ENSLAVED
LEADERSHIP IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Katherine A. Shaner
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List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Power in Perspectives: Interpreting Enslaved Presence in Archaeological Materials 1
2. Power Plays: Roman Policies, Public Slaves, and Social Status 23
3. Voices of Power: Onesimos, Paul, and the Ambiguity of the Enslaved “in Christ” 42
4. Shifting Power: Ambiguous Status, Visual Rhetoric, and the Enslaved in Imperial Sacrificial Practices 63
5. Power in the Ekklēsia: Contesting Enslaved Leadership in 1 Timothy and Ignatius 87
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
1.10
1.11
2.5
4.1
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.10
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project started as my dissertation at Harvard Divinity School under Laura S. Nasrallah. As an advisor she offered, at times, daily feedback, incisive challenges to think more clearly, and fortifying encouragement in the earliest, most tentative stages of the project. Words can neither describe the impact her mentorship had on this project nor express my gratitude for it.
Several institutions offered material support throughout my work. I offer thanks to the Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut, especially to Sabine Ladstätter, for the opportunity to spend several weeks with the excavation teams in Ephesos in June 2010. Elisabeth Rathmayr and Hilke Thür welcomed me warmly to the Terrace Houses and patiently answered novice questions. The Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University (WFU), under the leadership of Mary Foskett, gave me a generous summer writing grant that helped me nearly finish the manuscript. Gail O’Day, the dean of the WFU School of Divinity, also approved a semester leave that made completion of the project possible.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Karen L. King both offered advice and guidance over many years. Jennifer Glancy, Shelly Matthews, Steve Friesen, Shanell Smith, Michal Beth Dinkler, Joseph Marchal, Melissa Jenkins, and Rebecca Hancock all read and commented significantly on draft materials at various stages. The Columbia University New Testament Faculty Seminar helpfully workshopped a portion of chapter 3 with me. Summer writing groups, organized by Paige Meltzer and the Women’s Center at WFU, graciously read multiple chapters and helped me clarify the project. Special thanks to Melissa Jenkins, Erica Still, Michael Pisapia, Barbara Lentz, Gail Bretan, Michelle Voss Roberts, and Amanda Gengler for reading again and again and again!
Colleagues at the WFU School of Divinity, especially Michelle Voss Roberts, Derek Hicks, and John Senior, plied me with cups of coffee, helped me keep writing appointments, and offered inspiration. Shanell Smith, Linn Tonstad, Lisa Thompson, and Eboni Marshall Turman, my writing accountability group, lovingly held me true to my goals.
• Acknowledgments
I also thank research assistants James K. Melton, who scoured and formatted the bibliography, and Lauren Holder, who proofed Greek diacritics in short order. My students at WFU School of Divinity have had a significant impact on this work as well. Corinne Causby offered particularly creative insights that are footnote-worthy. Demi McCoy was willing to search databases exhaustively with the goal of finding nothing—a thankless job. Erica Saunders copyedited the entire manuscript several times with sharp acumen, quick accuracy, and cheerful problem-solving. Steve Wiggins at Oxford University Press gently coached me through the book-writing process.
When I was a second-year M.Div. student, Helmut Koester handed me a box of 35mm slides and charged me with describing what I saw in them. Little did I know that I would fall in love with Ephesos through those slides. He did not see the completion of this project, but it would not exist without his investment.
Anna C. Miller, Carly Daniel-Hughes, Marcie Lenk, Rebecca Hancock, and Mikael Haxby kept me supplied with listening ears and shoulders to lean on throughout the process. Karl Bark provided opportunities for walks, reminders about meals, and warm fuzzies. Jonathan Miller kept me connected to the modern world and showed me every day how equality works in real time.
INTRODUCTION
Quo magis necessarium credidi ex duabus ancillis, quae ministrae dicebantur, quid esset veri, et per tormenta quaerere.
I believed it necessary to procure from two slave women, whom they call ministers/ deacons, something of the truth by torture.
—Pliny the y ounger, Epistulae ad Trajanum
Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, writing sometime between 111–113 ce, asked the Emperor Trajan for advice about handling prosecutions of accused Christians in the province.1 These accused Christians, in Pliny’s description, included men and women; young and old; urban dwellers, villagers, and country folk; Roman citizens and noncitizens; and enslaved and free. Pliny detained two Christians: enslaved women whom other Christians called “deacons.” He tortured them because enslaved testimony was only admissible in a Roman court if gathered under torture.2 He seems disappointed with the information these women provided: “Nihil aliud inveni quam superstitionem pravam et immodicam” (I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths).3 Yet he includes the information he received from them in his letter to the emperor. As a result, Pliny records an important practice among Christian groups in Bithynia: enslaved persons participated in the religious practices of the community and even held specific titles.
Pliny’s letter dangles a tantalizing bit of information for anyone interested in histories of slavery in religious studies. Were these women enslaved leaders? Or were they enslaved helpers to leaders in this Christian community? Was their enslavement an incidental detail to their role as deacons? Or were they slaves trained for certain religious work? How should we understand the interplay of enslaved/free status with leadership roles in ancient religious practices? These questions undergird the ambivalence that the title of this book implies. Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity is neither a celebration of early Christian abolitionary impulses nor a venture into the horrors of enslaved life in the Roman
Empire. Rather it is a study of tensions, ambiguities, and power contestations that arise with the presence of enslaved persons in ancient religious communities.
Enslaved persons4 were ubiquitous in first- and second-century religious practices, yet their presence is most frequently marked when their roles as leaders come into conflict with the social hierarchies that subordinate them. This book argues that such conflicts indicate that enslaved persons held positions of authority as priests, religious specialists, and leaders in Ephesian religious groups— including early Christian groups. Using early Christian literature as well as civic inscriptions, imperial images, and architectural spaces associated with ancient Asia Minor, the chapters that follow sketch several possibilities for enslaved religious participation in the Artemis cult, imperial veneration, and early Christian groups. The resulting picture of slaves’ roles in religious groups complexifies our modern picture of slaves’ relationship to social power dynamics and religious and civic leadership structures.
Extant materials, of course, more readily represent lives of socially, politically, and economically privileged free persons than the lives of slaves.5 Yet recent work by ancient historians takes up the challenge to shift historiographical frameworks from accepting master perspectives as a full description of historical realities to a consideration of enslaved perspectives. For example, Sandra Joshel notes that writing history based on such one-sided constructions of slaves “inscribes as legitimate—even natural—the master’s claim to his slave’s labor and eclipses the power relations that uphold it.”6 This critique forces us to interrogate the negotiation of the power dynamics at work in master-slave relationships, particularly in the interplay between the rhetorical constructions of slaves and the everyday practices of enslaved persons. Joshel and Lauren Petersen, in their book The Material Life of Roman Slaves, argue that the same actions that masters describe as evidence of obedience, laziness, and/or the servile nature of enslaved persons could also be described as tactics of resistance to enslavement.7 Interpreting both texts and architectural spaces requires an understanding of the ways that they attempt to contain, constrain, and construct slaves as masters understand them.
Now the challenge and opportunity of studying ancient slavery comes into view: slaves are both ubiquitous on the ancient landscape and, at the same time, obfuscated or represented ambiguously in the ancient materials available to us. Enslaved labor sustained the economy and even the religious and civic life of major cities in the Roman Empire. A significant percentage of the population of these cities was enslaved.8 Yet, it is easy for scholars to imagine that their roles in society were largely indecipherable ones. Although it is known that the work of enslaved persons sustained the lives of the elites, kept up city infrastructure, and supported agriculture, such roles disappeared into the background of imperial politics, civic hierarchies, and religious practices. How then do we incorporate
the pervasive presence of enslaved persons in ancient life when our ancient materials often render them invisible apart from their masters’ perspective? What methodological interventions are necessary to bring enslaved persons back into the historical narrative?
Feminist Frameworks and the Analysis of Power Dynamics
Feminist historians of early Christianity faced a similar erasure in historical reconstructions and have shown that both the rhetorical perspective of ancient materials and the questions that scholars bring to their materials often hide women from view. Both insights apply to scholarship about slaves.9 In the case of scholars’ questions, feminist scholars have worked to expose the trajectories in these questions that erase women. For example, in Rom 16:7 Paul greets Andronicus and Junia as relatives (συγγενεῖς), as fellow prisoners (συναιχμαλώτους), and as distinguished among the apostles (ἐπίσημοι ἐν τοῖς ἀποστόλοις). In the mid-twentieth century, exegetes could not come to terms with the idea that Junia, a woman, was an apostle and a distinguished one at that.10 They insisted that Junia (a woman) was really Junias (a man) because women could not be apostles. Bernadette Brooten, through a careful study of names in antiquity, showed that Junia as a woman’s name was well attested, while no instances of Junias as a male name could be found. By enumerating the differences between ancient evidence and scholarly conclusions, Brooten exposed androcentric frameworks among biblical interpreters—frameworks that masked women’s presence and authority in early Christian communities.11 Subsequently, feminist scholars, like Brooten, have shown that women served as leaders in the religious practices of early Christian communities, despite patriarchal social structures.
Even when the presence of women is acknowledged, some interpreters of both texts and archaeological materials continue to discount women as active participants and leaders in Christian religious practices. Many interpreters point to texts that argue for the subordination of women as “proof” that women were not leaders in early Christian communities.12 For example, the household codes in Col 3:18– 4:1, Eph 5:21–6:9, and 1 Pet 2:18–3:7 order women/wives to be submissive to men/husbands. Other texts, like 1 Cor 14:34–36 and 1 Tim 2:11–15, instruct women to remain silent. Still others advocate marriage in order to silence women (e.g., 1 Cor 11).13 Reading these texts and others as descriptions of women’s practices in early Christian communities paints a picture of subordinate, domestic, silent women and subjugated, submissive, objectified slaves within early Christian communities. Women thus appear in mainstream narratives of early Christian history because of “a relatively straightforward reading of
the relationship between textual representation and social reality.”14 Such interpretations approach texts as accurate descriptions of women’s lives rather than as rhetorical arguments about women’s status.15 Reading these texts as prescriptions for early Christian communities reflects a more accurate range of possibilities within the historical context—some enslaved persons and women may have been subordinate and submissive, but the possibility exists that some were not.
This descriptive approach, however, has largely shaped the scholarly imagination about the possibilities for women’s roles in early Christianity. Thus, important evidence disappears about the ways in which women’s everyday lives may not have conformed with the rhetoric about women in texts and other materials. For example, Paul’s letters mention women in leadership positions across early Christian communities. Euodia and Syntyche (Phil 4:2–3), Phoebe the deacon (Rom 16:1), Junia the apostle (Rom 16:7), Chloe (1 Cor 1:11), and Prisca (1 Cor 16:19) are all named as key players in the communities to which Paul wrote. Highlighting women who held leadership roles in religious communities calls attention to neglected portions of early Christian texts and inscriptions. Revealing women in ancient sources helps recover their presence in early Christian communities.
In the work that follows, I illustrate an analogous problem in the study of ancient slavery. Just as most ancient texts about women reflect an androcentric perspective, so do literary and archaeological materials about enslaved persons reflect slaveholding perspectives. Thus, materials about enslaved persons do not provide windows into reality; rather, they advance arguments that reinforce certain social hierarchies. Just as evidence of women’s authority and leadership is obscured in our histories of early Christianity, so are enslaved persons’ contributions. Yet the usefulness of feminist historiographical strategies for studying enslaved persons extends beyond analogy. Feminist rhetorical-critical frameworks analyze power dynamics reflected through the arguments, interventions, and constructions of women and gender in historical materials. This book adapts such frameworks in order to analyze power dynamics reflected in both texts and archaeological materials. Such an analysis embeds the study of enslaved persons in larger matrices of power within ancient civic and religious contexts and within modern historiographical frameworks.
Simply pointing to the presence of women and/or enslaved persons in the ancient world, while extremely important, does not account for the power perspectives that texts and other materials adopt. In other words, texts and other kinds of archaeological materials attempt to persuade us that women and enslaved persons are both clearly identifiable as such and clearly subordinate. This reading strategy, however, does not consider the fact that early Christian texts are produced in the context of kyriarchal16 authority and leadership in the same way that
ancient materials about enslaved persons primarily reflect masters’ perspectives. Critical of assumptions that ancient women conformed to such structures, some feminist interpreters call for a hermeneutic of suspicion in historical reconstructions of early Christian groups. For example, prohibitions on women’s leadership only need to be made when the possibility exists for women to hold authority.17 Pauline and pseudo-Pauline prescriptions for women to be silent in the community in deference to men’s authority (1 Cor 14:34–36; 1 Tim 2:11–15) signal that women were likely strong leaders in the community.18
Feminist rhetorical criticism recognizes that a text’s rhetoric influences historical reconstructions. Rhetoric, in this sense, does not designate the stylistic standards for constructing prose or poetry but rather identifies the strategies used to persuade a reader, listener, or viewer that a particular point of view is “natural.”19 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza writes, “Rhetoric is aware that texts seek to persuade and to argue; they are address and debate, rather than objective statement and explanation.”20 This persuasive stance presents only one perspective in what were often multivociferous debates among historical groups. Since the materials that survive from antiquity perpetuate privileged perspectives, the persuasive voice in them often works to establish marginalizing social and political structures. This obfuscation has political consequences for historical reconstruction in that it reifies proposed structures of social and political relationships as the only historical possibility for such relationships.21 The work that follows brings to the fore multiple possibilities for historical analysis in light of, but not in compliance with, the rhetorical perspective of ancient texts and materials. Analysis of multiple kinds of arguments for enslaved subordination and objectification reveal fissures in them; using these cracks in conversation with each other, a fuller range of possibilities for women and/or/as enslaved persons appears.
This kind of analysis does not separate the study of women from enslaved persons. Rather it focuses on the intersections between groups of people in antiquity, scrutinizing power dynamics between and among these same groups. Women are located differently within social hierarchies according to class, race, religion, and legal status.22 Enslavement is not the only determining factor of a person’s role in religious groups; gender, access to resources, and ethnicity are also factors. Indeed, studying women or enslaved persons only in terms of objectifying and exploitative ideologies duplicates kyriarchy—or intersectional systems of power relationships that benefit those already in power or the κύριος. Thus, historical reconstructions of women and enslaved persons in religious practices need to account for these intersecting power dynamics when reading ancient sources. In the process, historians must attend to the rhetoric of ancient sources—a rhetoric that often constructs (rather than describes) gender, slave/free status, economic means, and social status along traditional kyriarchal lines.
Such rhetorical constructions are not limited to textual sources. Visual images, architecture, city planning, and other kinds of archaeological materials all attempt to persuade and construct certain understandings of who women and enslaved persons are and how they should function in socio-civic spaces.23 Comparing the ways that constructions of women and enslaved persons function rhetorically in both archaeological materials and literature helps illuminate possibilities for multiple sociopolitical and religious practices. Thus, a more complex picture of ancient slavery emerges, one that takes enslaved personhood as a basic assumption.
On the one hand, this approach acknowledges the fully subjugated status of slaves, even those with access to wealth and sociopolitical status. On the other hand, this approach illuminates ways that enslaved persons participated in, shaped, subverted, and sometimes controlled religious practices as human subjects rather than as instrumenta or tools.24 Such consideration of enslaved persons as both engineers of, and tools in, religious practices moves the scholarly conversation about slaves in early Christian communities away from debates about whether these communities were more than, less than, or equally liberative than their Roman counterparts.25
Slaves in the First and Second Centuries ce
Slavery in the Roman Empire was a complex institution that involved nearly every aspect of ancient life. As a result, historians of the Roman Empire and New Testament scholars have focused on different aspects of the institution. Since the work to follow offers insights to both types of scholars, I begin with a general sketch of the institution of Roman slavery in the first and second centuries ce.
The varieties of slaveholding ideologies, geographic and economic circumstances, and means of enslavement attest to an institution that was both fixed in its devaluation of enslaved persons and fluid in its means of perpetuating such devaluation.26 Thus, one finds within the institution of Roman slavery a broad range of experiences that allow for a number of contradictions. For example, masters had the power of life and death over their slaves; at the same time, the system held out the hope for manumission, the legal act of freeing a slave.27 Across the spectrum of the institution, some slaves enjoyed relative privilege and wealth while others worked at grueling labor, facts that attest to a great deal of fluidity within the institution. The fact that the social stigma of enslavement followed slaves and former slaves throughout their lives, however, demonstrates a certain degree of permanence in terms of social status.28
The practice of manumission illustrates well the way that this dynamic existed in the actual lives of first- and second-century slaves. Manumission was a frequent
practice. A person who was formerly enslaved, whether originally freeborn or not, was legally designated as a freedperson.29 Many methods of manumission existed. For example, Roman law stipulated that a slave could be manumitted after a certain time of service while her former master still lived, frequently after she turned thirty years old. She could also be manumitted in her owner’s last testament.30 Once a person was manumitted, her legal status changed from enslaved to freedperson. Most freedpersons were connected to their former owners through the patronage system, and some even drew a measure of social prestige from their former owners.31 Particularly in Asia Minor, imperial freedpersons became civic benefactors, emphasizing the stature that comes with imperial connections. For example, Gaius Stertinius Orpex, freedperson of Nero, and his daughter, Stertinia Mareina, donated large parts of the stadium in Ephesos and dedicated them to Artemis and Nero.32
At the same time, the designation of freedperson carried with it the macula servitutis or “stain of slavery.” Freedpersons always carried a stigma associated with their past that made them suspicious at best as free persons.33 This stigma marked freedpersons, particularly those with access to wealth, with stereotypical expectations, such as ostentatious taste in both dress and living. Trimalchio, the bombastic wealthy freedperson in Petronius’s Satyricon, is just one example of this stereotype at work in ancient literature.34 In addition, stereotypes about freedpersons helped perpetuate the low social status of slaves in the institution of Roman slavery. Henrik Mouritsen characterizes this ideology thusly: “The servile stereotype performed a vital function in maintaining the slave system by setting slaves apart from free and reinforcing the notion of stable, ostensibly natural hierarchies of authority.”35 Freedpersons thus reinforced the stigma of former servitude.
In addition, natural slave theory perpetuated the idea that slavery was innate for some people. Just as some were naturally born women or men, some were naturally born slaves. A person’s capacity for virtue was correlated to this natural state. For example, Aristotle’s Politics argues that individuals’ capacity for virtue should determine how power is distributed. Naturally slavish persons fall to the bottom of such a hierarchy because they possess only enough virtue to obey their masters.36 Slaves are therefore living tools in the hands of their masters. In turn, Aristotle argued, a master displays his own fullness of virtue in the orderly management of his household dependents, including slaves.37 Social hierarchies in this view, therefore, were based on a circular reasoning: the capacity for virtue distinguishes slave from free status even as enslavement proves slaves’ lack of virtue.
Yet even for Aristotle this kind of natural slavery was not only about an individual’s legal status. Natural slavery intertwined with concepts of ethnicity and
gender. For example, Greeks did not exhibit the same naturally slavish tendencies as barbarians because all Greeks were by nature not slaves.38 In addition, among enslaved barbarians gender hierarchies did not exist, since their slavish tendencies automatically placed them lower on the social hierarchy than even enslaved Greek women.39
Another central debate in antiquity strengthened servile stereotypes. This debate circled around whether slavery was an inevitable physical condition for certain persons or an inner orientation resulting from a lack of philosophical discipline. Stoic philosophers, for example, argued that enslavement is an inner condition regardless of a person’s physical reality.40 Thus those who cultivated inner freedom could never be truly enslaved. Those who were legally free, if they were enslaved to their passions, did not experience true freedom. For example, Arrian reported that Epictetus—who was himself a former slave—criticized those who pursued political power rather than correct philosophy, calling such ones “slaves.”41 Epictetus’s rhetoric was meant to be inflammatory; accusations of enslavement are never flattering. His argument that proper cultivation of virtue leads to true freedom suggests an ideology of enslavement that is not predicated on the physical realities of enslavement but rather on inner orientations toward freedom. While this ideological position did not advance the idea that enslaved persons have unalterable or inevitable characteristics that justified their slavery, Epictetus deployed the negative, dishonorable stereotypes of enslavement. At the same time, Epictetus’s philosophical imagination depended on the possibility that slave/free status was alterable.
While a variety of ideologies about slavery existed, there was also a great deal of variety in the everyday lives of slaves. Roman slavery varied across urban and rural geography. Slavery was part of the Roman agricultural tradition; large rural villas with hundreds of slaves served as centers for food production in the Empire. Agricultural manuals, like those of Varro, Cato, Columella, and Xenophon, gave advice on managing such villas.42 These manuals prescribed management philosophies for villa owners who wished to marshal the most economic gain through enslaved laborers.43 In addition to animal husbandry, harvest storage, and growing techniques, these manuals discussed the management of enslaved bodies, suggested appropriate labor for enslaved workers, organized enslaved relationships, and proposed ways to avoid rebellion.44
In urban environments, enslaved persons were fewer in number and often occupied more specialized positions, but their presence in the spaces of Roman cities was ubiquitous. Slaves worked in bathhouses, workshops, and temples; they also were gladiators, sex workers, and actors in the theater. Some slaves (οἰκετοί, θρεπτοί) lived in large urban households working as cooks, gatekeepers, washers, pedagogues, bookkeepers, and religious practitioners.45 Masters who owned
multiple large houses often appointed an enslaved manager (οἰκονόμος) at each site, giving that manager access to resources for maintaining the household.46 While the wealthiest Romans held the most slaves, even households of meager means often would hold one or two slaves.47
Urban slaves were not confined to domestic contexts; they also worked with institutions throughout the city. In cities like Ephesos, slaves worked in the fishing industry, in the agora, in the theater, and at the harbor.48 Major temple complexes also owned significant numbers of slaves who worked on the temple plantations, maintained the physical structures, administered the treasury, and performed rites.49 Some of these slaves (δουλοῖ ἱεροί) worked in various aspects of the cult.50 Public slaves (δουλοῖ δημόσιοι)—that is, slaves owned by the dēmos, or city—worked as civil servants. The emperor also owned large numbers of slaves, some of whom acted as his proxy throughout the Empire.51 These imperial slaves often had access to significant economic, social, and political resources.
Slaves came from a variety of sources, a reality that attests to the complexity of the institution.52 A thriving trade in slaves is attested around the Mediterranean rim, but particularly in Amphipolis, Delos, and Ephesos.53 Prisoners of war were sold as slaves, often connecting conquered ethnic groups with slavery.54 Infant exposure, a practice well-attested in the Roman world, also generated young slaves for the markets.55 Kidnapping by slave-trading pirates is attested in inscriptions from the Aegean Islands.56 Children born to enslaved mothers were slaves of their mothers’ owners. Finally, limited instances of self-sale are also attested in the Roman Empire.57
In short, enslaved persons were ubiquitous in ancient Roman life, whether in the lives of those who owned them or in the lives of city dwellers generally. The complexities of their existence were only magnified by the varieties of their situations: some, no doubt, lived lives of relative comfort, while others literally did the dirty work of the city. The varieties of discourses about slaves make it difficult to characterize any singular experience of slavery.
Historiography and Roman Slavery
If the preceding picture of the institution of slavery in the Roman Empire is complicated, the ways in which scholars approach the study of slaves and slavery in antiquity is equally so.58 Historiographical frameworks produce widely different pictures of Greek and Roman slavery in the first centuries ce.59 These differences are, in part, due to scholars’ different ethical stances vis-à-vis slavery in antiquity.60
Most scholars understand Roman slavery as problematic because the power dynamics implied in master-slave relationships allow one human being complete control over another. While some suggest that such power dynamics are
benign so long as both masters and slaves behave with kindness and respect, others argue that the imbalance of power makes the institution inherently exploitative.61 Those who contend that Greek and Roman slavery was a relatively benign institution insist that good masters and good slaves shared genuine affection for one another.62 For example, Joseph Vogt, who sees an ethos of loyalty between enslaved persons and their masters, points out examples of self-sale as evidence that Roman slavery was a benign institution, offering more stable economic conditions than low-status freedom.63 Others counter such interpretations, arguing that physical violence and fear characterized the master-slave relationship. Moses Finley held that masters’ corporal brutality characterized the system, even when enslaved persons found themselves in powerful positions.64
Keith Bradley forges a third path, noticing that both harmonious and fearful master-slave relationships existed but that both were part of a system of social control. Through reward and punishment systems, including the reward of manumission, enslaved persons reinforced their own enslavement, complying with the master’s wishes for the sake of rewards like gratitude, familial ties, and even the promise of freedom.65 Bradley also points out that when these manipulatory techniques failed, masters always had recourse to physical violence.
Underlying all three of these perspectives, however, is the idea that masterslave hierarchies were always clearly defined. Masters had power; slaves did not. While scholars recognize apparent reversals to this hierarchy, most explain these disjunctures as a reinforcement of masters’ power over slaves.66 This agreement about power structures focuses historiographical arguments around the virtues or evils of slavery. For example, at times ancient sources portray slaves holding power over their masters when they work as nurses or as cooks.67 Sometimes slaves seem to comply with their own enslavement; and sometimes slaves gain wealth and prestige from their owners. Attempts to explain these scenarios range from proof of slaves’ loyalty to their masters to threats of violence as cause for obedience. These explanations speak to the quality of relationships between masters and slaves, leaving the complexities of power in these scenarios unexamined.
Roman slavery, therefore, has been described as either potentially benign or exploitatively problematic. Both positions are responses to the vagary of power dynamics within the Roman slave system; both positions, however, are predicated on a similar methodological approach. This approach interprets ancient source material on slavery as descriptive of the actual lives of enslaved persons rather than as rhetorical arguments meant to reinforce social control. Because of this reading strategy, scholars construct a picture of slaves as objects (whether kindly treated, brutalized, or subtly manipulated) rather than as human participants (whether exploited, coerced, willing, or manipulated) in everyday activities, including religious activities.
In contrast, this book demonstrates that power relationships between masters and slaves are not necessarily clear. To be sure, the master-perspective rhetoric that functions almost exclusively in our sources constructs slavery as a form of total domination, dishonored objectification, natal alienation, and indeed “social death” as Orlando Patterson puts it.68 This definition of slavery—while correct in its characterization of slavery from masters’ perspectives—leaves no possibility for enslaved persons to resist their own dehumanization, objectification, and social death.69 Yet if we apply master-perspective rhetoric as historical reality, historiographically we eliminate the possibility for enslaved persons to be socially resistive persons—a move that erases enslaved persons from history despite their ubiquity. This book acknowledges in its framework the ways in which master-slave hierarchies were unclear, disjointed, and even subverted in the everyday activities of enslaved persons.70 As Vincent Brown notes, this ambiguity in master-slave hierarchies presents an opportunity to see the everyday lives of enslaved persons as means and acts of subversion. To be sure, I do not claim that slavery is ethically neutral in antiquity or in any contemporary historiographical framework. Practices of owning, corporally controlling, and alienating human bodies are neither ethically justifiable nor socially benign. Our sources communicate as much. Yet, ancient evidence defends, constructs, and clarifies the hierarchies that kept enslaved persons under the control of their masters.71 Thus my central question is: Why do such hierarchies need to be continually reestablished?
A limited body of feminist historical work in ancient slavery is helpful for framing this project.72 Feminist scholars who work on ancient slavery critique the prevailing reading strategies used to approach ancient materials. They argue that if we read literary texts, inscriptions, and archaeological materials as transparent windows into antiquity, our historical reconstructions regarding enslaved persons reflect slave-owning ideals. While histories of slaves have blossomed in the last few decades, DuBois, Joshel, and others argue that the mainstream of Greek and Roman history still reflects a scholarly preference for studies about socially, politically, and economically privileged persons. This preference in turn reflects an idealization of antiquity on the part of modern scholars73 a preference that often mirrors and focuses on elite free/privileged men, both historically and contemporarily, and thus masks the participation of enslaved persons in ancient life.
Religion, Early Christian History, and the Enslaved
With a focus on urban slavery in Asia Minor, this book delineates several ways in which enslaved persons were involved in religious practices in antiquity and enumerates possibilities for multiple kinds of roles in these practices. Few scholars have focused on religious practices in order to study the complexities of enslaved
persons’ lives. Even fewer scholars of Greek and Roman religion have studied the roles of enslaved persons in such practices. One exception is Franz Bömer, whose four-volume work catalogues the involvement of slaves in Greek and Roman cultic practices.74 Yet, in constructing this catalogue, Bömer characterizes enslaved persons as “imitating” freeborn persons in their actions—an assessment with which I disagree. For Bömer, enslaved persons were mere functionaries in Greek and Roman religious practices, tools at the disposal of the elite persons to whom religious/pious benefits accrue.75
When religion does enter the conversation in studies of slavery in Roman history, scholars often suppose that Christians either worked to eliminate or at least had a positive impact on the institution. Thus, when Christian texts explicitly state a reciprocity or allude to kindness between slaves and masters (such as Col 4:1), some scholars argue that the effect is the slow erosion of the institution by forging bonds between masters and slaves.76 This argument assumes that Christians rejected the totalizing power of slavery even if not fully rejecting the institution, something unique to Christian communities. Yet Greek and Roman writers, who were contemporaneous with or predate earliest Christianity, argued similarly that the mark of a good master is an even temper when dealing with slaves.77 Furthermore, scholars of Roman history also suggest that in the first and second centuries ce Roman law took measures to soften slavery’s sting.78 Thus these scholars portray the institution of slavery as a kind of social safety net that ensures room, board, and clothing for those who would otherwise be destitute79 rather than a brutal system of forced labor. Those who argue that early Christian attitudes toward slavery were morally superior to the social, political, and religious contexts in which Christians resided ignore the brutality. Early Christian groups were inextricably embedded in their local social, political, and economic worlds, including the Roman institution of slavery, and thus their texts reflect similar perspectives on the institution of slavery.
Scholars of early Christianity tend to employ the same set of assumptions in their analysis as those of Roman historians: Christians were fundamentally different from their Roman counterparts in their views on slavery. Scott Bartchy follows Vogt in interpreting slavery in general—not just among Christians—as a benign system in which most masters treated slaves kindly and most slaves were content in their status. Christian masters were, thus, even more benevolent.80 Similarly, Dale Martin argues that slavery was a kind of salvation; for a very small number of people, enslavement to an influential master might have been a means of upward mobility.81 In Martin’s assessment, theological metaphors comparing salvation with slavery to God must have some basis in historical experience. If salvation is a good thing, Martin argues, then some aspects of slavery must also be positive. Martin’s work illustrates the complexities of social status and enslaved
status in the first centuries. Yet these readings characterize master-slave relationships, and thus slavery, as advantageous rather than exploitative.
Departing from Bartchy and Martin, Richard Horsley and Allen Callahan argue that slaves’ experiences of exploitation, objectification, and degradation must come to the fore in any discussion of ancient slavery. Yet they also argue that early Christians, and particularly Paul, were subversive critics of this established Roman social order.82 As such, Horsley and Callahan follow those Roman historians who characterize slavery as brutal and controlling but create an untroubled binary between brutal Roman slavery and liberative Christian egalitarianism. Thus, despite the ambiguity toward slaves in his letters (see chapter 3), Paul emerges as a champion of Christian equality against Roman hierarchy in this interpretation. The portrait of Paul as a subversive figure obfuscates struggles about slavery among those to whom Paul wrote or subsequent generations83 struggles that surface when we read Paul’s letters with an eye toward their rhetoricity.
Missing from this debate is the fact that early Christian sources provide no consistent critiques of slavery and some Roman writings disparage corporal punishment at the hands of masters.84 On the one hand, Gal 3:28 and 1 Cor 12:13 proclaim an end to divisions between slave and free for those who are in Christ. On the other hand, Pauline and deutero-Pauline literature never questions the fundamental concept of slavery. This literature frequently uses master-slave relationships as metaphors for human-divine relationships (1 Cor 7:23–24; Rom 6:22) and gives instructions to actual masters and slaves (Col 3:22– 4:1; Eph 5:5–9; 1 Tim 6:1–2; Titus 2:9–10; 1 Pet 2:18–25). In addition, further textual and archaeological evidence also shows that leaders in early Christian communities held slaves, sanctioned slavery, and perpetuated the system.85 In the face of this evidence, the idea of Christian exceptionalism is unfounded.86
Most recently, historians of early Christianity have returned to the notion that even within Christian groups, master-slave relationships were exploitative, controlling, and often brutal. J. Albert Harrill, for example, argues that early Christian writings employed common literary tropes and stock slave characters that justified masters’ dominance over their slaves and Christians displayed little discomfort or moral outrage with these portrayals.87 Thus literary stereotypes justify dominance, subordinate slaves, and celebrate the elite men who are their masters.88 While this analysis helpfully explains how slavery pervades the literary imagination, the ways that enslaved persons’ daily lives stood in tension with the rhetoric of these texts do not come to the fore.
Furthering the trend in New Testament studies toward understanding early Christians as accepting of the brutality of Roman slavery, Jennifer Glancy asks whether New Testament texts allow for enslaved participation in early Christian
communities. She shows that early Christian texts perpetuate masters’ perspectives and encode logics of enslavement so thoroughly that slaves’ experiences of objectification and exploitation do not even register as problematic for early Christian communities.89 Not only did slavery’s brutality remain unchallenged in early Christian groups, but its logic also helped to shape the movement theologically and morally.90 For example, Glancy shows that Paul’s instructions about sexual morality in the Corinthian correspondence were impossible for enslaved persons—who were always sexually available to their masters—to follow.91 As a result, Paul’s instructions render enslaved persons outsiders to the community and thus reinforce social ideologies that objectify and exclude enslaved persons. Scholars have usually asked, “What did Paul think about slavery?” Glancy’s interpretation shifts the question: “What did enslaved persons in the early Christian community understand in Paul’s rhetoric?” Such a shift allows for a complex rendering of enslaved experience in historical reconstructions. At the same time, the rhetoric of spaces, images, and texts, even when heard from the perspective of the enslaved, obfuscates the ways in which everyday life does not match rhetorical prescriptions. Thus, the ways that enslaved persons participated in early Christian practices may have differed significantly from the prescriptions of Paul’s letters.
Ubiquitous Slaves, Hidden by the Evidence
Despite these historiographical debates about the nature of slavery in the first and second centuries ce, few scholars would dispute the ubiquity of slavery during those times. Across the Roman Empire, enslaved persons were present in nearly every aspect of social, political, economic, and religious life. Finley describes the ubiquity of slaves thusly: “I should say that there was no action or belief or institution in Graeco-Roman antiquity that was not one way or other affected by the possibility that someone involved might be a slave.”92 Indeed, slavery was necessary for a flourishing economic system in Asia Minor.93 At the same time, the sources about the institution are varied and complex, presenting previously noted methodological difficulties for historians.
Attestations of the presence of slaves are plentiful in literary texts, visual images, inscriptions, and other archaeological materials.94 Yet the study of ancient slavery is exceptionally challenging because little or no first-person evidence for the lives of enslaved persons survives from antiquity—no diaries, no slave narratives, no definitive “slave quarters,” no mention of slave-run institutions. Finley again articulates this issue:
There were no Greek or Roman Frederick Douglasses. It is notorious that the few writers of antiquity who had a personal background of
enslavement show no trace of that experience in their surviving works, not a scrap to distinguish them from the overwhelming majority of writers, whose background was in the slave-owning classes.95
While much literature mentions slaves, and discusses slaves’ work,96 the clear majority of these materials reflect slave-owning perspectives. Even writers whom we know to have been enslaved, like Epictetus, do not analyze their everyday lives as slaves.97 As a result, enslaved persons are often rendered invisible because their experience cannot be distinguished in ancient texts.
The tension between the ubiquity of slaves in ancient life and their obscured presence in our sources constructs a portrait of enslaved persons that is consistent with slave owners’ ideals. Thus, sources on slavery rhetorically construct the ideal slave as one who is only noticeable when her master wishes her to be and otherwise blends into the background.98 These sources also show that ancient writers used slaves as a kind of experimental lens through which to study free characters. Images of enslaved persons in ancient materials are often “fantasy projections of the free, not so much portraits of slaves as others through whom the free could play out their own agenda.”99 Such projections hide historical enslaved persons from our view.
This book draws together early Christian texts as well as published archaeological materials. Even though Christian literature of this period directly addresses both slaves and slave masters in early Christian communities, neither scholars of early Christian history nor scholars of Roman slavery have used these texts as a key source for studying the roles of enslaved persons in religious practices and the ways that these roles complicate structures of power.100 Archaeological materials give evidence of enslaved presence throughout the Roman world. Containment devices, including shackles, collars, and racks, have been found. Similarly, reliefs depicting the capture of slaves, as well as inscriptions regulating slave-trading activities and enslaved labor, also exist.101 Yet such materials have not been fully explored as evidence of slavery. Some of the archaeological materials discussed in this book appear in significant studies of early Christian history,102 yet scholars have not mined them for their constructions of enslaved persons. Furthermore, few studies on Roman slavery incorporate archaeological materials, particularly materials attesting to enslaved persons’ roles in religious practices.103
Chapter Organization
Spaces and archaeological remains of ancient cities are powerful tools of persuasion, particularly about the roles of enslaved persons. The chapters that follow describe the power struggles that make such persuasive tools necessary. The first
