The Politics of Pesto: Making Metaphor Work (Moretum)

In the Roman cultural economy of labor, manual and intellectual work were connected via the ‘work’ of metaphor. But ideological barriers continued to keep certain kinds of work distinct from one another. This chapter reads the dynamic relationship of manual work versus creative ‘work’ through a crucial locus for its thinking-out, the post-Ovidian, pseudo-Virgilian poem of pesto, the Moretum. I argue that the use and denial of metaphor characterises the various working subjectivities of the poem: Simulus the peasant, simultaneously stretched higher through metaphor, while also reduced by its restriction; Scybale the enslaved domestic servant, who is completely denied the elevation of metaphor; and the poet, whose ability to elevate via metaphor represents the poem’s height of ‘work’. I end by making a small complicating suggestion about the poet’s unique insight on the relationship between poetry and labor.