Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture by Sandra R. Joshel Sheila Murnaghan

Author:Sandra R. Joshel, Sheila Murnaghan [Sandra R. Joshel, Sheila Murnaghan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415261593
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2001-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Like Quintilian, Columella displays a discursive tendency toward aggregating slaves and women in one large, inferior mass, stressing the strong similarities between the bodily practices and emotional natures of the self-indulgent, deceitful free wife and the lazy, cunning slave. “For the most part,” he writes, “women so abandon themselves to luxury and idleness that they do not deign to undertake even the superintendence of woolmaking … and in their perverse desires they can be satisfied only by clothing purchased for large sums” (Rural Life 12 pref. 9). Women are careless and lazy, and they “hate the country,” recalling the pleasures the city offers (12 pref. 10). Like women, slaves think constantly of “the voluptuous occupations of the city” (1.8.1), a habit that worsens their natural inclinations toward laziness (1.8.2,10) and unlimited spending (1.7.5, 1.8.6). In Columella's view, both slaves and women are necessary evils. On the one hand, their labor enables free men to pursue the virtuous fruits of leisure; on the other, their vices are a constant threat to the leisured order. The only effective way to combat their vices, Columella advises, is to transform the aberrant woman or slave, as near as his or her inferior nature allows, into some approximation of a good man (1.8.10).20 As a good example of the profits of this treatment, Columella cites the villica, the steward's wife. When subjected to harsh discipline, he says, her natural addictions to wine, greediness, superstition, sleepiness, and lust (12.1.3) are obliterated in favor of a virtuous, soldier-like existence (12.2.6). Thus supervised and regulated, her femininity and slavishness mutate into the more acceptable (and exploitable) qualities of modesty and obedience, qualities visibly manifested in her chaste and submissive bodily practice.

Enforced self-transformation is the answer to Quintilian's concerns as well.

Above all, see that the child's nurse speaks correctly. The ideal, according to Chrysippus, would be that she should be wise (sapientes); failing that, he desired that the best should be chosen, as far as possible. No doubt the most important point is that they should be of good character: but they should speak correctly as well.

(IO 1.1.4)

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