphors for social acculturation, culminating in Vergil’s narration of Jupiter and Juno’s pact in the twelfth book of the Aeneid. The fourth and final chapter explores the figure of the cow, bull or calf as an identifiable symbol of Italian identity and resistance that is explicitly separated from the idea of Rome, suggesting an implicit commentary on Roman exploitation and destruction of Italian landscape and resources. The act of bugonia thus represents the culmination of the nature-culture contrast, with the bovine herd animals representing the germana patria being sacrifices for the continued proliferation of the strangely Roman civilization of bees, whose society resembles the Ciceronian patria communis. In the epilogue, I return briefly to Cicero’s discussion of the duae patriae to demonstrate the utility of Vergil’s exploratory representations of Italian identity. This project is innovative in its commitment to approaching Vergil’s poetry not as a project of Roman identity building, but as work driven primarily by the tension between local Italian and Roman civic identities as one of the unifying themes of the work. 1 nescia fallere vita — Vergil, Georgics 2.467 For my family i Contents Dedication . i Contents . ii Acknowledgments . iii Chapter 1 Introduction . 1 Mantua me genuit: Vergil and Local Identity . 6 Cicero, Roman Italy, and Bicultural Identity . 14 Theories of Roman Biculturalism and Acculturation . 27 Chapter 2 Alternis Versibus . 37 Patria as germana patria in the Eclogues and Georgics . 40 The Externalization of Rome in Eclogues 1 and 9 . 50 Town and Country in the Eclogues . 61 Making and Breaking Community in the Eclogues . 67 Chapter 3 Cultus . 78 Roman-Italian Integration in the Georgics . 83 Georgic Metaphors of Civilization and Culture . 103 Grafting and Cultural Integration . 116 Chapter 4 Víteliú . 140 Italian Oxen and Roman Wolves . 143 Oxen, Italy, and Italians in Vergil . 150 Oxen similes in the Aeneid . 158 Itali and Vituli . 166 Epilogue Dilapsus Cito In Unum Confluit . 185 Bibliography . 189 ii Acknowledgments While researching and writing this dissertation, I have benefitted from the generosity and help of a number of individual, communities, and institutions. I am happy to acknowledge them here. I would like to thank my committee members for their constant support, encouragement, and belief in my project. I am unfathomably grateful to Nelly Oliensis, who has spent the most time with this project aside from myself, and whose detailed written and verbal comments have made this dissertation immeasurably better; I regret only that I couldn’t incorporate even more of her thoughtful suggestions. I count myself as a special kind of lucky for having emerged so many times from our meetings more confident about my work and progress than when I had gone in. I must also thank deeply Kathleen McCarthy and Dylan Sailor, both of whom provided helpful and thoughtful comments from the project’s inception to its finish; I thank them both especially for discussions early on while preparing my statement of intended research, while preparing for oral examinations, and during both semesters of the dissertation colloquium: the early encouragement and direction provided there truly helped to shape the project. While not a committee member officially, I must also mention here Maurizio Bettini, whose courses brought an intellectual thrust and disciplinary awareness without which I do not believe I could have conceived of this project as it stands; I thank him not only for patiently reading work at several points in this project, but also for invigorating discussions of Roman literature and culture, as well as for a happy semester spent researching this project in Siena. The Department of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley has been a gracious and generous support system throughout my graduate career, and I am thankful for all of the interactions and support, large and small, which enabled this work. In addition to the faculty listed above, I must thank Mark Griffith, Carlos Noreña, and Duncan Macrae for useful and rewarding conversations around the topic of this dissertation and related topics, as well as Andrew Stewart and Chris Hallett for a Stronach seminar on Art and Luxury in the Bay of Naples which allowed me to examine the ideas contained here from an entirely different perspective. More generally, I am extremely grateful to the department for the bestowal of travel and research funds, including semesters of support for research, as well as the opportunity to teach in a truly great department. I am thankful to the university, as well, for both my initial support as a graduate student, as well as the funds provided for dissertation completion which allowed a semester’s research in Siena and in Berkeley. The final years of this project benefitted from the financial support of the American Academy in Rome, the Phi Beta Kappa Chapter of Northern California, and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund; I am, again, inexpressibly grateful for this support and this confidence in my work. Spending the antepenultimate years of this project researching and writing in Rome was an invaluable and incredible – etymologically – experience, and my project benefitted from many conversations. I would like to thank Lindsay Harris, Lauren Donovan Ginsberg, Michelle Berenfeld, Cate Bonesho, Bea Peruzzi, and Liana Brent – my fellow Ancient Studies fellows – for conversations and advice; Raymond Carlson for interesting conversations on Dante and Dante’s Vergil which reminded me of the passages that begin the project’s first chapter; and to the many dear friends who made the Academy feel like home: Beverly McIver, Abigail Deville, Ashley Fure, Brandon Clifford, Jo Lobdell Clifford, Taylor Beck, Leslie Cozzi, Jamie Atkinson, Jess Peritz, Mitch Dvoracek, Suzanne Farrin, and many others. I was lucky enough to give a number of talks at a number of institutions while finishing up this project, iii which provided the opportunity to have many useful and rewarding conversations on these and other matters. I am thankful to the Vergilian Society’s Symposium Cumanum, where in summer 2016 I presented a paper on competition in the Eclogues stemming from this research, originally intended to be published as part of this project; it became instead an article in the Society’s journal Vergilius in 2017; I am extremely thankful to Christine Perkell and Timothy Moore for their immense help in preparing that project, which inevitably influence the project as a whole. While in Rome, I was fortunate to give talks at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, the British School of Rome, and at the Academy itself, as well as during the Vergilian Society’s affiliated panel during the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego. I am thankful for the conversations and interactions I had with many during these events, but especially Richard Thomas, John Van Sickle, Kresimir Vukovic, and others. I could never have embarked upon this journey without the excellent training and wonderful experiences I had as an undergraduate in the Department of Classics at Princeton University.