Sarah Breitenfeld, Davidson College
Greco-Roman motherhood has received recent scholarly attention (Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell 2012; Sharrock and Keith 2020), but studies of non-citizen mothers in Classical and Hellenistic Greece are more limited (though, see Hong 2016). One notable exception is Strong 2012, which provides an examination of mother-daughter bonds among prostitutes. Nevertheless, Strong exclusively mothers who were free(d) at the time of their respective stories (though some ‘daughters’ were enslaved, e.g., [Dem.] 59.19). This paper aims to add to Strong’s analysis by focusing on enslaved mothers, who were navigating even more challenging circumstances than their free or freed counterparts. Rather than seeking economic profit or respectable marriages for their children (Strong 2012: 123), this paper asserts that some enslaved women had to use their children to curate close relationships with powerful men. Furthermore, enslaved women may have carried children to term in order to end their own enslavement, sometimes even by giving up access to those children after they had been weaned.
DT 68, an Attic curse tablet from the 4th century BCE, is one example of an epigraphic text that provides an enticing glimpse into enslaved motherhood. The tablet states the desire for a woman named Theodora to be “unfulfilled” (ἀτελής) in her “trade” (ἐργασίας, see Kamen 2014a) and in her sexual relationships with multiple men. Scholarship such as Dickie 2000, Eidinow 2013, and Pachoumi 2013 has demonstrated the likelihood that Theodora was a sex laborer, working in an industry where many enslaved women serviced clients in extremely dangerous conditions (Glazebrook 2011; Kapparis 2018; Forsdyke 2021; cf. Cohen 2015). The tablet focuses on Theodora’s close relationship with a client named Charias, but by stipulating that Charias should “forget” (ἐπιλαθέσθαι) “the little child of Theodora” (τοῦ παιδίου Θεοδώρας), the text of DT 68 also makes clear that Theodora was a mother. Though Theodora’s child has been noted by scholars in passing (Petropoulos 1988; Gager 1992; Graf 1997; Eidinow 2013), the challenges that Theodora faced while raising this child in enslaved prostitution have yet to receive scholarly attention.
This paper uses a close reading of DT 68 as a case study to examine the relationships between enslaved mothers and their children in Classical and Hellenistic Greece. It focuses on the circumstances that could force an enslaved mother such as Theodora to choose between her own safety and that her child. On the premise that citizen clients were known to purchase the manumission of enslaved sex laborers with whom they had particularly close bonds (e.g., [Dem.] 59.30–31, Men. Epitr. 538–549, see Kamen 2014b; Glazebrook 2014) and that citizen slaveholders compelled enslaved women to provide children as a condition of their manumission (e.g., FD III 3.33, see Tucker 1982; Zelnick-Abramowitz 2005, 2019; Vlassopoulos 2021; Kamen and Levin-Richardson 2022), I show that enslaved mothers were navigating dangers and concerns particular to their enslaved status. Furthermore, I argue that women such as Theodora were sometimes forced to endanger their children in order to achieve close relationships with citizen men and their own manumission from slavery.