Book Review: CARLA RUBIERA CANCELAS. Esclavitud femenina en la Roma Antigua.

Blackwell Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic, 2015

Reviews in History, 2017

In this masterful monograph, Alice Rio revisits one of the central questions in the historiography of early medieval Western Europe: how did the transition from slavery to serfdom take place? While many earlier answers to this question have proposed a more or less linear trajectory from late Roman slavery to the serfdom of the central Middle Ages, Rio sets out a compelling and elegant argument for a rather less elegant state of affairs: instead of trying to contort the messy source base into a seamless theory, she sensibly and convincingly argues that 'there is a fundamental problem with looking for a single linear story here: the line is far too broken up, too frayed with little individual threads making their own bids for escape, and often leading nowhere' (p. 248). Rather than smoothing over the very wide range of variation in what unfreedom could mean in this period, Rio aims to provide an interpretation of that diversity that can explain an overall trajectory without seeking to pare off the divergent possibilities that the sources present us with.

C. Noreña, and N. Papazarkadas (eds.), From Document to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World, Leiden - Boston, 2019

This contribution aims at offering an update of the epigraphic corpus on public slaves and freedmen, which is currently known, with a view to providing a full-scale reconsideration of the whole phenomenon of public slavery elsewhere in the future. This catalogue has not pretension to comprehensiveness, especially because it does not include possible new attestations from Greek East. While increasing the epigraphic corpus of public slaves, the evidence collected in this paper also provides new data concerning public slavery both in Rome and in the cities of the Latin West.

Women of the Past, Issues for the Present Nina Javette Koefoed, Rubina Raja (eds), Brepols, pp. 61-82, 2024

Many women and children suffered enslavement in the Roman Empire. Most of them have left no trace in the historical record. But several dozen are attested by documents that survive on papyrus, wax tablets, and inscribed pieces of wood and bear witness to transactional networks that moved the enslaved from one region to another. The commodified people that they document are overwhelmingly those of women and children, not adult men. In many cases, it is clear that the enslaved were subjected to multiple transactions, often in a short period of time. This paper examines why these facts are of broad significance for how we place Roman slaving practices in a broader global history of slavery.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017

This chapter investigates the relation between gender and slavery among the Greeks and Romans. It considers the gendered division of labour for enslaved people with a special emphasis on enslaved females and female enslavers in the domestic context. Important topics covered include sexual violence against enslaved individuals, manumission, and prostitutes as enslaved. It argues that enslaved females were most common in domestic contexts and the sex and entertainment industry. Both contexts, however, meant that they were open to sexual abuse, but close contact with the free might also benefit enslaved women by leading to their manumission. Enslaved people frequently appear outside ancient constructions of gender, officially denied socio-political status as husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers, and free from behavioural expectations like male courage and female virtue; but this lack of a gendered identity was likely another element of their oppression.

Paper delivered at the 3rd North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, Washington D.C, 2020.

The Position of Roman Slaves

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Bodnaruk, Mariana. “Late Antique Slavery in Epigraphic Evidence.” In: Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE. Eds. Chris L. de Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 224-248. While slavery was entrenched in the tributary mode of production of the late empire, the vitality of the fourth-century Roman slave system witnessed a decline in the next two centuries. Imperial pronouncements inscribed in stone and set up in public and monumental contexts throughout the empire refer to slaves, both urban and rural. From the fourth to sixth centuries the state legislation dealt repeatedly with servitude even when commanding slave-like treatment for runaway tenants. While some economic historians discount its significance by misidentifying rural slaves as coloni, others recognize that landowners still made use of slavery even if increasingly preferring to combine different categories of labour. With the scholarly focus on narrative sources, late antique inscriptions recording commodified humans have received less scholarly attention. This article engages in an analysis of the late Roman epigraphic practice documenting slaves in the imperial centres and rural periphery as well as on the frontiers of the empire. The study of the epigraphic representation of Roman slavery from 260 to 600 comprises census inscriptions and civic tariffs, manumission documents, records of public municipal servitude, epitaphs mentioning slaves and freedmen, and identification tags. It examines what the epigraphic monuments and concomitant imagery reveal about the late antique slavery highlighting intersecting oppressions. It argues that the Roman habit of inscribing inequality underscores the materiality of late Roman slavery. This article focuses on both Latin and Greek epigraphic evidence that, although relatively meagre compared to earlier centuries, provides insights into the persistence of slavery in late antiquity.

2011