| Smiling Slaves |
of wealthy Greeks and Romans were decorated with
theatre imagery: statues and busts of poets and characters, frescos, paintings and mosaics of dramatic
scenes (e.g. House of the Comedian, Delos) (Csapo
2010, 147-149). We can picture the slave statuettes
sitting in libraries and triclinia, acting as a reminder of the patronage of the house-owner, either as
an avid theatre-goer or even one of the benefactors
funding such spectacles (Csapo 2010, 140-141). It
also suggests that private dinner theatre (in the style
of Petronius’ Satyricon) may have been performed
in this setting. Public events were ephemeral, while
domestic decorations offered a perpetual reminder,
while serving as tangible expressions of upper-class
status. One wonders if they were sold at the plays
and are reminiscent of the merchandise peddled at
modern music and sporting events. If collected in
this way, clever slave statuettes would have both
appealed to fans and encouraged buyers to be fans
of any production the character was part of (Green
,WZRXOGEHHDV\WRSUHVXPHWKHVHÀJXULnes belonged to the master of the house, but this is
contested by the beautiful women’s jewelry found
bearing the mask of the cunning slave (Green and
Handley 1995, 75; 89-90). Domestic slaves, unable
to purchase such things, may have enjoyed the ironic sight of the grinning slave around their master’s
home.
performances were staged in front of the temple of
the deity that festival was honouring, with the audiHQFHVHDWHGXSRQWKHWHPSOHVWHSV,WLVQRWGLIÀFXOW
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have taken on the dedicatory tradition of the masks,
which is almost certainly the case for a second century CE clever slave statuette found beneath the
ruins of the Temple of Neptune in Sorrento (Mitten
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Over time clever slave imagery came to be
found in all areas of Roman art with little connection
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an enjoyable memory or cultivated lifestyle (Jory
2002, 239; Wiles 1991, 80-81). There is a strong
association between the leisurely worlds of the theatre and the symposia, epitomised in the happily
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the fun-loving god Dionysus/Bacchus. The double
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of the dead seems to explain why comic masks are
so often found in cemeteries as tomb decorations.
Commonplace by the second century BCE, comic
images in Roman graveyards appear to ɕ