Quoium Pecus: Representations of Italian Identity in Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics

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.

Advisor: Oliensis, Ellen