Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity ed. by Deborah Kamen and C. W. Marshall (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity ed. by Deborah Kamen and C. W. Marshall David Sutton Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity. Edited by Deborah Kamen and C. W. Marshall. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 2021. Pp. 317. While research into many aspects of marginalized identity and experience is a rich part of classical scholarship and teaching today, genuinely intersectional approaches remain in many ways novel to the field. Thus, volumes like Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity have much to offer both in their own right and as signposts for further developments in ancient studies. This collection of essays explores the role of sex in the lives of enslaved people in Mediterranean antiquity, mostly addressing textual sources and largely setting aside the context of prostitution, which, the editors note, is the most fully treated aspect of slave sexuality today. The sensitive introduction acknowledges the principal challenges to their project, including the limitations of the primary evidence and the fundamental problem of balancing a vigilant awareness of the oppressive nature of slavery against recovering a role for subjectivity and agency among enslaved individuals [End Page 168] and populations. With respect to the limitations of ancient evidence the editors highlight the utility of comparison with modern slave societies where the enslaved voice is better preserved, and a number of the contributors to the volume take this opportunity very much in hand (principally, but not exclusively, with reference to the American context). There are seven chapters on Greek topics followed by six on Rome, and some of them form thematic clusters; three chapters from the second half treat evidence from the Roman novel, while two chapters from the first half (and large parts of two more) address Greek oratory. These focus areas mean that potential paths of inquiry are not taken up, with little attention paid to comedy or epigram (for example), but this is a natural enough occurrence when new ground is being broken and should merely serve as a stimulus to further study. Two chapters on material culture, on classical Greek art and Pompeian households respectively, provide extremely valuable context to the textual evidence explored elsewhere and readers will profit from these as they explore other sections of the book. Emily Wilson begins with a study of slave sexuality in Homeric epic, focused mostly on the Odyssey and its depictions of enslaved women, which argues for an emphasis on the vulnerability to sexual abuse of mortal women for whom rape is understood as a normal component of enslavement. This approach culminates in a reading of Telemachus' execution of the enslaved women that rejects interpretations of the act as punishment for any exercise of sexual agency on their part. Kathy L. Gaca offers a provocative study of martial rape in antiquity with modern comparative evidence from multiple nineteenth-to twenty-first-century conflicts, an approach that is fruitfully applied to the story of the "Olynthian woman" in Dem. 19.196–198 (also the topic of Allison Glazebrook's Chapter Seven). The chapter's central claim is that the female head of a slave-owning household exercised control over the male slave-owner's sexual access to female slaves in the home; this proves one of the more speculative arguments in the book with modern comparative evidence rather more compelling than the ancient material. Kelly L. Wrenhaven's chapter offers a valuable and unflinching overview of the representation of vulnerability, abuse, and sexualized violence towards enslaved bodies in the material cultural tradition. While enslaved males are not subject to the same levels of violence as females, the eroticized sexual use of male bodies is also demonstrated, and the chapter reviews somatic distinction both between free and enslaved bodies and between different categories of slaves. To my mind one of the most successful sequences in the book is formed by the Athenian section. Chapters Four and Five, by Jason Douglas Porter and Rafał Matuszewski, respectively, are closely linked in their focus on sexual agency of and sexual relationships involving enslaved people in classical Athens. Porter directs attention to heteroerotic pairings and Matuszewski to homoerotic ones, both arguing for a recognition of the...

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