The Domesticity of Their Darkness

Snapshots of the Enslaved in Roman Art
This book explores how Roman art depicted enslaved individuals, emphasizing fragmented, non-linear "snapshots" rather than a full narrative. It highlights the unsettling presence of the enslaved in domestic scenes, revealing tensions between visibility and erasure, and aims to bring the overlooked background into focus.

The Domesticity of Their Darkness is about the appearance of images of the enslaved in Roman art and the analysis of this archive. The word snapshots has been used quite deliberately, and very specifically, in the subtitle of this study because of the impossibility of there ever being the material evidence and opportunity to write a full, linear, chronological narrative about images of the enslaved in Roman times. The ancient enslaved are now to us like shadows out of time: yet, most importantly, they seem to have existed between the images discussed in this study. In these works it was never their aesthetic value that counted: they were to be read and understood, so that their meaning came across. In the Roman world everything was art, including the history of enslavement and of the enslaved. The floating roots of so many of these enslaved individuals cannot be located in a world where for the Roman elite name, roots, and family lineage created an ideological geography of belonging, of being inside, reaching into the future as well as back to the past. For the enslaved the tranquillity of simply inhabiting space could never be enough. Images of the enslaved in Roman domestic interiors often appear now as being somehow quite weird, in terms of the strange within the familiar and the familiar as strange. The domestic world portrayed, its domesticity, does not coincide with itself. There is a wrongness here, a delusive envelope, yet all is depicted as being right. The book represents an attempt to foreground the background.

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