The dust jacket of this well-illustrated volume, which presents six papers delivered at the sixth E.T. Salmon conference held at McMaster University in 2007, along with an additional chapter and introduction by the editor, features a sculpted pillar base now in the Landesmuseum Mainz depicting two muscular male captives, turned away from each other but chained together at the neck, the heavy chain pulled taut between them by their straining in opposite directions (Inv. no. S 269, an image of a copy can be seen at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S%C3%A4ulensockel1_Mogontiacum.jpg). Though not discussed in these pages, the image reflects well the nature of the volume, which after the introduction divides neatly down the middle, with three essays focused on inscriptions from the city of Rome and three treating artistic representations from across the Roman Empire balanced around a central chapter on the movement of slaves within Pompeian houses and across Italian farms. The two faces of the volume, like the two captives, look in different directions, but they are bound to each other like conjoined twins: neither can be properly appreciated without the other.
After briefly surveying previous scholarship on the material evidence for Roman slavery, G. in the introduction summarises the other chapters and concludes by appealing for a more reciprocally engaged relationship between specialists in material culture and historians that recognises the centrality of slavery to our understanding of life in the Roman Empire.
In a well-argued opening chapter that raises important questions about Roman naming practices, C. Bruun investigates the choice of name-type (Greek or Latin) given to Roman home-born slaves (vernae) and finds, not surprisingly, that Latin names among recorded vernae are far more common than among the slave population generally. More paradoxically, in view of a recognised tendency among freedmen who left inscribed memorials to give their freeborn children Latin names and of vernae in private households no longer to be identified as such as adults, the free Romans bearing Latin cognomina in ordinary epitaphs are as likely to be freedmen or the sons of freedmen as freeborn. At the same time, one in ten children born to parents with Latin names bore a Greek cognomen, as did a similar percentage of Romans explicitly identified (by filiation) as freeborn, which suggests that the common association of Greek names with servile status and, to a lesser extent, of common Latin names with ingenuitas, needs reconsideration.
In the second epigraphic essay H. Mouritsen subjects the names recorded in the epitaphs of household servants from two well-known Roman columbaria of prominent early imperial families (the Statilii and the Volusii) to detailed statistical analysis for the light they shed on manumission practices among the Roman elite. Mouritsen recognises the opportunity afforded by two closed archaeological contexts and rightly notes the inevitable distortions introduced by epigraphic bias but does not entirely succeed in avoiding the pitfalls of conjecture in reconstructing manumission rates within the two households and in the end must hedge the data speculatively in order to argue for its representative character. More convincing and valuable is the sharply drawn picture of mixed and integrated familial structures and communities within elite households. More than one in three marital relationships and nearly one in three filial relationships involved members of different status, and many of those commemorated in both households were the slaves of other slaves (vicarii). Whether this picture of mixed familiae derived from the commemorative plaques in collective columbaria says anything about the domestic conditions or patronal relationships within the households of the living is less clear.
The following chapter by P. Keegan examines the graffiti found in the early imperial structure on the Palatine identified as the Paedagogium and finds in them a range of educational levels, ethnicities, types of training, names, and homoerotic and ludic interests. The building is conventionally, but not certainly, identified as a training facility for imperial cup-bearers, prized as much for their beauty as for their table skills, and from this identification Keegan reads into the graffiti an acutely observed sociological profile of a mixed community of freedmen and slaves whose names and preoccupations reflect their roles as imperial servants. The picture is sensitively drawn, but the scribbled musings of the paedagogiani do not appear all that different from those of Pompeian graffitists from more than a century earlier, and it is difficult at times to see in them a distinctive culture of the familia Caesaris.
From texts to contexts. In an essay that forecasts a methodological tack adopted in her recently co-authored book (with L.H. Petersen, The Material Lives of Roman Slaves [2014]), S. Joshel draws on work by American historian Stephanie Camp to explore the architecture of surveillance and containment, both physical and ideological, that Roman slave owners devised to constrain the movements of their slaves, and slaves’ efforts to subvert it. Innovative in method and acute in its analysis of the strategies deployed by masters and slaves to thwart each other, Joshel's nuanced and insightful discussion of the choreographies of slave movement around rural estates and within Pompeian houses opens up new ways to investigate slave agency in the ancient world.
The next two essays, by N. Lenski and G., find reflections of slave culture in domestic decor and visual imagery respectively. Each traces the development of representational motifs involving slaves from Hellenistic (or earlier) times, noting significant expansion and change during the Roman period in use of the motifs, which are taken to reflect the comparatively more institutionalised and ubiquitous presence of slavery in Roman life. Lenski investigates the little studied phenomenon of household objects intended to evoke slavery by alluding obliquely to the role of slaves as human tools or by serving as actual props (notably lamp-bearers) or dumb-waiters (tray-bearers). The deployment by Romans, for all three types, of anthropomorphic figures at times explicitly representing slaves points to the interchangeability in the Roman imagination of inanimate and animate ‘tools’ through a stark realisation in plastic form of one of Aristotle's famous formulations of the nature of the slave (Eth. Nic. 1161a30–b6).
G. finds a similar elaboration and diversification during the Roman period of generic scenes representing Cupids being punished or captured and sold. In Hellenistic literature and art Eros is playfully punished for mischief with his own weapons and escapes with ease by flying away. In the Roman versions Cupids endure the punishments of slaves – chains, whipping, burning and agricultural labour – and have their idyllic existence shattered by ‘catchers’ who imprison them in cages like slaves. Together the two essays make a compelling case for the underappreciated capacity of artistic representations to illuminate the casual cruelty that pervaded the mental landscape of Roman slave-owners.
In the final essay, published posthumously, N. Kampen investigates the representations of slaves and freedmen in monuments connected to active soldiers (as opposed to veterans) during the first century along the northern frontier. The comparatively narrow focus is designed to minimise ambiguities in the evidence, which none the less remains frustratingly equivocal. Characteristically, Kampen's meticulous attention to the nexus of images and texts enables her to tease insights out of even the least promising material, as here, for example, in the suggestive observation that in military tombstones ‘liberti may be shown and not mentioned or mentioned and not shown’ (p. 183) but never both.
Regrettably, there is little cross-fertilisation among the chapters, even when the opportunities for enrichment seem evident. Keegan, for example, refers to Bruun on ‘cognomina and their relationship to slave status’ (p. 96 n. 33) but takes no account of Bruun's argument in discussing the significance of Greek cognomina among the graffitists at the Paedagogium, where the ratio of Greek to Latin cognomina (52:63) (p. 78) and the apparent identification of several of the graffitists as vernae (pp. 81–2) suggest a possible concentration of home-born slaves among the paedagogiani. Quibbles aside, these essays are of higher quality individually and cohere more closely than those in most conference volumes. Anyone interested in slavery in the Roman world will profit from the new perspectives and methodologies offered here.
