Dan-El Padilla Peralta (Princeton University)
The synergistic interrelation of the transatlantic slave trade, Euro-American settler colonialism, and the North Atlantic intellectual revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries continues to be scrutinized across a range of fields, with striking and sometimes shocking results (see, purely e.g., Rosenthal 2018 on accounting and Downs 2021 on epidemiology). Practitioners in classics and classics-adjacent fields are becoming increasingly familiar with this literature; one welcome result has been the efflorescence of panels at recent annual meetings that examine slavery’s pervasiveness in virtually every walk of Greek and Roman life. Many of these panels have focused their attention on the literary imprints of mass enslavement, especially in the Roman world. Yet we are still some distance away from doing full justice to the catalytic force of mass enslavement as an epistemic phenomenon, one that dictated most if not all of the knowledge accumulation of Greco-Roman antiquity’s enslaver classes, as well as the belletristic and technical literary production that they controlled. This paper evaluates mass enslavement’s significance to the intellectual history of the Mediterranean through one case study, teed up first from a disciplinarily inward-facing and then from a comparative-facing angle: the theological writings of Marcus Terentius Varro.
It is no longer controversial to hold that Varro’s vast and variegated literary output is stamped by slavery. Particularly in those writings concerned with the retrieval and refurbishment of cultural practices that were presumed to be fading into senescence or oblivion, Varro’s “antiquarianism” (see now Smith 2018) wraps itself around the rhythms of Roman imperialism and the machinery of mass enslavement. This is not surprising for a writer whose lifetime saw the rapid transformation of Roman literary culture through slavery and servile work – some of whose contours are recoverable from works such as Suetonius’ De grammaticis et rhetoribus (Kaster 1995 for commentary; Winsbury 2009: ch. 8 on slavery as “enabling infrastructure”). Even in this universe, however, Varro was a standout. Even though mass slavery’s presence in the De re rustica and the De lingua Latina has elicited comment, its salience in the theological imagination of the (fragmentary) Antiquitates rerum divinarum has not been remarked. This paper proposes to remedy this issue by working from two directions at once.
First, I zero in on those sections of the ARD that, by Late Antiquity, came to be lampooned for their almost compulsive hairsplitting of divine functions (notoriously, frr. 90-177 Cardauns, mostly preserved for derision’s sake in Augustine’s City of God). I argue that this hairsplitting is best understood by reference to, and in fact as a theological transposition and elaboration of, the occupational hyperspecialization that mass enslavement underwrote in the Late Republic and Early Empire: the “pyramide hiérarchique du personnel servile” idealized in the De re rustica (Aubert 2004) and attested epigraphically in the Principate. Second, I read this theological construct through a comparative framework: Varro’s project, an inviting – and disquieting – instance of the leveraging of mass enslavement as a resource for abstract theological thinking, has a place alongside numerous other historical cases of “scripturalization” as a theological reflex of slavery (Wimbush 2012). With this second move, the paper responds to Pauline Ismard’s worry (2017) that Greco-Roman slavery is being shortchanged in global histories of enslavement, by specifying one domain – the tracing of categories for abstract philosophical and religious thought around the figure of the enslaved – where Roman cultural historians in particular may still have something novel to contribute to comparative research into asymmetric dependency (one focus of the Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies).