This collection of essays began as a 2008 conference in Toronto. The authors approach ‘comic slavery’ from a range of perspectives, including its relation to politics, history, art, violence, ideology, the sex trade, the economy and citizen identity. While the volume as a whole engages with an important and challenging subject, the reader working from cover to cover will detect a considerable discrepancy in the quality of individual chapters. Some contributions venture with insight into new territory, while others add little to the discussion and would perhaps have been better left as conference papers.
T. begins his lengthy introduction by cataloguing the myriad obstacles standing in the way of studying comedy and slavery, and he admirably addresses these (sometimes controversial) issues head-on. His history and overview of Athenian slavery offers a useful assemblage of ancient sources, statistics and previous scholarship, but some of his historical analysis is of less value. In particular, his use of Aristophanes and Menander to understand the realities of ancient slavery (e.g. the social distribution of slaveholding, slave onomastics and the socio-economic status of slave owners) continues for too long with too little reward. At times, T. gets somewhat far afield from comedy, leaving the reader who comes here for insight on slaves and slavery in Greek comic drama feeling a little disappointed. The sizable final paragraph, for example, fails to mention comedy at all, turning instead to the collection's value for shedding light on the ‘darker recesses of ancient Greek culture’. The absence of comic drama in this section suggests a disconnect between Greek comedy and the harsh realities of Greek slavery: can we really use the former to understand the latter?
A similar disconnect can be noted in Marshall's comparison of modern and ancient sex slaves in New Comedy and contemporary South East Asia. Marshall presents a disturbing look at the social realities of the sex trade, identifying many previously overlooked elements of ancient slavery and starting a dialogue about a difficult and understudied topic. But the correlation he creates between reality and fiction is questionable. For example, he suggests that Habrotonon's choices in Menander's Epitrepontes cannot be evaluated ‘independent of the trauma she is surviving’. Although Marshall's point would certainly hold true in the real world, he is not accurately portraying Menander's comedy, and Menander's comedy is not accurately portraying the suffering of an actual sex slave.
Konstan and Cox also look at historical reality and Menandrian slaves, and Konstan begins with what is probably the most important point in the volume: representation of slavery ‘refracts rather than reflects the social reality or realities’. The sensitive and sensible readings of Menander's comedies which follow provide a sense of what it must be like to take a seminar with Konstan. He analyses scene after scene in detail, showing that Menander differentiates master–slave interactions in large and small households and that the violence inherently found in Athenian slavery appears deep in the background of the plays. Cox, on the other hand, shifts between the fictional and real world without much of Konstan's recommended use of ‘refraction’. The thesis is revealed in the closing paragraph, where she concludes (somewhat over-simplistically) that slaves were not isolated, but their interactions with others ‘always had the master in mind’.
A. effectively examines the relationship between history and the comic slave, scouring Aristophanes' plays for information on economic and social conditions in Athens. He draws a number of interesting conclusions from non-comic material about the increased value of slaves after the Peloponnesian War and the plague, and suggests that the greater demand for slaves prompted the emergence of the trickster slave. Although I am not entirely convinced that this character did not exist prior to these historical events, A. makes the most of our evidence, suggesting that the cunning slave is a representation of the slave-owning class' anxiety about losing power in the last quarter of the fifth century.
Instead of using comedy to understand slavery, Olson uses slaves and slavery to understand comedy, compellingly demonstrating that Aristophanes uses slave-practices as a metaphor for the Athenian political system in his early plays. He develops his argument with Acharnians and Peace, but really drives the point home with his analysis of Wasps and Knights. Aristophanes maps the household onto the state to show that the demos should serve as the master, and the politician should serve as the slave (i.e. always working for the benefit of the people). But the poet also reveals how easily these roles are reversed, and warns that the Athenian people can unwittingly serve as slaves to politicians.
Lape also concentrates on Aristophanes, using the Frogs to look at the interesting issue of citizen identity in Athens after the Battle of Arginusae, when slaves who fought for Athens were freed. Unfortunately, her analysis drains the humour from a number of comic scenes and draws sweeping conclusions in overly jargonistic language. For example, she believes that Dionysus and Xanthias' exchange of Heracles' clothing in front of the house of Hades represents the possibilities of ‘the transmutable self’ and ‘stems from indiscriminate tragic consumption’. I am dubious that we can extract so much from an amusing gag in which the mock-hero Dionysus constantly changes costume with his slave. In the end, she draws the conclusion that the Frogs represents a fear that citizens may become possessed by the actions shown in tragedy and begin to act like the ‘Other’.
Sells moves beyond Aristophanes in his study of slaves in the fragmentary remains of Old Comedy. His catalogue of passages and readings shows that the slave in non-Aristophanic comedy had rather limited agency and that Aristophanes may have been the first to give slaves an important role in comedy. Although the extremely fragmentary nature of non-Aristophanic comedy makes drawing definite conclusions impossible, Sells's investigation suggests that Aristophanes was an important innovator and helped the genre evolve towards the much more slave-heavy New Comedy.
Bosher and Wrenhaven bring material culture into their discussions of slaves and slavery in comic drama. In her excellent study of Phlyax slaves, Bosher paints a very convincing picture of the development of comedy that includes the influence of visual arts. The slave, Bosher argues, was singled out as the favourite icon of Athenian comedy on Phlyax iconography. This popularity in the visual realm crystalised the slave as the mascot for the genre, which in turn inspired Greek and Roman poets of New Comedy to develop this character into a more important figure than he was in ‘pre-Phlyax vase’ comedy. Bosher looks beyond the theatrical medium to expose a surprisingly sizeable regional influence on comedy's evolution. Wrenhaven's use of material culture is less successful. She aims to identify ‘which characteristics are slavish and why’, but she conflates depictions of the non-ideal with that of the slave somewhat problematically. She also shifts between time periods in a troubling way, making broad generalisations that undercut her conclusion that costume both defined identity and served to challenge identity.
The mixed quality of the volume stems, in part, from the challenge of using comedy as evidence for the historical experience of slaves. As Sommerstein has shown in his admirable study ‘Slave and Citizen in Aristophanic Comedy’ (in Talking about Laughter and Other Studies in Greek Comedy [2009], pp. 136–54), Aristophanes' plays place surprisingly little importance on whether or not a character is free or slave. While Sommerstein's specific conclusions may not hold true for all ancient comedy, they raise a point that remains salient regardless of time period and author: comic drama is probably not the best place to look for an accurate sense of slaves and slavery.
