Sarah Breitenfeld, University of Pittsburgh
On January 13, 1789, John Wright published a reward for the return of the enslaved woman Jane, who had fled from his household in Bridgetown, Barbados. Using this violent record of Jane’s life, Fuentes 2016 tracks Jane’s probable movements through colonial Bridgetown by paying close attention to the physical layout of the city at the time of Jane’s escape and to sounds, smells, and especially sights that Jane likely experienced interacting with this geography. In doing so, Fuentes demonstrates the productivity of focusing on geographic space to access the experiences of enslaved women and shows that we can map “the sensorial and architectural history of slavery in this urban site from an enslaved woman’s perspective” (2016, 15). Fuentes and other scholars of transatlantic slavery have shown the interconnected relationship between gender, slavery, and geography (e.g., Camp 2004; McKittrick 2006). I aim to demonstrate that we can apply Fuentes’s method of interpreting fugitivity to enslavement practices in Greece in the 4th century BCE using Attic lawcourt speeches (on applying Camp 2004’s “geography of containment” to Roman slavery, see Joshel 2013; Joshel and Peterson 2014).
Against Neaira, the court case that accused a metic woman of passing as an Athenian citizen, offers a valuable case study for the benefits of such an approach because the speech provides a detailed geographic account of one woman’s movement through space. Apollodorus begins Neaira’s story with her childhood in a Corinthian brothel and details that she undertook trips to Athens while laboring as a sex slave ([Dem.] 59.18–26). He states that Neaira later relocated to the households of two men in Corinth who purchased her, and that she secured her manumission and journeyed to Athens with a man named Phrynion ([Dem.] 59.29–33). The court case also recounts that Neaira moved between demes within Attica to travel to symposia, later fled Phrynion’s home in the Attic deme Paiania, and travelled to Megara because she was prevented from returning to Corinth due to the stipulations of her manumission agreement ([Dem.] 59.33–35). When Neaira then returned to Athens to move in with Stephanus, a former client, she was abducted by Phrynion and forced to travel between their households as part of a legal agreement ([Dem.] 59.38–48).
With this description, Apollodorus uses Neiara’s movements through geographic space as proof of her non-citizen status, but, drawing on the work of Fuentes and others above, I show that we can reframe this narrative of domination by focusing on Neaira’s sensory experiences as she journeyed through Corinthian brothels, Megarian roads, and Attic demes, streets, and households. In doing so, I argue that by approaching these locations as sensorial and architectural sites of enslavement we can redirect attention towards Neaira’s perspective and her own relationship with geography and space. After thus demonstrating that Neaira offers a productive case study for applying Fuentes’s methodology in studies of Greek slavery, I close by exploring how this methodology pertains to other women living in enslavement in the ancient Mediterranean.