The Material Lives of Roman Slaves by Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 205 These caveats aside, when focused on the ancient material Toner does an excellent job providing vivid descriptions of ancient games and exploring their meaning and message from the multiple perspectives of the emperor, the spectators, and the participants. The book deserves a wide audience. Miami University Steven L. Tuck The Material Lives of Roman Slaves. By Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2014. Pp. xv, 286, 16 plates, 170 figures. In Apuleius' METAMORPHOSES 5.2–4, Psyche is attended by slaves whose presence is detectable only by sound and the physical results of their assiduous services: her bath is prepared, her dinner is laid out by disembodied voices, and, when Psyche’s marriage is consummated, these same unseen slaves tend to her no-longer virginal body. Psyche’s famulae are omnipresent and yet invisible, the real stuff of slave owners’ fantasies. Sandra Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen ask how real Roman slave owners ordered space and time to achieve this ideal—and what opportunities the same spaces and times offered slaves to undermine it. The “material life” of slaves therefore refers to their existence in the material world of dimension, not the material implements with which they, as individuals, worked or dressed. Using a complement of literary, epigraphic, art historical, and archaeological sources, the authors pursue a description, which is almost time-lapse photographic, of slaves’ movement through space and time in four different physical environments: urban houses, streets, workshops, and country villas. But for each environment the authors identify two patterns. The first describes the purposeful shaping of spatial and temporal dimensions, and so of slaves’ movements, to serve the master’s priorities. These revolved not only around efficiency, but also the ability to control when and how masters saw their slaves; for example, masters wished to be served with minimal visual intrusion by slaves while banqueting, but to have easy oversight of slaves engaged in production. Taking inspiration from Michel de Certeau,1 the authors call the shaping of space and time to serve these priorities the master’s “strategy,” a useful term that is effectively contrasted with slaves’ “tactics,” the second pattern the authors describe. Interpreting masters’ complaints about the moral and physical failings of their slaves (e.g., “sneaky,” “malingering,” “lazy”) as reflections of slaves’ purposeful attitudes and actions, the authors see “tactics” as the opportunities slaves had to escape, disrupt, or undermine the choreography composed by the master. These included opportunities for slaves to remove themselves briefly from the never-ending dance to enjoy some moments of stillness and isolation, to engage in fleeting, alternative choreographies with other slaves beyond the sight and hearing of the master, to undermine the master’s projected impression of control by purposefully mis-stepping into sight or hearing, or to shape the physical environments through which they were forced to move. 1 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. S. F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1988). 206 PHOENIX Each of the four physical environments under discussion has its own chapter. “Slaves in the House” looks primarily at the private banquet as a domestic arena of space and time in which masters’ strategies and slaves’ tactics could be enacted. The difficulty of following detailed descriptions of architectural layout is mitigated considerably by the book’s plethora of plans and razor-sharp black-and-white photos. The authors consider vertical space in the house, observing the height of doorways, the presence of stairs, the relative light and space given to passageways and small rooms. Invocation of the third dimension is fruitful, as hidey-holes and the diminutive size of some doorways are not apparent on two-dimensional floor plans. Slaves would have known the houses in which they lived and worked much better than their masters. Domestic architecture generally offered opportunities for intrusive “slave tactics,” and many houses could have afforded some privacy, however mean and intermittent, to slaves who wished to have it. “Slaves in the City Streets” suggests that slaves, unmarked by distinctive clothing, could enjoy a measure of freedom in city streets. Houses perforated by back doors— doors beyond the sight and awareness of...