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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 momenta

How did enslaved labor influence the composition of literary texts in the Roman Mediterranean? This paper attends to the role of enslaved labor in order to reimagine what compositional practices we imagine as possible and, thereby, to enable a better reading of how ancient texts employ their sources. Conventional wisdom has long held that authors of Greek and Latin prose narratives used only one source at a time (Luce 1978 on Livy; Pelling 1979 and 1980 on Plutarch).

(Marcus Tullius) Tiro, Cicero’s enslaved, and later freed, literary worker, has been the subject of much study. Scholars have looked at the way Tiro is represented in Book 16 of Cicero’s Ad Familiares and his possible role in editing that book of letters (e.g., Beard) as well as considering the relationship between enslaved and enslaver (e.g., McDermott, Gunderson). This paper instead looks at Tiro’s relationship and social standing with people beyond Cicero and his immediate family.

Scholars have long observed the centrality of enslavement in the works of Seneca the Younger (e.g., Bradley 1986, Edwards 2009). As Catharine Edwards notes, Seneca begins his Moral Epistles with an injunction to the reader to “liberate” himself from an ethical state of enslavement. Less accounted for, however, is the role played by enslaved literary workers within the Epistles, and in the collection’s production and circulation in antiquity.

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

In Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (2018), John Levi Bernard ‘bring[s] together postcolonial insights on the classical tradition as a mechanism of imperial power, while aligning with … [a] dialectical reading of African American cultural production in relation to dominant American culture of classical monumentalism and public historiography’ (11).

In response to the colleague who once asked whether the artist Kehinde Wiley directly engaged with classics “rather than just classicism as an aesthetic,” this paper argues that more exacting attention to Black classicisms in the visual arts frees us from the tyranny of this artificial and unproductive distinction. Wiley’s equestrian portraits in particular open up two approaches for turning the colleague’s question on its head: 1. the provincialization of classics as, in the end, one contingent form of classicism, sorely in need of rewriting its relationship to Blackness; 2.

In a discussion of contemporary artist Allyson Mitchell's call for contemporary queers to engage both critically and generously with the lesbian separatism of the 2nd wave (Cvetkovich & Mitchell, 2011) queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman describes digging into 'geologic time, the time of feminism and other dinosaurs, of fossilized icons and sedimented layers of meaning' (Freeman, 2011, 85).

The authority of the classical aesthetic is associated with formal precision and conceptual clarity, but antiquity has also bequeathed us a wealth of visual detritus that resists taxonomy and interpretation. The former continues to inspire a vigorous engagement with classical sculpture, exemplified by contemporary artists from Jeff Koons to Oliver Laric and increasingly aligned with digital technologies. But what happens when artists forgo the authority of classicism in pursuit of more critical modes of reception?

Closer collaboration between the Classics and History disciplines is beneficial, not only for higher education instruction, but also K-12 education. I offer much in terms of resources - programs, webinars, websites and online humanities forums like H-Net - that can facilitate these connections.