Christopher Londa (Yale University)
Among the most potent metaphors in Roman authorial discourse is the “personification” of a literary work as a slave or freedman (Fitzgerald 2000). The trope has received ample attention for its prominence in Horace Epistulae 1.20, Ovid’s exilic poetry, and Martial’s epigrams. Each author addresses his libellus in language that conflates the physical characteristics of the book and the body of the enslaved. A rich vein of scholarship documents how the blurring of human and literary corpora affords these authors a vehicle for reflections on style (Williams 1992), tradition (Hinds 1985), and self (Mordine 2010; Oliensis 1995). Yet, the personification of the libellus entails a second conflation: when books are encoded as slaves, their authors are revealed as slaveholders. Taking these “personifications” as a provocation, I ask how Roman ideas about authorship relate to the habitus and episteme of Roman slaveholders.
The overlaps, I argue, are considerable. Many authorial practices—assigning names and titles, attaching letters of dedication or introduction, marking or emending flaws, adding embellishment and polish—have analogues in the ways that domini tried to control the interactions between enslaved individuals and the world outside the household. Roman elites frequently dispatched their servi or liberti as their representatives; they expected to be “read” through their surrogates much in the same way that authors were read through their texts. By consequence, Roman slaveholders were constantly “writing” slaves into the roles, functions, and fictions that would advance their own reputations; slaveholders acted as authors to transform “raw human material” into praiseworthy extensions of their person (Nepos Att. 13; Plutarch Vit. Cat. Mai. 21; Vit. Crass. 2). When their efforts failed, they reacted strongly against fugitivity and infidelity—telltale signs of the slaveholder’s impotence and metaphors for the author’s loss of control (Fitzgerald 2016 on Plin. Ep. 2.10 and Martial 1.52).
Rome’s elite literary culture rendered books and slaves eminently interchangeable. Via the hands of amanuenses and the mouths of anagnostae, Roman nobiles experienced texts through the bodies of the enslaved. Books could provide pleasure or entertainment; so too could an attractive or witty servus. Books stored, transported, and communicated information; servi and liberti also carried out these functions. Both papyrus rolls and enslaved human beings were tools in the hands of elite male subjects, who did little to articulate the ontological difference between the “objects” under their control.
Rather than effecting a momentary collapse of its categories, the book-as-slave metaphor shows that Roman ideas about authorship drank deeply from slavery’s ideological well. This finding has significant implications for how we understand what it meant to be an author in Rome. Only loosely tethered to texts, books, and the act of writing, Roman authorship was instead grounded in the sovereignty of the elite male subject, in his ability to control literary production just as he controlled all other productive activity in the household. Acknowledging the ways that Rome’s social inequities inflect its concept of authorship becomes a critical first step in dismantling the “great-man” rhetoric that has long dominated literary studies.