Jennifer Trimble (Stanford), "Seeing Roman Slaves"

Date
Fri January 17th 2020, 12:15 - 1:30pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Classics
Location
Building 110, Room 112
Jennifer Trimble (Stanford), "Seeing Roman Slaves"

Slavery was a fundamental part of Roman society.  An extensive body of scholarship has analyzed the physical and legal violence that kept this institution in place.  Scholars have also analyzed the “soft” power involved, that is, the many ways beyond legal and physical violence through which slavery was characterized and enforced.  Curiously, however, very little work has been done on visual culture as an important component of Roman slavery.  Yet Roman culture was intensely visual, and visual representations and practices of seeing were deeply interwoven with the institution of slavery.  The book I am writing, Seeing Roman Slaves, argues that what people saw was crucial to how they understood, practiced, and experienced slavery.  Within this large subject, I focus on the visibility or invisibility of enslaved people in Roman culture.  This was always a fraught issue, connected to questions of social power and boundary crossing. 

In this talk, I first present the book project as a whole and then explore a case study drawn from public Roman slave sales.  The legal, visual, and literary sources on these sales all define a triad of interrelated roles: buyer, seller and slave being sold.  Each of these roles was defined in important ways by who looked at whom, in what way, and with what consequences.  Onlookers played an important reinforcing role, helping shape social power—or its total lack—in the public eye.  The visual and written paraphernalia of slave sales interacted in particular ways with these visual dynamics, giving insight into the social operations of visual signs, constructions of the human body and of social power in the public eye, and the visual performance of the law.  In short, these visual dynamics were an integral part of the definition and practice of slave sales.  And, by juxtaposing these different forms of evidence, we can see very different experiences and conflicting perspectives within the same situation.

This event is free and open to the public. Light lunch served at 12:15pm. Talk begins at 12:30pm.

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