Power of deduction, labor of reproduction: Vergil’s sixth « Eclogue » and the exploitation of women

Vergil’s sixth « Eclogue » has long been viewed as exemplary of the poet’s light-touch, soft-focus Callimacheanism, but there is more going on in this program piece than the allusive, Alexandrian play of homosociality. Taking a cue from the obliquely exploitative relationship of poet to muses signaled in the proem, this study tracks a number of ways in which the poem’s women are exploited or controlled, from Pasiphae, to the Phaetondiadae, to the nymph Aegle, to feminized trees angled to serve the fantasy of male poetic power. Ultimately, these attempts at domestication and exploitation, unified in the programmatic buzzword « deducere », are met with the uncontainable agency of women pushing back.