Hello,
I'm Susanne Turner Curator at the Museum
of Classical Archaeology
and this video is part of the Museum
Remix:
Unheard project. This
is the Grave Stele of Hegeso.
So what's a Grave Stele?
It's a tombstone in this case of a woman
in Athens,
who probably died around about the turn
of the fourth century
BCE. Ours is a plaster cast a copy
of the original it's about one and a
half meters tall with two female figures
one of them is seated and bigger
and has a name Hegeso, daughter of
Proxenos
carved above her head. The other is
smaller and wears a simple
long-sleeved dress, she has no name.
I've chosen this object because this
second figure is probably
a slave. It makes sense to understand Hegeso
as the recipient of this tombstone
and in fact all of the visual cues here
are driving us, pushing us, to do so.
She's bigger and she's beautifully
attired
and she has that name. But if we allow
our eyes to simply slide over to Hegeso
then how are we able to do this unnamed
slave girl justice? It is notoriously
difficult to view the ancient world
through
enslaved eyes, most of our sources are
written by
elite men for primarily elite male
audiences, and no personal account of an
enslaved person
has survived. The enslaved are all but
invisible in the archaeological record, I
mean we sometimes find
things like the accessories of slave
ownership, so
collars with a slave owner's name
on them. But none of this would let us
hear an enslaved person speak
except through the voices of that elite
owning class.
So what would Hegeso's slave say to us
then
if we could hear her? Certainly different
types of slave had
wildly varying experiences in the
ancient world,
so those who were working outside in the
field would have had a difficult life
with hard labour
but those who had it hardest were the
ones who worked in the silver mines at
Laurion.
It was wildly recognized that it was all
about a death sentence to be sent there
and the labor was so back-breaking that
many of them wouldn't survive for very
long.
In contrast, household maids
and I use that term knowing that it is a
fallacy,
can seem to have had it easy so often
they
enjoy these warm relations with the
other female figures
on the grave stele, so much so in fact
that actually it's often really hard to
know whether you're looking
at the figure of a younger sister say
or a slave. Slaves weren't easily
identified simply from the way that they
looked
and definitely not from say the colour
of their skin. But we might read
all of this cozy intimacy as an
illusion these scenes on grave stele
they are projecting
an image of familial harmony and one
that includes slaves,
but commemorative monuments nearly
always massage the truth
and we shouldn't let Hegeso's make us think
that the life of a slave in a well to
do Athenian household
was anything like life under the stairs
somewhere like Downton Abbey. I mean I
suppose it might have been
for some but the grave stele don't show you
the indifference, cruelty
and violence that many household slaves
must have experienced
and it will come probably as no surprise
to hear that slaves were sexually
available to their owners.
And so being enslaved meant
a loss of bodily autonomy and
personhood.
So if we look back again then at Hegeso
and her companion, companion here is
not the right word,
object might be better. Read alongside
the other signifiers in the scene she's
just another marker of
status and wealth just
like the originally painted jewellery that
Hegeso picks
from the box or the elaborate and unique
headdress that she's wearing
on her head. So
you might want to think about
how can we give voice to an anonymous
slave who died
two and a half thousand years ago?
And how might the story of an enslaved
woman
from classical Athens compare to that of
a woman enslaved through the
transatlantic slave trade
or indeed to one of those household
servants from Downton Abbey?
Or of course you might not want to think
about any of that because it's up to you.
Happy Remixing!
