Women's Socioeconomoic Status and Religious Leadership in Asia Minor: In the first Two Centuries C.E.

4. Slave Women

4 Slave Women I argue that determination of women’s religious status depends on analysis of their socioeconomic status in the institutions of household, patronage, and slavery. In preceding chapters, I show how access to wealth and widowhood accompanied women’s status as socioeconomic heads of households and patronal leaders of political and religious groups. Analysis of sources on women from inscriptional and literary texts and iconography have formed the basis for these conclusions. I have used the framework of historical feminist materialism and the analytic model of kyriarchy to investigate the economic status of freeborn wealthy women in households and women patrons in religious groups. Many women in religious groups were slaves or freed slaves rather than freeborn. How did legal status affect women’s access to religious leadership? In this chapter, I examine the status of slave women in religious groups in Asia Minor.1 Differences in interpretations of slaves’ religious status emerge most distinctly in discussions of texts that allude to changes in slaves’ status. Hence I select texts about slaves in religious groups that focus most specifically on changes in slaves’ status. Scholars have identified several key texts for such discussion in Asia Minor in the first two centuries of the common era: the letter of Ignatius to Polycarp, and the Bosporan synagogue manumission inscriptions. These texts are especially rich for elaborating the socioeconomic status of slaves. (I argued in the second chapter that understanding women’s religious status depends on study of women’s socioeconomic status in institutions such as 1. This study builds on research featuring early Christian and Jewish slaves that has already been produced, particularly the studies of J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006); Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Allen Dwight Callahan, Richard A. Horsley, and Abraham Smith, eds., Slavery in Text and Interpretation (Semeia 83/84; Atlanta: SBL, 1998); J. Albert Harrill, The Manumission of Slaves in Early Christianity (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1995); and Dale Martin, “Slavery and the Ancient Jewish Family,” in The Jewish Family in Antiquity, ed. Shaye Cohen (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993), 113–29. 137 slavery.) I will not discuss two other texts that have often featured in scholarship about attitudes toward slavery in religious groups: Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians and Paul’s Letter to Philemon.2 While the Pauline texts have lent themselves to studies of attitudes toward slavery, the texts I focus on allow me to examine slave women’s actual status in religious groups, rather than attitudes toward them. Before moving to those texts on slave women’s religious status, I investigate the socioeconomic status of women slaves, since slavery was an essential institution of the socioeconomic system. This step is particularly important because slave women in Asia Minor have received relatively meager scholarly attention. Sources that explicitly identify women slaves include iconographic sources as well as epigraphic and literary. As in the preceding chapters, I analyze these sources with the model of kyriarchy in which slaves occupy the bottom stratum as the most oppressed social group (see Figure 2 in Introduction). I compare the portrayals of slave women with those of free women and slave men. These comparisons allow me to discuss constructions of slaves’ status and gender. Then I focus on slave women’s occupations depicted in inscriptions in the historical context of Asia Minor. I show how representations of women slaves in the sources reproduce control and exploitation by slaveholders. With this understanding of representations of slave women, I turn to the texts on slave women’s status among religious groups in the second part of the chapter. The synagogue inscriptions present manumission of slaves, including women, by religious groups in the Bosporus. Ignatius’ Letter to Polycarp suggests that religious groups in Smyrna manumitted slaves by using the group’s common funds. Scholars have debated manumission by religious groups and the religious status of manumitted slaves. I contribute to this discussion by interpreting the texts in light of representations of slaves’ socioeconomic status analyzed in the first part of the chapter. Portrayals of Slave Women Some of the discussion in this chapter draws on funerary monuments because these are the sources that depict women workers. Many of the women represented in the sources by way of their occupations seem to have been slaves or freed persons.3 Greek sources rarely make legal status explicit, and women’s names are not...