'The Bitter Chain of Slavery': Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome, page 19 by Keith Bradley
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a (10.31; 9.59; 6.66). For Martial (and presumably his audience) the commodity's sexual availability is simply taken for granted: slaveowning men and women are free to indulge any appetites they have, and slaves are to submit and to accommodate them (e.g. 1.84; 3.71; 3.73; 4.66; 6.39; 9.25; 12.58). The results might be literarily amusing--one man is utterly unaware that his apparent 'children' have all been fathered by different members of his household staff (6.39), and another is lampooned because he sells but then buys back a slave girl with whom he is infatuated (6.71): what a disgrace! But the assumption that the slaveowner is sexually sovereign is unmistakable. (The inference might be drawn that the slave, as seen earlier from Philo, was sometimes a willing sexual partner [a male slave on the run for instance who was shacking up with a discharged soldier (3.91)], but the servile perspective on sexual access is obviously hopelessly beyond reach.) Then, thirdly, there is the object (once more) of random violence, the object whose body is taken as a natural site on which to inflict physical pain and suffering. A woman distressed that one ringlet of her elaborate coiffure has not been properly pinned strikes her dresser with a mirror; a man annoyed that his dinner is not properly prepared flogs his cook; another punishes an errant slave by hitting him in the mouth (2.66; 3.94; 8.23). Martial repeatedly associates the slave with the whip, the cross, the shackle and the brand (e.g. 14.79; 2.82; 10.82; 3.29, 9.57; 3.21; 10.56). So no tenderness here of the kind that appears in the laments for the untimely dead, and the slave now is always anonymous.
Two of Martial's poems recall the story of Marcus Piso and the theme of the contest of minds, offering further evidence of a master-slave relationship that was subject to constant negotiation. First, the poem (6.39) to which I just alluded in which a certain Cinna is derided because his seven children are the fruits of his wife's liaisons with seven of the house