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

The object of this fascinating book is to render visible Roman slaves in the remains of the Campanian cities and villas destroyed in 79 A.D. by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Joshel and Petersen seek to illustrate how slave-owners’ methods of control, and slaves’ resistant responses, can be visualized in the houses, streets, neighborhoods, and workshops of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and nearby villas, convinced that archaeology is a viable source for the history of Roman slavery and that the presence of slaves must be restored to archaeological sites from which scholars have traditionally excluded them. They duly combine inferences from written sources with topographical descriptions and copious illustrations to indicate how owners may have regulated slaves’ movements, and how features of architecture, artistic decoration, and physical setting may have served slaves’ interests in asserting their independence as human agents. Highlights include suggestions that the House of Menander at Pompeii contained places where slaves could linger and disappear from sight as they moved through the house to perform their duties, actively frustrating their owners’ wishes in the process; that the bars and fountain areas of Pompeii provided places for slaves to loiter and socialize with other slaves; that the zebra stripes decorating some of the walls of the so-called Villa A at Oplontis functioned as “choreographed” signs for slaves to follow when moving from one part of the house to another, efficiently but unobtrusively from the perspective of their owners and their owners’ guests; and that in a workshop such as the House of the Baker at Pompeii the complex process of bread production, meticulously described, allowed slaves many occasions to disrupt operations by deliberately slowing the pace of work or taking some of the food produced for themselves. (Here the analogy with Frederick Douglass’s comments on “racing” to which I have drawn attention myself is appositely introduced.) Comparably, the late architectural development of the villa at Settefinestre seems to show a preoccupation with surveillance of rural slaves of a kind prominent in Greco-Roman sources on slave management (CR 63 [2013] 155–56).

Joshel and Petersen make clear, as they must, that much of what they propose is speculative, particularly because the size and character of the slave complements of the sites studied are unknown. Nonetheless the possibilities raised are of great importance, and in its legitimate concern to evoke the day-to- day realities of life in slavery their book is to be warmly applauded. (The contrast with abstract quantitative and demographic studies is stark.) Its painstaking discussions of such architectural features as doorways, passageways, service corridors, staircases, and storage rooms invite bold and intriguing ideas about forms of servile activity which representatives of the slave-owning classes, like slave-owners in modern slavery systems, constantly represented as misbehavior; and for the region and period concerned the “hidden transcript” of J. C. Scott, to which Joshel and Petersen are heavily indebted, must now be regarded as much less opaque than in the past. That notion of course is a refinement of earlier studies of the response to servitude in modern slave societies in which accommodation is as important a concept as resistance (see Biblical Interpretation 21 [2013] 536–37). Here the concept is neglected. But the case could be made that Roman slaves were sometimes, perhaps often, prepared to inure themselves to the demands their owners made upon them, motivated by hopes or promises of manumission—liberti, significant for any consideration of servile social relations, do not figure in the book at all—and certainly the response of Roman slaves to slavery is hardly likely to have been monolithic. M. I. Finley was well aware of this, even if he underestimated the degree of petty resistance that from this and other modern projects now seems unquestionable (Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology [New York 1980]: 111–17). Otherwise the opportunities for escape to which Joshel and...