In the Pompeian home, enslaved individuals performed a variety of different jobs and roles, from guarding the ostium to scrubbing the floors. Many of these jobs required them to be in certain places at once; a cook, for example, would have had to be in the kitchen during scheduled meal times or at the master's direction, while a server for a dinner party would have had to stand close to the entrance of the entertaining room to know when to refill wine cups, bring in the food, and help inebriated guests to stand. These placements would have been one way for the master to assert control over his "tools" and to demonstrate that control to the frequent guests he would host; if enslaved people were in the right spots, then the ideal flow of service and work would ensure that the house's daily activities ran smoothly and exactly to the master's plan, proving that he was a competent leader and capable of managing his affairs.
But of course, things never go exactly to plan. Through plays, works of literature, and letters from Roman writers, we have accounts of enslaved individuals who resisted against the strict roles set out for them that restricted their motion. In letters that the first-century philosopher Seneca wrote to give moral advice to his friend Lucilius, he says:
"Your slaves regarded your absorption in business as an opportunity for them to run away... 'My slaves have run away from me!' Yes, other men have been robbed, blackmailed, slain, betrayed, stamped under foot, attacked by poison or by slander; no matter what trouble you mention, it has happened to many. Again, there are manifold kinds of missiles which are hurled at us" (Moral Letters, 107).
Seneca portrays the misbehaviour and escape of enslaved individuals as an everyday occurrence, one which happens to every man like Lucilius—that is, every master. Though we have to take these narratives with a grain of salt, considering that the only written accounts for enslaved behaviour that we have come from their slighted masters, we can use them to reconstruct the push and pull that would have taken place between the heavily ordered and controlled plans of a slaveholder and the spontaneous action that these enslaved people could have taken to undermine those plans. In our attempt to understand the lives of enslaved individuals, its useful to know that they weren't docile, invisible objects used to run the home, but were individual people who reacted and interacted with the domestic space they were forced to inhabit in a variety of different ways.
In this section, we will attempt to reconstruct the ways that forms of creating boundaries, restricting motion, and resisting inertness played out in two different houses. We will use this exploration to understand how enslaved individuals acted and were expected to act and which areas of the house we can place their actions. Click one of the buttons below or navigate to either house using the dropdown menu at the top of the page.