Book chapter
Introduction: A/Despotos
Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE–300 CE
Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean, Oxford University Press
2025
DOI: 10.1093/9780197769997.003.0002
Abstract
This section examines how we can better understand both enslaved labor and Roman literary production by examining them through the variant lenses of book history, language, ethnicity, gender, intersectional approaches, and disability studies, as well as by reconstructing their physical effects on the body. Joseph Howley considers the authority vested in ancient writing and how enslaved secretaries, scribes, readers, clerks, and teachers facilitated the cultural conventions of elite Roman society. Ekaputra Tupamahu examines race and ethnicity in Roman slavery and dissects literary production from an ethnolinguistic perspective. Cat Lambert uses an intersectional lens and the analytic of gender to illuminate the production and consumption of Latin literature, all while assessing how notions of the “masculine reader and writer” erase ancient enslaved and freed writers in support of a false ideal. With a focus on disability and the physical effects of literary production on the enslaved body, Candida Moss’s essay indicates how enslaved workers were used as “tools of accommodation” and prosthetics by their enslavers. Together, these essays allow us to dismantle false assertions surrounding authorship and ancient writing that still influence book history today.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Introduction: A/Despotos
- Creators
- Sarah E. Bond
- Contributors
- Jeremiah Coogan (Editor)Candida R. Moss (Editor)Joseph A. Howley (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE–300 CE
- Series
- Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean
- DOI
- 10.1093/9780197769997.003.0002
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press; New York, NY
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2025
- Academic Unit
- Classics; History
- Record Identifier
- 9984962646602771
Metrics
1 Record Views