Emily Ann Lamond (University of Michigan)
By the turn of the first century CE in Rome, the slave market divided people with disabilities into two broad categories. From literature, we are best informed about those who were chosen for their unusual physical attributes or behaviours which made them exotic luxury items (e.g., Martial Ep. 6.39, 8.13, SHA, Comm. 11.1, and Pliny HN 34.6; Dench 2005: 279-292, Garland 2010, Trentin 2011). We know less about others, who, on the basis of their bodies or behaviour were discounted in more than one sense: both from particular positions in the slave familia and in their price on the slave market.
What counts as disabling differs across cultures, as scholars of ancient disability have noted (e.g. Rose 2003, Laes, Goodey and Rose 2013). This bifurcated Roman slave market therefore has important implications for understanding how enslaved people were disabled by society. Some might assume that economic value (here, price) and social value (e.g. decreased stigma) went hand in hand for slave owners, and they thus disabled one group of enslaved people (those prized highly for their differences) somehow less than the other. I argue, however, that Roman slave owners reinforced a coherent system of devaluing disability that affected both categories equally across the slave market. In other words, even if certain conditions were not devalued economically, they were always devalued socially.
Harpastē, a fatua or ‘fool’ in the household of Seneca the Younger (Sen. Ep. 50. 2-4) exemplifies the dynamics of this complex interaction between slavery and disability. The function of a fatua was to entertain. Harpastē was inherited by Seneca’s wife, and was a prestige commodity due in part to her intellectual differences. Her value increased – both for her owners’ amusement and presumably as an investment – when she then became blind. In contrast, other enslaved people, whose disabilities challenged a narrow set of slave owners’ expectations for specific tasks, had a different lot in life economically. The evidence of the curule aedile’s edict illustrates this stark financial devaluation of disability (Dig. 21.1; Gell NA 4.2) – how enslaved people were literally devalued on the basis of slave owners’ desires and assumptions. A person could be quantified according to their body or behaviour, and in some cases owners could receive refund or compensation for any previously undisclosed “defects” (vitia).
Thus the stark bifurcation emerges: in one case, bodily variance generates economic value; in the other, it lessens it. But I argue that the position of someone like a fatuus – a luxury item intended to entertain – would have been likewise precarious. In addition to being subject to the whims of a slave owner, enslaved people with prized conditions such as hunched backs and short stature also faced disapprobation. Seneca’s disgust with Harpaste’s intellectual disability shows this. Even while this difference heightened her economic value, it formed the basis for her devaluation more generally. Among elite Roman slave owners, particularly those of a Stoic persuasion, aversion to luxury and baseline perceptions of a narrow “normal” collided.