ricardienne | Entries tagged with ancient slavery

I stayed late ostensibly to finish rewriting a section, but while I was doing word searches, I got distracted by Pliny (the Younger).

This one is kind of bizarre (and totally irrelevant to what I'm working on, but whatever):

(Ep. 1.21) Dear Plinius Paternus
Just as I honor your mental discernment, so do I your visual -- not because you have so much good taste (don't get conceited!) but because you have exactly as much as I do (although this is no small amount!). Joking aside, I think the slaves I bought on your recommendation are quite suitable. It remains to be seen that they are reliable, which in chattel one judges more with the ears than with the eyes.
Best,
Gaius Plinius

What's interesting to me is the eyes/ears joke (?) at the end, because it's so reverse historiographical. *Everyone* knows that the eyes are more reliable than the ears, usually. I mean, I guess it's just "character > appearance" with excessive learned wit, but I want it to be something more... (Pliny is obsessed with historiography). Also, I think that Pliny would have been all over emoticons, if they had been available to him.

...I still don't know how I didn't read Rosemary Sutcliff's Eagle of the Ninth before. It is my favorite kind of old-fashioned (or new-fashioned) children's story: all about epic friendship and undying loyalty across a slightly uncomfortable status divide.* Marcus, young, painfully upright Roman centurion badly wounded in his second year of service; Esca, the young British slave he saves from the gladiatorial arena. Becoming fast friends; embarking on an adventure to recover the lost standard of the IX Hispania. Sutcliff is a brilliant writer, and she does quite a good job both capturing the Roman mindset and portraying the complexities of Roman-British interactions, hybridity, tension -- much better than one might expect for a book published in 1954.

And now I am feeling a strong urge to write fic -- possibly about the legal shenanigans that Marcus's friend the Legate has to go through to see that Esca's manumission is legitimate. Possibly in Latin...