Domestic Violence and Servile Vulnerability in the House of the Vettii, Pompeii

BICS 66
Sarah Levin-Richardson. "Domestic Violence and Servile Vulnerability in the House of the Vettii, Pompeii." Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 66 (2023): 97-110.

Sometime in the first century CE, the sexual services of enslaved woman named Eutychis were advertised in the entranceway to the House of the Vettii at Pompeii: “Eutychis, homeborn slave with charming ways, for 2 asses” (CIL 4.4592 Add. p. 1841; Eutychis / vern<a> a(ssibus) II  / moribus bellis). This graffito raises important questions: How did homeborn slaves (vernae), presented in Roman literature as beloved by their owners, come to be prostituted? What experiences did Eutychis have in the House of the Vettii, whose décor was as violent as it was luxurious? With only this graffito (and a similar one on the same wall) attesting to Eutychis’s existence, traditional approaches fall short. I thus present Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation (Hartman: 2007, 2008)—used by her to re-animate the voices of captives on the trans-Atlantic slave route—as one way to work with the omissions that characterize ancient evidence. I use this approach to write from the perspective of Eutychis, of an enslaved doorman, of an enslaved cook, of a freeborn daughter, and of a mater familias, creating short stories using the evidence from the house, from Roman culture, and from comparative material. Through these narratives, I explore multiple potential life histories of Eutychis and the emotional implications of Eutychis having been born into slavery and then prostituted.

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