Deserta regna: The Georgics and Empty Space

Abstract

The plague at Noricum in Georgics 3 creates empty space (deserta). A geocritical analysis of the plague landscape and related spaces illuminates generic trajectories of Virgil’s poem and its relationship to sociopolitical developments. Virgil energizes emptiness as negative space through a rhythmic relationship between objects and void, which both makes an aesthetic appeal and offers an opening for narrative. The plague narrative’s emphasis on spatial disorder with reference to pastoral and to Lucretius shows emptiness as the outcome of historical and literary processes. The spatialized textuality of the plague also points toward epic and the aestheticized framing of imperial conquest in the Aeneid as a story about exile, invasion, and settlement. Virgilian emptiness attracts the gaze, and in the context of Augustan geopolitics, the potential that vacancies carry to be filled, including by state power and violence, eases the visualization of Noricum as potential Roman territory, but not without also confronting human subjectivities that have been impacted by exile and death. The spatial reality of the plague landscape is shaped out of divergent experiences, forced movement, and settlement or conquest, intersecting in generically complex, spatialized textuality.