This article offers a reassessment of Varro’s treatment of servile flight in his De Re Rustica. It analyses and contextualizes the pervasiveness of juridical echoes of slave runaways in Book 3, in a section on snails and bees. It thus suggests that the topic of slave flight is not neglected by Varro, as previously assumed. Varro presents the tangible prospect of slaves escaping from the estate in animal disguise. By revealing the apparent obscurity with which servile flight is handled by Varro, the article also shows the centrality of this concern in the minds of Roman slave owners – detectable even in a text on the ideal management of agricultural estates, where the topic does not belong.
