Kelsey Shawn Madden

Thesis Abstract

The presence of foreign women and children on the studied pieces of visual art conveys the message that the families of the conquered ‘other’ were either eradicated in the name of Rome or they entered the domestic sphere under total Roman control (Ostenberg 2009:141). If complete family destruction is the message when the members of the barbarian family are depicted together, what meaning did the depiction of these people have when read as individuals? It was highly unlikely after the triumphal procession of captives paraded before the Roman crowd that the enslaved family unit would stay together; they could and would be sold separately. What were the realities of these ‘other’ women and children in this situation and how did the target Roman audience of the depictions in contemporary art perceive these images? This is the other supplementary question this dissertation seeks to explore.

The answers to these questions present a new and different reading of the images. The foreign woman and child not only serve the purpose of displaying the destruction of the complete family unit but, in the context of war, were also a prized possession, a trophy to own and to be treated in any way the owner wished, including for sexual gratification. Slave girls, women, and boys were in a physically and morally vulnerable position. Information regarding the sexual attitudes of the Romans towards themselves and 'others' have been cited and explored in the scholarly literature, with Jeannine Uzzi, for example, suggesting a foreign boy’s presence on a marble sarcophagus of the 2^nd century in Rome was sexually motivated.

Amy Richlin (1992) and, more recently, Christian Laes (2003), openly discussed the sexual aspect of the deliciae children. However, the topic of the sexual exploitation of foreign women and children in the Roman world has been extremely limited because of our Victorian Puritanism, acculturation and ideas regarding sex, especially in the context of children. This has resulted in a minimal number of scholars willing to discuss this topic directly and without blanket terms like ‘slavery’ to obliquely describe the acts committed against subdued foreign peoples. The time is ripe to explore properly and consider openly the realities lived by the dominated and enslaved 'other' in Roman antiquity and how this reality was displayed and read in Roman art.

In current scholarship, the purchasing of slaves for the purpose of sex and the sexual autonomy of the master over the slave is discussed under the general umbrella of ‘slavery’. I would argue, however, that this blanket term is not adequate or accurate; and I would make a case for acknowledging this practice in terms of sex-trafficking as we understand it today. While this term does not appear in the Latin language, there is considerable textual evidence for the denigration of un-free individuals whose bodies were at the disposal of others and for the circulation of attractive slaves for the sexual pleasure of those in power and control, as this dissertation seeks to demonstrate.  

Slave women and boys (pueri) could be interchangeable with women as receptacles for sex, but freeborn boys were strictly off-limits. Post battle, the ‘barbarian’ woman and child were forced into a three-step cycle as identified in the art: 1) capture; 2) possession/transport; and 3) Triumph/Trophy display. Their use behind closed doors will be assessed using literary sources. For each cycle, there is an accompanying scene in the visual depictions. Where there is scant archaeological evidence for a cycle, literary evidence is used. This downstream process will be linked with artefactual and textual evidence.

A multidisciplinary approach will be taken with the application of biosocial theory, psychology, wartime rape theory, and feminist theory to aid in providing a sound interpretation of the past that these women and children lived in.