New Discoveries

With the 2021 discovery of a room in the Villa Civita Guiliana in Pompeii’s northern suburbs, expanded ideas about the place of slaves in the home—their agency, sensory experiences, and daily experience of sleeping, waking, and working—can be formed. The room, located in a villa on the outskirts of the city, has been identified as the “bedroom” for a single enslaved family due to its multiple bed sizes (roughly child and adult) and its use as both living quarters and storage space, with objects for work and personal enjoyment present within. Arranged in the same way that the couches would have been spaced in the triclinia, the beds are made of rope and wood with space for blankets or linens on a flat central platform and space under the bed, possibly for storage. Though excavations of the villa are ongoing and we do not have definitive plans of the structure, we can use markers from other houses in Pompeii that tell us about the importance of a room and the people who occupied it to give us this space's function. The structure (square, no windows), the size (relatively small compared to other excavated rooms), placement at the back side of the villa, and objects found in the room (a chest with horse gear, jugs, chariot parts, and rope fragments) suggest that it was used as a storage space. The plan of the excavations at this spot in the villa is similar to the plan of the House of Menander's stable area, with small, square working quarters attached to a wide hallway for the chariot connected to the stables.

So what does this discovery tell us about the lives of enslaved individuals in Pompeii? In the Villa Civita Giuliana's enslaved quarters, we can see the struggle of both the master and the enslaved individual to define their existence within the space. Rather than being an object without personhood or a non-objectified person, the enslaved individuals in this room would likely have been considered as both person and object. We see this issue in literary treatises that deal with the treatment of slaves in the home, workhouses, and fields; in Book I, Chapter 17 of his On Agriculture, Varro states:

"Slaves should be neither cowed nor high-spirited. They ought to have men over them who.... are dependable and older than the hands whom I have mentioned; for they will be more respectful to these than to men who are younger. They are not to be allowed to control their men with whips rather than with words, if only you can achieve the same result. Avoid having too many slaves of the same nation, for this is a fertile source of domestic quarrels. The foremen are to be made more zealous by rewards, and care must be taken that they have a bit of property of their own..."

This passage suggests that masters would want enslaved people to be treated as human, reasoned with when possible and kept happy in consideration of their individual countries of origin and desire for ownership. Yet we know that masters often ignored these principles, resorting to cruelty, choosing enslaved individuals entirely based on brawn like animals, and looking past enslaved individuals in the home entirely. As we know that this room and those beside it were likely also storage for the stables, we can see how the owner of the house may have created associations between enslaved individuals as objects and their need to be placed away from eyesight; in effect, the placement and object finds of the room demonstrate the belief that an enslaved person was just another stored thing. Much like work in the mills, where workers would have little separation between working and engaging in the other necessary aspects of life (eating, sleeping, excreting). Unlike in the mills, however, the object of work would be a physical part of the space even while resting (and pooping—a chamber pot was found in the room as well), creating a more drastic loss of self-identification as the individual may have developed to completely define themselves as the master did, based entirely on their role as steward for the chariot and horses.

Yet having two different sized beds also supports an interpretation of this room as a space where enslaved individuals could assert some sort of ownership over their surroundings. The Archaeological Park of Pompeii describes two beds as "1.7 metres long," the average height of an adult person, and the third bed as "just 1.4 metres, and may therefore have belonged to a young man or child." When an enslaved individual, child or adult, entered the space, there may have been some sense of acknowledgement that the bed would only fit their body size and an ability to see themselves through that body size. The only amphorae in the room are located between the beds rather than in the centre of the room with the rest of the chariot parts and horse gear as well, indicating that they could have held personal items or belongings for enslaved individuals rather than the master's property.

Though the space would still be owned by the master and ultimately in his control, its inclusion of designated spaces for sleep and a space for holding goods may have actively fostered a sense of personhood and individuality in an enslaved person, who a) would have their body form molded into the bed, whose tangible presence would be visible through the tangled sheets, moved objects, and progression of the work at hand and b) would have been able to see a part of the house that was specifically designed, laid out, and maintained for their rest. While the group of broken horse harnesses in the chest and around the room denote activities that reinforced enslaved individuals' status as tools (fixing chariot parts, storing items, waiting inertly), the beds denote a separate space designed for them to engage in activities considered more private or personal (sleeping, sex, eating, resting), away from direct surveillance by the master.

This discovery is ground-breaking because the "bedroom" is the only one of its kind excavated in Pompeii. We are not able to learn whether having three beds, one child-size, was standard practice for these quarters in larger estate homes or whether this room was designed with three specific enslaved individuals in mind, perhaps a family of enslaved people who were kept together as an incentive for good working practices like the "slave families of Epirus [that] have the best reputation and bring the highest prices" that Varro mentions. Regardless of which individuals particularly occupied this space, the excavation of this room changes how we are able to conceive of how enslaved individuals would have seen themselves and been seen in the context of the home as a planned and controlled physical space by giving us glimpses of the objects and range of movement they would have access to while not working, serving, or waiting. The finds from the Villa Civitia Guiliana let us explore this aspect of enslaved life to rehumanise the people who lived it, thereby reinserting them into the larger narrative of people living in Pompeii