This chapter examines a form of racialization at Rome that declared certain non-Romans to be innately suitable to enslavement. In an instance of racecraft through stagecraft, Roman comedy contributed to the naturalisation of this noxious ideology by presenting a cast of characters whose visual appearance and social or legal status corresponds directly to predictable sets of character traits. At the same time, the enslaved and freed themselves wrote and performed Roman comedies, so the fabula palliata also pushes back in important respects against their times’ racial formations. The discussion concludes with an analysis of the life of the comic playwright Terence whose authorship of his plays was called into question because he allegedly lacked the innate ability for impressive literary production.

Chapter 7 builds on recent scholarship demonstrating that print technology was foundational to concepts of racial identity and whiteness in particular. It explores how writers appealed to the phrase “the art of printing” to describe racial sameness and otherness as a set of ethnic, geographical, and bodily differences. Press technology itself gave people a way to talk about race, which in turn framed racial concepts for later writers.