The Joker in the Pack: Slaves in Terence

Abstract

Where social relations are concerned, the servile condition was the joker in the pack: the true slave could be given a different value or significance according to prevailing principles of social organization. The slave was an outsider without a past or a future, without separate interests or compromising associations. In principle the slave was a creature of his or her owner. If necessary, the slave could act as a surrogate. The slave condition cancelled out all prior belonging or autonomy and enabled the slaveowners to claim the slave's reproductive powers, productive energy, administrative or military capacity and personal initiative.Blackburn (1996), 161Boiled down to its essentials, domestic comedy is about the business of getting and begetting, about economics and reproduction. True, it might be more fair to say that it is about the sense individuals have about their own roles and actions in these enterprises—about love and fear and regret, for example—but the twin concerns of household wealth and the status of future generations provide the structure within which these emotions take on meaning. To be more precise, these concerns are not just twinned, but are part of a single process which we might call ‘familial reproduction’, i.e. the process of using material, cultural and biological resources to stabilise the family's identity and status in the present and to extend the family's identity and status into the future. One important resource that Roman families drew on was the rich and manifold resource of the slave members of the familia.