India Watkins Nattermann (UNC-Chapel Hill)
Slave torture in Plautus’ plays has primarily been read through an elite perspective (Segal, Marshall, Hunt). Richlin, however, sees Plautine comedy as popular entertainment arising from a “reservoir of anger” (2017, 26) and vehemently asserting the subjectivity of the enslaved. Using Asinaria and Captivi, I foreground enslaved bodies and the violence they suffer, using Hortense Spillers’ distinction between enslaved flesh and enslaver’s body to read references to torture as subversive. As his enslaved characters understand, play with, and critique their assignation as objectified flesh, Plautus both stages and mocks elite anxieties about the citizen body’s inviolability.
Spillers defines “flesh” as an objectified, enslaved body marked by the enslaver through scarring, branding, and other tortures. “Body,” however, belongs to the enslaver, a subject who inscribes flesh through torture, rendering it a signifier of his domination (67f.). Alongside this “theft of the body” (67), the enslaved become “ungendered,” despite the sexual abuse they might face (68).
Spillers’ distinction helps elucidate Libanus’ and Leonida’s boasts and jokes about torture. In recasting their scars as badges of honor instead of markers of degradation, they resist designation as mere flesh by inscribing their own meanings into their skin (largitur peculium, omnem in tergo thensaurum gerit, 277; also 546–57). Likewise, when they brag equally about pulling off a trick and withstanding torture, they reconfigure beatings as the hallmark of the successful trickster rather than the enslaver’s strategy of control (omnes de nobis carnuficum concelebrabantur dies, 311; also 262–64; 313–14; 341–42). Furthermore, framing their tricks as military maneuvers recasts their abuse as voluntary (eae nunc legiones, copiae exercitusque eorum / vi pugnando, periuriis nostris fugae potiti, 554–55; also 294–95; 317): in asserting their free will and masculine subjectivities, they resist the “degendering” force of torture.
In Captivi, Tyndarus’ unmarked body shows the unsettling similarity between enslaved flesh and enslaver’s body (629–30) (Konstan and Raval). The vague references to violence against him underscore the improbability of escaping enslavement unmarred (illic ibi demumst locus / ubi labore lassitudost exigunda ex corpore 1000–01; also 650; 723–31). By showing his body as impossibly unmarked, Captivi plays with elite anxieties about the citizen body’s inviolability and manumission, the social transformation from flesh to body. Likewise, chains still drape Tyndarus’ body at the play’s end (1020–21), showing that this transformation, even for the freeborn and unscarred, is fraught.
Nevertheless, the specter of sexual abuse haunts both plays. Libanus angrily rebuts jokes about his former sexual abuse (302–06) and pretends to rape his enslaver in revenge (702–04) (Richlin): sexual abuse is not reconfigured as a source of virtus as beatings are. Likewise, Captivi insists that Tyndarus was raised chastely (bene pudiceque educatust usque ad adulescentium, 992; also 273), but hints about the past sexual abuse of the fugitive Stalagmus (954–56; 967) (Richlin) highlight the unlikelihood of escaping enslavement without similar suffering. The enslaved in these plays recast or escape visible markers of torture, but the invisible scars of sexual abuse remain.