The farmer wants a wife: ecofeminism, domestic violence, and coercive control in Roman agricultural writing

Abstract

This article explores the explicit and implicit depiction of domestic violence and coercive control in a range of texts from different genres, all dealing with agriculture: a farmer’s attack on his wife after a rustic festival in a Tibullan elegy, the Elder Cato’s instructions to his overseer on how to control his wife coercively in De agricultura, and the portrayal—and suppression—of anthropomorphized domestic violence against nature in Virgil’s Georgics and Columella’s De re rustica 10. These texts throw different lights on the realities and ideologies of domestic abuse and environmental exploitation in ancient Rome, as well as their transhistorical and transcultural continuities. By examining them through a range of ecofeminist lenses, we can see how the nature–woman connection can both give a voice to the victims and contribute to their subjugation.