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The amanuensis as vilicus: Enslaved Labor in Roman Agriculture and Authorship

Roman elite book culture depended on skilled enslaved labor (Winsbury, Habinek). But while ancient authors speak openly about dictating to (Blake 2012, 2016) and being read to by (Starr) enslaved people, obscurity still shrouds the figures we have come to identify with labels like “secretary” or “amanuensis”, such as Tiro (enslaved by Cicero) or Eros (enslaved by Vergil). Elites are open about collaborating with peers (and in Pliny’s case, even his wife) on the composition and authorship of literary works (Gurd), and Quintilian theorizes the relative technical merits of dictation and drafting by hand (Inst. 10.3.19–21), but the ubiquity of secretaries suggests they may have played a role in the creative or intellectual dimensions of literary production. Our sources are silent on this possibility; this paper uses the problem of the vilicus, or enslaved overseer, in the Roman agronomic tradition as an analogy to fill that silence.

From Xenophon to Bryson, ancient oikonomic writers in Greek theorized the psychological control of enslaved workers, a tradition continued in the Latin agronomic tradition (Padilla Peralta, Scheidel). But the agronomists took an especial interest in the vilicus who ran the agricultural estate in the absence of its owner (Reay). Cato (DAC 5) seeks to impose restrictions on the vilicus’s self-image, insisting that the overseer not think he knows (sapere) more than his enslaver even as he also mandated that he know (sentire) how to do every job on the farm. This epistemic firewall extends to the enslaver’s social and business affairs, where the vilicus is only ever a proxy. Columella (DRR 1.2) directs his elite reader to visit his estate often enough to authoritatively direct the vilicus in the administration of the farm (lest he direct himself). Read carefully and against the grain, and with reference other studies in the history of slavery (Scott, Jones-Rodgers), the agronomists show the vilicus to be an enslaved person whose work as a proxy for the enslaver necessitates careful policing. For the Roman farm to function, the vilicus needed to be able to oversee it himself; the greater that dependence, the more elites insisted that it was they who ran the farms and that the knowledge and judgment of a vilicus was fundamentally inferior to that of a dominus or paterfamilias.

The effective literary amanuensis worked to execute the enslaving author’s literary agenda, but for the prestige of authorship to continue to redound exclusively onto the enslaving author, that work needed to be minimized and even effaced. Columella’s anxious commitment to this effacement situates this dynamic within increasing prominence overall of enslaved and formerly enslaved people in the affairs of Rome’s elites. The importance of literary work to elite identity made it necessary for elite “authors” to insist that the only work enslaved people did for them were “mechanical” tasks like dictation and recitation. The discursive silence about amanuenses turns out to be an active silencing, of a piece with the kind of strategies for dominating the enslaved articulated by the oikonomic and agronomic writers.