Brett L. Stine (Columbia University)
Recent scholarship surrounding Roman enslavement practices has foregrounded the lived experiences of Roman enslaved persons through analyses of the material and literary production and consumption of Roman elites (Lenski 2013; Joshel and Petersen 2014; Blake 2016). This paper attempts to further this work by bringing into relationship legal (the Digest), literary (Galen, Pliny, Martial), and para-literary texts (P.Oxy. 4.724), and argues that attention to skilled labor and gradations of skilled labor found in documentary and legal sources can provide momentary glimpses into ephemeral enslaved experiences, even as those experiences are imbedded within a broader set of elite, self-representational discourses. It will specifically highlight bookwork, by which I mean the labor related to making books (e.g., the scribe) and the labor of using books (e.g., lector).
First, I place bookwork against the backdrop of skilled labor broadly through an examination of the artifex in Justinian's Digest.I argue that the Roman legal system can, with qualification (Joshel 2011), provide glimpses into the lives of enslaved persons through the qualitative discourse surrounding the skills of specialized labor/laborer. I then illustrate through the epigrams of Martial the potential of this discourse of quality to uncover as well as obfuscate enslaved experiences via skilled work.
I then turn to discourses of labor quality in bookwork, beginning with the scribal labor found in Galen's Avoiding Distress and On My Own Books. While Galen foregrounds his own literary activities as an elite (Johnson 2010), the bookwork background of Galen proves useful for considering how a highly competent, well-trained staff of enslaved copyists would have likely proven physically necessary to participation in literary production and consumption (Starr 1987; Fitzgerald 2000). A letter from mid-second century CE Egypt (P.Oxy. 4.724) sheds light on the value of a well-trained enslaved scribe, while displaying the need for such skilled labor through its physical properties, multiple orthographic and mechanical mistakes. The letter makes explicit on the micro-level the need for quality scribes implicit in the major literary production of Galen.
Next, I briefly consider lectores found in several letters of Pliny (3.5; 5.19; 8.1; 9.34; Starr 1991). As with Galen, the enslaved and freedmen lectores of Pliny are both functional and aesthetic, fully integrated into the literary consumption and projection of the owner (Johnson 2010; Joshel 2011; Blake 2012 and 2016; Lenski 2013). The enslaved, however, may also be glimpsed, as a “mediocre” reader contributes wholesale to Pliny's ability to participate in elite publication practices via performance.
To conclude, I suggest that skilled labor proper, and qualitative differences within types of skilled labor (e.g., book work), provide another lens for exposing and exploring otherwise ephemeral traces of the enslaved in Roman sources found at the nexus of elite representational practices and the necessity of skilled labor for those practices. In particular, the role of the enslaved in elite literary production, which is often obfuscated or minimized, becomes more salient when read alongside documentary and legal sources which consider the evaluative practices and outcomes of skilled labor in Roman life.