S. has produced a rigorous and thoughtful investigation into slavery and slave experience in the time of Plautus. S. situates Plautine representations of the interactions between slaves and masters within a rich historical context including political, legal, religious, social and cultural dimensions, to present ‘a thickly contextualized image of slavery at one particular moment in time’ (p. 14). Her approach to slavery is based in an engagement with Hegel and with scholarship on slavery in the American South; slavery is understood here to be a social relationship produced through the ongoing contest between dominating master and resisting slave. S. recognises three silences as emergent from this dialectical relationship: the silence of the hegemonic culture about its slaves; the enforced silence of the slave who is denied subjectivity; and finally, the spontaneous and strategic silence of the slave. This final silence is at the core of the book's aim to make a historical argument about ‘slave experience’, and thus distinguish itself from other scholarly work on ancient slavery (p. 1); by re-centring the slave as a historical agent who acts with some degree of self-purpose, a wide range of behaviour can be read as ‘action statements’ or indicators of the slave's agency or beliefs (p. 12; R. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia [1982]). Plautine drama, with its many and varied representations of interactions between masters and slaves, male and female, provides a testing ground for this approach. In each of the five chapters, S. first provides a historical context, and then traces the contours of this historical topography as it shapes the expression of slave–master interactions on stage.
The opening chapter, ‘Human Property’, argues that changes to regulations governing the sale of slaves in the second century b.c.e. show the development of a more sophisticated public slave market, one that not only aligns with the private economic interests of slave owners but also extends the ideologically-derived terms of slave sale throughout the Roman world as a feature of public law. These terms of slave sale, as S. finds, preclude any possibility of slave agency by locating liability for any slave behaviour (defect or virtue) with the slave owner. Against this backdrop, S. reads two Plautine scenes of the auction of slave women (in Mercator and Persa) to show Plautus' awareness in these scenes of the objectification inherent in the sale of slaves, and also of the possibility of the slave's own manipulation of the ‘script’ of the slave sale, for example the option for the slave to remain silent, to display tears and heightened vulnerability, to depict strategically their relation to free status; ‘Plautus thus seems to recognize the problem for the slave of how best to respond to slavery’ (p. 47). This chapter is commendably engaged with the gendered aspects of Roman slavery. It also provokes difficult questions about representing and recognising ‘agency’ in slaves.
The question of accessing slaves' experience and agency emerges again in the second chapter, ‘Enslavement, or “Seasoning” Slaves’, which focuses on the ongoing process whereby a formerly free person is transformed into a slave. Beginning with a look at the figure of the ‘successful’ slave, for example the uilicus of Cato's De agricultura, S. considers the array of slaves of differing statuses as presented in the Captivi. S. analyses the social expectations invoked on stage for each ‘degree’ of slave (newly acquired captive; seasoned veteran; recalcitrant runaway); and, working backwards, the expectations that defined the successful master. The labile definition of ‘slavishness’ is on display here, but S. also draws attention to the potential of the ‘strategic silence’ of the slave, as an asset ‘to cloak an inner life apart from slavery’ (p. 79).
The third, and strongest, chapter, ‘Violence, Private and Communal’, draws the wider Roman community into the dialectical dialogue of Plautine slavery. The historical context adduced here revolves around the institutionalisation of violence against slaves, either as a component of Roman religious ritual (rites associated with the Matralia and Nonae Caprotinae are discussed) or via the public punishment and crucifixion of groups of criminal slaves (as a result of military action in 198, 196 and 185 b.c.e.); in this way, a private legal relationship is translated into publically recognised and communally policed statuses (p. 84). S.'s analysis of violence threatened or enacted by or against slaves in Aulularia, Miles Gloriosus, Pseudolus and, at greater length, Asinaria, illustrates ‘the corporal vulnerability of the slave as a social fact’ (p. 116). The public performance of this violence shows the slave was ‘subordinated to the whole community of free citizens’, which affirms the public status of the citizen (p. 116). Moreover, S. shrewdly sees slave dialogue about violence in Plautus as a vehicle for the audience to enjoy a vicarious sense of domination.
Chapter 4, ‘Release from Slavery’, claims that Plautus' representations of manumission ‘offer stunning contrasts with Roman legal and political practice’ in terms of the slave's capacity for assimilation into the citizen role (p. 118). Weighing the historical fact of large-scale manumission and social recognition of slaves who participated in the Second Punic War alongside the post-war discourse on the legal and political capacities of freed slaves, S. finds in Plautus' staging of slaves striving for freedom in Rudens and Menaechmi a consistent depiction of manumission as the ‘capricious gift of the master, not a deserved reward of the slave's action, but a reflection of the master's honour; the slave [here Messenio in Menaechmi] emerges as naturally incapable of grasping freedom or of acting independently from desire for a self-defined life project – that is, a natural slave’ (p. 145).
In Chapter 5 S. turns to the theoretical ‘Problem of Action’ for ancient writers. From within slave-owning ideology, deliberate, autonomous and effective slave action was quite literally ‘unthinkable’ (M.-R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History [1995]). Observers of the Sicilian slave rebellion (136–132 b.c.e.), therefore, could only interpret this coordinated political action on the part of slaves as evidence of their inferiority and bestiality, and as a failure on their masters' part to exercise the appropriate control. This persuasive reading is juxtaposed with an analysis of the character of the trickster slave in Pseudolus as a figure whose verbal mastery should be evidence of an interior and independent self but whose autonomy remains an ambivalent quality.
The volume has many virtues and should be read by anyone interested in ancient slavery or in Republican culture. It provides a detailed and nuanced socio-political context for aspects of slavery in Plautine Rome. There are theatrical, performative and verbal aspects of the plays that do not receive sustained attention here; in this regard, the book may work best as a companion to the excellent interpretation of slavery in Plautus by K. McCarthy (Slaves, Masters and the Art of Authority in Plautine Comedy [2000]).
S.'s ‘methodological experiment’ prompts reflection (p. 1). In seeking to counterpose ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ evidence, she effectively re-instantiates a conceptual division between these two types of evidence, a divide long entrenched in Classical Studies. Engagement with the well-established approaches typical of New Historicist or Cultural Studies might have made the methodological issues less pressing here. S. need not be so defensive about her interdisciplinary approach; it is a valuable one that should be adopted more widely, despite its inherent difficulty.
I commend S.'s directive to read the silence of slaves in as rich a historical context as possible. The book is conscientious and engaging, and should stimulate further study. One hopes that such thoughtful historicisation can be applied also to the social concepts of ‘self’, ‘identity’, ‘person’ and ‘agency’ (e.g. W. Johnson, ‘On Agency’, Journal of Social History 37 [2003], 113–24), concepts which will surely be of concern in the future of slave studies.
