The Material Life of Roman Slaves by Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen (review)

The Material Life of Roman Slaves is an imaginative and engaging project that aims to make slaves visible in the archaeological record, where modern scholarship has previously absented, overlooked, or forgotten them while focusing on the freeborn. The authors maintain that by reading the archaeological record carefully and critically, the experiences of slaves and not solely the perspectives of slaveholders can be recovered. They concentrate on archaeological evidence from Campania and Ostia, but interweave legal and literary texts, seeking to account for the complex relationship between these bodies of evidence, which do not always work in tandem. Each of the four main chapters explores the themes of visibility and invisibility, appearance and disappearance as they pertain to slaves’ activities and experiences in locations defined as both physical and social: urban houses, city streets and neighbourhoods, workshops, and villas. Such environments reflect the interests and intentions of slaveholders and constitute what John Michael Vlach, an historian of the antebellum American South, calls “contexts of servitude.” These contexts were not always entirely under slaveholders’ control, though, as slaves had the potential to disrupt slaveholders’ plans and reconfigure spaces for their own purposes. Thus, Joshel and Hackworth Petersen hold that, “at least in terms of experience, the same space became a different place for slave and slaveholder” (6).

To understand how slaveholders and slaves might have managed and experienced “contexts of servitude” differently, the authors employ Michel de Certeau’s notions of “strategy” and “tactic,” as outlined in The Practice of Everyday Life. Belonging to the dominating class, strategy associates power with the control of space; it is “a mastery of places through sight” and of place over time.¹ Tactic, in contrast, “must play on and with a terrain imposed on it,”² relying on time and seizing chance moments as opportunities. The authors interpret material and textual evidence within this framework and draw on historian Stephanie Camp’s concept of a “geography of containment” in which laws, customs, and ideals combined to constrict slaves’ movements while legitimizing slaveholders’ sense of mastery. In response to this, Joshel and Hackworth Petersen introduce the idea of a “choreography of slave movement” (10) that limited slaves to prescribed paths, controlled the timing of their actions, and scripted gestures and motions at their jobs. Elaborating on the notion of tactics, they contend that negative portrayals and complaints in literature and law about slaves’ behaviour can also be read as instances of slaves seizing opportunities–appearing visually or aurally at inopportune moments or simply disappearing. Tactics “worked on and within [the slaveholder’s strategy] … to effect ends other than those intended by the slaveholder” (15).

Chapter 2 focuses on the banquet and the choreographing of slaves in several modest and large houses in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia. The authors point out the tendency in scholarship and guidebooks to treat service areas only from the owners’ perspective, in addition to the relative neglect of rooms such as kitchens, which often are not readily accessible to visitors and thus are further marginalized. They draw attention to architectural features slaves had to negotiate during dinner service which one might otherwise overlook as significant, such as steps (especially those resulting from renovations altering previously familiar layouts), and the low height of some doorways. Beyond inscribing status and hierarchy architecturally, they posit that these features could have had an impact on slaves’ ability to work efficiently and effectively, yet also could have been used to their advantage to enable delaying or hiding, for example. They advocate seeing previously marginalized spaces like kitchens as spaces for interaction in which both slaveholders’ strategies and slaves’ tactics operated, and convincingly show the benefits of considering houses dynamically and kinetically.

Chapter 3 moves from houses to Pompeian streets to consider streets themselves and the related spaces of fountains, bars and cook shops, and especially the back doors of houses as sites for...