Katharine Huemoeller (University of British Columbia)
Voices from the Cave: An Enslaved Woman as a Source in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus
In the longest anecdote in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus, a young Crassus and his entourage flee political persecution in Rome for the Iberian coast, where they take refuge for eight months in a cave on the property of a local landowner, Vibius Pacianus (4–5). The two men never come face-to-face, but Vibius demonstrates his support for the exiles in another way: he gives Crassus two enslaved women from his estate to perform sexual labor. The episode is remarkable for its transmission. Plutarch attributes it to the historian Fenestella, who in turn claims to have heard it directly from one of the women. It appears, therefore, to be something rare in our historical record: a (near) first-person account of an enslaved woman’s experience of sexual exploitation (Kamen and Marshall). But what does it actually offer the historian of slavery? In this paper, I use the episode as a case study to explore the challenges of writing history “accountable” to enslaved people (Smallwood). I argue that Plutarch’s narration of the episode, while focalized through the women, elides them as historical subjects by configuring them as instruments of bonding for the two men (Sedgwick, Keith, Levin-Richardson).
Previous commentators have treated the anecdote in one of two ways: as a diversion (Chlup: “delightful anecdote,” Hillard: “entertaining”) or as fiction. Ward, for example, undermines the enslaved woman’s credibility, characterizing the story as “wishful thinking” by an old woman seeking to “give significance to her life” (Cornell: anilis fabula). In both cases, the episode is represented as unworthy of serious engagement, reinscribing a particular version of what counts as an object of historical inquiry and who counts as a source.
After outlining the episode’s reception, the paper proceeds to a close analysis of the text, focusing on the dramatic moment in which the women first encounter Crassus. The scene contains a number of features that imply a first-person account, including the women’s emotional response (fear), a detailed description of the cave, and the exact words with which they address Crassus: “We are searching for a master hidden here” (δεσπότην ζητεῖν ἐνταῦθα κρυπτόμενον, 5.3). These words, though, are not their own. The line is dictated to them by Vibius as a “joke” (παιδιή). Part of the “humor," I argue, lies in Vibius’ orchestration. The women are made to ventriloquize the shared cultural expectations of the men: they actively seek their own domination.
The chain of transmission of this scene complicates evaluations of subjecthood. If Vibius controls the women’s voices in this moment, one of the woman recovers a measure of agency later in life when reporting her experience to Fenestella. Her account, though, is transmitted by Fenestella and then Plutarch in such a way so as to occlude key biographical details, rendering her obscure as a historical subject. In the end, she appears in her own story as a mechanism for the expression of male mastery.