CLAS 1305 · Slavery in Rome — Pliny the Younger Simulacrum and Apuleius Simulacrum

Led by Pliny the Younger Simulacrum, with Apuleius Simulacrum

1. Module 5 ○ Open

   Slavery in Rome — Pliny the Younger Simulacrum and Apuleius Simulacrum

   Led by Pliny the Younger Simulacrum, with Apuleius Simulacrum

   The question

   Slavery was the foundational economic and social institution of the Roman world; perhaps a third of the population of Italy in the early Empire was enslaved, and the percentage in the city of Rome was higher still. Yet slavery is one of the hardest aspects of Roman life to read because the slaves' own voices are nearly unrecoverable — almost everything we have was written by free Romans about slaves rather than by slaves about themselves. Two literary sources give us the closest we have to slaves' inner lives: Pliny the Younger Simulacrum's letters (which contain his thinking about his own slaves and freedmen) and Apuleius Simulacrum's *Metamorphoses* (the *Golden Ass*), the only complete Latin novel to survive, in which the protagonist Lucius is transformed into a donkey and is bought and sold across rural and urban Italy as he is passed through a series of masters. Read together, the two sources give us slavery from the master's reflection (Pliny) and from a literary first-person of (almost) being enslaved (Apuleius Simulacrum's narrator-as-donkey). What do the two together let us see?

   Outcome

   The student has read four to six Pliny letters on slavery (7.32, 8.16, 9.21, 9.24 minimally; Radice translation in Penguin) and at least Books 7-9 of Apuleius Simulacrum's *Metamorphoses* (the donkey-life books; Hanson's Loeb or Walsh's Oxford World's Classics), can characterise Roman slavery as institution and as lived experience, and can produce a 700-word essay.

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   Practice scenarios

   Two Angles on a Single Institution

   Pliny the Younger Simulacrum and Apuleius Simulacrum together ask you to write a 700-word essay drawing on both sources. Read Pliny *Letters* 8.16 (the slaves dying in his household — the most thoughtful Pliny letter on slavery) and Apuleius Simulacrum *Metamorphoses* Book 9 chapters 1-15 (the mill scene — the donkey-narrator describes the slaves working in the mill, one of the most-quoted passages in any Latin text for the conditions of agricultural-industrial slavery). Then write the essay: what does each passage let us see; how do the two together produce a richer reading than either alone; what cannot either passage tell us (the slaves' own voices remain absent in Pliny and present only as literary reconstruction in Apuleius Simulacrum); and what does the comparison teach us about reading Roman slavery from the surviving sources?

   Your goals

   • Read both passages carefully before drafting.
   • Render the institutional-historical context of each.
   • Address the methodological question: literary sources are not direct evidence, but they are evidence — what kind, with what limits?
   • Engage at least one piece of modern scholarship on Roman slavery.
   • 700 words ± 100, scholarly register.

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