 The Archaeological Research Facility recognizes that Berkeley sits on the territory of Khochun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Trecenio Alloni, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Alloni people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley more accountable for the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. So this week we have a panel chaired by, moderated by Meg Conkey, and three very fine scholars who are going to cram a lot of very interesting things into a very few minutes. So in the interest of time, I will keep very, very short introductions. I aim not to encyclopedia-dise, but to tantalize. First, we have Eric Green, emeritus professor of history, chronicler of diaspora, investigator of ancient others and identities, not to mention a noted advisor of Roman political history today, speaking on Jews in the Roman Empire, a persecuted minority, will be followed by Kim Shelton, a professor in classics here at Berkeley, a weaver of pre and proto and history master of mortuaries and monuments and avatar of the Aegean, today for us interpreting gender inequality in ancient Greece. And bring it all on home will be Ted Pena, also coming to us from the classics, Paragon of Pompeii and biographer of artifacts, auditor of ancient economies, will be delving into the vast and yet underarchialized, archeologized topic of slavery in the Roman Empire. And of course, moderating will be an incomparable Meg Conkey, I'm partial being an anthropologist and prehistorian myself, emerita professor of anthropology here, pioneer of gender and feminist theory in archeology, an advocate for pretty prehistoric things, may they be met on their own terms, and peerless pursuer of the open air Paleolithic, which is also a particular interest of mine. And as we saw in her computer background just now, it spends a pleasant amount of time in the French countryside for research. So without further ado, I will turn it over to her. If you have questions during the talks, please put them in the chat and we will convey them. So let's get going on inequalities in the ancient Mediterranean. Thanks so much, Jordan. And thanks for doing a nice job on introducing our three panelists today. They asked each of them to try to condense an enormous amount of material into just a few minutes, but to give us a sense of a spectrum across some of the classic civilizations of the Mediterranean, especially the Roman and the Greek, in terms of some of the issues that we're still grappling with today, which have to do of course with the varieties of social inequalities. Archeologists are ideally positioned along with historians to talk about the ways in which social inequalities of various sorts played out in the ancient Mediterranean. So we're going to actually change a little bit from the order that you suggested. We're going to start actually with Professor Shelton talking about gender inequalities in the in Greece. We'll then move to Professor Gruen and then we'll move to Professor Penya at the end. So let's get started. We've got a little bit of time. So let's go, Professor Shelton. If you'll share your screen and here we go. Thank you, Meg, very much. And thank you, Jordan, for that very nice, very nice introduction. So interpreting gender inequality in ancient Greece. As I said in my blurb about this talk, that evidence for gender inequality from ancient Greece actually presents a kind of dichotomy that the visual record is very different from the archaeological and historical evidence. And of course, the gender roles that the Greeks themselves presenting among their pantheon of God's is, of course, in contrast to the ones that were actually, you know, implied or imposed on the society that worshiped them. I also want to have a few guys here, goddesses, especially. I want to start out really by saying, first of all, giving you a spoiler alert. The spoiler alert is that all of this is about men, that men created the historical record. They wrote it primarily for a male audience. And that's why there's primarily gender inequality, at least the way it has is handed down to us. I'd like to quote my my current favorite musical, Hamilton, by saying you have no control who lives, who dies and who tells your story. So I want to look at that and think a little bit about, you know, certainly how this happens. And it's not only that men are creating the the historical record. It's actually even a subset. It's really elite male citizens who have the wealth and time to undertake an education and really form their society. And it actually goes beyond that. It's even urban dwelling elite adult male citizens. So all of the categories that do not fall into those things, the people living in the countryside, the majority of the population that is not the wealthy status of women, children, of course, non-citizens of several different categories that were part of the society, they don't they really don't have a voice. It doesn't come down to us. So in that way, archaeology sometimes, not in every case, but sometimes helps us access these other elements of the society. But but it is very difficult sometimes to dig beneath the traditions that have been left to us. So that's one thing to keep in mind. We also, of course, as archaeologists, we can look to things like households and evidence of craft production, especially at the household level that helps us access and especially in this case, I'm going to be talking about women, but also slaves, slaves were an essential element, even at the household level for most citizens of the polis. And of course, I should also say that because Athens in particular was an extremely literate society and that literature includes a pretty robust view into daily life, it is going to be a lot of what I'm going to talk about. They've left us a more predominant, dominant record than some other some of the other city states of the ancient Greek world. So forgive me for mostly focusing on that. I also, though, am going to look back into the prehistoric period and see if we see the antecedents of this of these social social norms as they become, or if, in fact, this is, as some scholars have suggested, a result of democracy. That, in fact, what we see most of our record comes from the fifth and fourth centuries, BCE, and and even beyond that developed Hellenistic period. It's, in fact, potentially a result of democracy. So I start out with one one scene from Senniphon's economic coast, the household management that has very much colored the way we think about the sort of the gender roles and gender politics in the ancient Athenian world. And you see here this what we believe to be an invented character who actually speaks about the relationship with his wife and what she's capable of doing, which actually gives her quite a lot of agency, but in a very restricted environment. She is in the household exclusively. And we have a lot of actually sources that confirm this that for citizen women in the Athenian world, they were generally, we would say, they were secluded, they were subdued, controlled and confined. And there's a lot to to be said about keeping them confined and not able to mix with different various populations that kept this this model in place. And it speaks a lot to if it speaks a lot to what men were particularly worried about when we see the restrictions that were imposed at the social level and especially at the household level and how women in fact were intrinsic to the success of the household and yet considered inferior and, you know, and not not able to take any part in public life. So that's that's particularly interesting. We do see, though, that especially in the larger, wealthier households, there was actually quite a lot to manage. That, of course, we should point out that girls in this time period, and I do mean girls, were married when they were between 12 and 14 years old. And they were generally married to men who were around 30 years old. Between 28 and 32 years was was said to be ideal for the Athenian man to take a wife. So if you can imagine you, you know, you're 12, you're taken out of your family, family's home, you're put into this home and asked to manage, which could include a slave group that's both ones that slaves that work in the household and others that actually work outside of the household. And you're expected to manage that. You're expected to manage the production, especially of crafts necessary on the household level and predominantly textiles. I'm going to show an image of that as well. And you also were, of course, expected to feed and close and also take care of, if anyone was sick, the entire household. That includes the slave population as well. So it was really a daunting task and there would have been really no training in this other than what you would have learned growing up in your own household. This was probably most girls education had to do with what is necessary to run the household and, of course, learning it, hopefully, from their own mothers. But, you know, things like infant malady and high mortality of women at birth while giving birth also led to many situations in which there wasn't necessarily a mother figure to hand this information on. I should also say about childbearing. And that was, of course, their number one role of even managing the household was they were supposed to reproduce and keep the family line going. But it was actually in some ways beneficial to the status of the woman, because once she gave birth to her first child, she was actually promoted in a way. She was allowed to have even further responsibility. And I think that they were probably considered, you know, in training up until up until that point. I mentioned textile production, and this was in part because every household really was expected to produce all materials necessary for not only the population of the house, but also everything else that you would need, including if you had window coverings and floor coverings, and if your husband was a sailor, you would need to provide the sails for the ships. And if most of them were agriculture producers, there were different kinds of sacks and bags and sheets that were necessary for the agriculture as well. So we think of it, oh, sure, they're going to close, but it was actually, you know, a huge production. And we estimate that most Athenian women would have spent almost every day of their lives doing this, producing textiles. And actually, we know that many of the slaves that worked in the household also produced textiles. So again, that was part of the management of the labor force within your own within your own household. So as we saw that public space was considered the domain of male citizens only and privacy, therefore, was relegated for women. Let's see, what else do we know about women at this time? Well, they had Athenian women had no political rights. They could not own property. As we already mentioned, they were married as a young teen. A dowry was very important in that marriage. But they never owned that dowry. If, for instance, if their husband divorced them, he had to return the dowry, but he returned the dowry to their to her family, to her father, to her uncle, whoever was the closest male relative. That's who actually owned it, as it were, or managed it for her. So those are important things to keep in mind. The the socially approved outlets for women were all religious. There were specific religious functions that were only for women, including being priestesses for female deities. That was usually necessary. There are certain aspects of even every day ritual, including libation and animal sacrifice that included girls and women at different ages. We see some of those here, including a very important festival connected to the goddess Athena that also is requires young young women maidens to be a part of that. And then celebrations like weddings, funerals, and even what I call here mortuary maintenance, there was a very complicated calendar of how often you had to return to the cemetery and take care of the dead. And that was all relegated to women. So that's really important. And we see, though, in in the archaic age, on occasion images like this, where women are seeing going to the Fountainhouse and they appear to be what we'd say aristocratic women, ones of higher social status. And yet they're out in public. And this is one of some some small bits of evidence that suggests that when Athens was in a pre-democratic stage and it was really an aristocracy, with a small number of families, that women actually had more freedom than they did than they did later on. And I will say that that based on especially scenes from vases, but also from the comedies produced in Athens, there's abundant evidence that women did actually circulate. They could even control property, in keepers and merchants as well. But these may well be what we call medics, which are the resident foreigners and not necessarily citizens. We don't actually know. Certainly the ones that are the the preferred entertainment at the symposium at the male drinking party called the Hetaira usually are thought to be, you know, not citizen women or citizen women who had who were destitute and couldn't find employment in any other any other way. So archaeology, what is the what does it tell us? What are the houses themselves? Really, it doesn't confirm what the literature, literary evidence tells us is that we have separate male and female areas of the house that the genders are segregated and that we really can't say that. All we can say is that there are in fact special areas specifically for men to use, but the rest of the house actually is not really gendered in any way. And things like textile production is portable and can be moved to wherever you have the better light, the better conditions on any given day. So we can't even use that for tracking, tracking exactly what the houses were like. Burials is another area where actually citizen women seem to have equal rights to graves, if that sounds funny, but they do. And I say that because in the prehistoric period, which I'm going to run out of time and not get to the end of the prehistoric period, is that it's very clear to us from the late Bronze Age that women do not have equal access to burials. In fact, it's almost three quarters male burials to female. And that suggests to us that they don't, that some have access, but many, many do not, that half the population is not represented. And that doesn't seem to be the case in the historical period. So that's certainly certainly a change. OK, well, let's briefly in the last minute and a half look at the Bronze Age. And I just want to say that really in art, women are everywhere in some context to the exclusion of men, which is very interesting because what we get from our documentary evidence from the linear B tablets suggests very much the opposite. In fact, it seems very similar to what we have in the later classical period that in fact women have very specific roles in society. Now, of course, these documents are biased. They come from the palace. They're what the palace is interested in. They do not necessarily record everything that's going on in society. But it's actually ironically lucky that we have these biased documents because they record, in fact, the lowest level of of the economic situation of women, they record slaves and they record women who are just producers for the palace and the palace actually has to feed them and give some minimal rations in order to sustain them. Whereas at the opposite end of the scale, we have only among nine hundred women only that are recorded from the tablets at Pilos, some of which you see the archive here. There's only seven women that can be identified as having high social status, and this is because they are, in fact, said to be connected to men who we think are their husbands, men who we see throughout the tablets as having very high social status, economic power, land holdings and the like. The only long story short, the only evidence that we have of women with land holdings from the Bronze Age is in the religious sector where women do seem to have actually a little bit of agency and that they don't actually own the land. They hold the land for the gods that they represent. But still, they do. This is actually a tablet that records one of the earliest legal battles from the European continent in which there is a priestess, Erytha, who actually argues for herself on her own right, not by a man, against the Damos, which is essentially the community body, perhaps a council of landholders, totally separate from the palace. And it's a disagreement on what kind of land she holds and what her right to it is. So that's a really short summary. There were some other things I was going to show, but that's all right. I mentioned the burials and that was the most important thing. So gender inequality. Mostly because of the men. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Just a little teaser there. And I believe you're teaching a course on gender. So, you know, next time you teach the course, advertise it widely. And now that you've attracted everybody to it, even with the problematic news, we'll say, right? So we'll turn now to another domain of life in the ancient Mediterranean and hear from Eric Gruen about some of the kinds of issues related to what might be considered religious discriminations or not. Go, Eric. Thank you so much. Thank you, Meg. The Romans were well known for their tolerance of alien religions. And why not? Pagans enjoyed a multiplicity of gods, the more the better. If one of them didn't come to their aid at a critical time, there were always numerous others to turn to. And they were perfectly happy to embrace deities from other peoples and nations whom they could then incorporate into their own pantheon and indeed make a comfortable part of their own rituals and observances. And that practice dates back almost to the beginnings of Roman history. When Rome was locked in a fight to the death with its principal rival, the Etruscan city of Vi, the Romans absconded with the priceless statue of the Etruscan deity, Juno Regina, and brought it to Rome. Now, they were at least polite enough to ask the goddess whether she was willing to go to Rome and the statue duly nodded her head and was whisked off. Now, never mind the truth or falsity of the tale, the voluntary, apparently voluntary, relocation of Juno Regina from Vi to Rome symbolized the withdrawal of the goddess's favor from the Etruscan city and thus assured the Roman victory and the beginnings of expansionism through the Italian peninsula. Juno Regina would eventually acquire her own temple on the Avondine hill with proper sacrifices and a spot on the sacred calendar. Now, that celebrated event set a pattern and it anticipated a policy. The importation of cults from elsewhere to Rome became an integral part of Roman religious history. The worship of Vesclepius, for example, arrived from Epidaurus in Greece in the third century B.C.E. and stayed to be installed on the Tiber Island. Venus Erikina, a recollection goddess from Western Sicily, came to Rome later in the century and received a temple on the Capitoline hill, a conspicuous place of real honor. The Sybiline books, which were sacred scrolls of Hellenic origin and were composed in Greek hexameter verse, they recommended the transportation of the Magna Mater, the great goddess from Asia Minor to Rome in the form of a sacred stone. And she was received as directed by the Oracle at Delphi. She was received in solemn ceremony set up on the Palatine hill where she was celebrated and she was there to stay. She became honored by an annual festival. And one could go on and on along these lines, like the worship of the Egyptian deity Isis had a strong following in Rome and Mithraism with Persian roots and eventually spread to various parts of the Roman Empire. So there was a miscellany of religious cults and practices that took hold in Rome with little or no repression or persecution. Now, should we describe this to Roman broad mindedness and toleration? Well, those, I think, would be the wrong terms to apply. There is no Latin word for tolerance, for example. And the very notion of extending or withdrawing tolerance is quite irrelevant, I would say, the acceptance and the embrace of alien cults was simply a longstanding ingredient of Roman identity. But then there are the Jews. They were a minority group everywhere in the Roman Empire. And that includes a substantial community in the city of Rome. They were a separatist sect with their own rituals, their own peculiar customs, their own places of worship and, of course, their own God. Yahweh would not be absorbed into the Roman pantheon and his adherents stood apart from the polytheistic gaggle of gods that characterize Rome's religious landscape. So were the Jews then huddled in a ghetto, subject to official repression, a marginalized minority whose inferior status deprived them of rights and privileges and laid them open to victimization? Were they the exception to the general laissez-faire of Roman religious attitudes? Did they lead a precarious existence, always vulnerable, objects of bias, hostility and potential persecution? Well, it might certainly seem so. No fewer than three times Jews were forcibly expelled from the city of Rome. And in addition, one can cite numerous snide comments by Roman writers and intellectuals who scorned and mocked the Jews as a weird and unappealing people without landish customs and bizarre beliefs. Cicero, for example, labels their creed as a barbara superstitio. The philosopher Seneca denounced the observance of the Sabbath. It was a colossal waste of time, he said. Jews use up one seventh of their lives in idleness. The poet Petronius made fun of their abstinence from pork, alleging they must be worshiping a pig god. The satirist juvenile had a field day with the practice of circumcision, claiming that Jews are so exclusive, they won't even give directions in the street to anybody who isn't circumcised. Just how they could tell, he doesn't say. But that is all just a small sample of this kind of remarks. And yet it would be a mistake to draw hasty conclusions from these miscellaneous comments. First of all, it's particularly noticeable that despite a lot of caustic and amusing remarks about Jewish practices and behavior, the Romans made no reference to Jewish ethnic traits, to inherited or genetic characteristics, to appearance, speech or inequalities associated with racial origins. The Romans did not speak of the Jews in terms of ethnic attributes that might suggest an alien presence in their midst. In short, racism had not yet raised its ugly head. Jews, in fact, although they prefer the company of their own compatriots in their own communities, they were hardly an exclusivist group that kept solely to themselves, shunning and shunned by the larger society. For one thing, Jews readily welcomed and encouraged conversion to Judaism by the Gentiles or at least adoption of the practices and engagement with the practitioners of Judaism. We have substantial epigraphic evidence that attests to crossovers and intertwinings. For example, there are funerary epitaphs noting that the deceased is Jewish, but also adding the designation of D.M., which stands for these monibus, a standard formula in pagan epitaphs, alluding to the divine spirits of the dead. And yet the Jews embrace that kind of designation. Or take another example as a wealthy Jew who freed his slave, Jews did have slaves, freed his slave in a synagogue, a synagogue, a ritual in the synagogue. And he paid homage to Theos Hipsistos, highest God, which is a common Jewish designation for Yahweh. But he also provoked, invoked the protection of Zeus, Earth and Sun. In other words, the dedicator evidently found no strain or tension between appealing to the Jewish God while simultaneously calling upon the protection of divine powers as framed by pagans. And another inscription, quite remarkable and revealing one, which is an announces an endowment that the Jewish donor is graciously given to the Association of Carpet Weavers in order to fund annual commemorations for two Jewish festivals, Passover and Pentecost or Shavuot, but also to support the festival of the Calens, which is a pagan event proclaiming the coming of the new year. Now that this guilt received proceeds from the endowment, which would honor both a Jewish holiday and a pagan civic holiday, which was obviously quite acceptable to the Jewish donor. And it seems clear that the Jews did not retreat into isolationism and separatism. Nor was the distinctive identity of the Jews compromised by participation in the wider world of the Roman Empire. It's well to remember that the Jews, Jews in the diaspora, dwelled all over the Mediterranean, their synagogues were ubiquitous. Our testimony places these houses of prayer in multiple numbers in Syria, Egypt, Sainte-Anneika, Cyprus, Anatolia, the shores of the Black Sea, Greece, Macedonia, the Aegean Islands and Italy. Much of the evidence is literary or epigraphical, as with the travels of Paul to Jewish synagogues that we get in the book of Acts. But then some of it is is archaeological. The remains of synagogues have been unearthed in unlikely one would have thought unlikely places like Delos, Austria, Stobian Macedonia, Sardis, Dura Europus and the institutions had their own official untrammeled by Roman interference and provided a setting not only for religious services, but for education, communal dining, celebration of festivals, judicial decisions, gathering of assemblies and emancipation of slaves. And we should not forget to mention that many Jews in the diaspora possessed Roman citizenship. Paul is only the most famous example, and we have many, many more. And however rare the practical exercise of that privilege may have been in far flung communities, it did represent a key mark of status. Now, to be sure, there could be bumps in the road in the turbulent period of the Roman Civil Wars, certain Greek cities in Western Asia minor took the opportunity to restrict the privileges of Jews in those cities, to curtail their religious rituals, practices, curtail their adherence to ancestral laws, but it's revealing that in every one of those instances, Roman officialdom was called into adjudicate and invariably declared their backing for Jewish privileges and traditional practices like observance of the Sabbath and annual contributions to the temple in Jerusalem. Even the emperor of doctors himself, the solicitors of Jewish interests, we're told that he saw to it that if allocations of grain to Roman citizens happen to be scheduled for the Sabbath so that Jews as a result could not participate in them, Augustus decreed that there that the Jewish portion would be reserved, held in reserve for the following day so that the Jews could benefit from the grain distributions without violating their observance of the Sabbath. But what about those occasional expulsions of Jews from the city? Well, much is made of that in the scholarship. This is a sign of Roman oppression, but it's worth putting it in perspective. First of all, there were only three episodes of that sort widely spaced in Roman history. Each case sprang from special circumstances. Jews were not singled out. Others like astrologers and Isis worshippers were also expelled. And on each occasion, each occasion, the Jews were back in the city within a very short time. And it's difficult to avoid the impression that the actions were more symbolic than practical. They were expressions of the government's occasional need to reassert its commitment to traditional religion by taking action against foreign practices. But these bumps in the road, in other words, were brief, temporary, exceptional and by no means representative either of Roman policy or of Jewish experience. In fact, the most potentially inflammatory clash of cultures, one might think, was the Jewish prohibition of worship of any deity other than Yahweh. Wouldn't this get them into deep trouble? Particularly on the occasion of public ceremonies when it came to the imperial cult and worship of the emperor. Well, this problem was nicely solved to the satisfaction of all parties. The Jews, of course, could not pay homage to the emperor as a god. They could pray to Yahweh on behalf of the emperor. Everybody could go away happy. So to summarize, the image of the Jews as a persecuted minority, I would venture to say, needs some corrective. Jewish experience in the Roman Empire for the vast proportion of the time was smooth and untroubled. Jews thrived in the Mediterranean diaspora, even in Rome itself. Increasing number of Jews enjoyed Roman citizenship, which is perfectly compatible with Jewish tradition. This is not a matter of tolerance by the Romans. It was an integral part of the Roman mindset. They had already accepted a wide variety of alien creeds in their religious panorama, including devotees of the Egyptian ices, the eunuch priests of the Great Mother, mystery calls whose initiation rights included a bold slaying ceremony and celebrated and engaged in nocturnal and orgiastic rituals. Given that history, accommodating the adherence of Judaism was no trouble at all. Thank you. Great, Eric, thank you so much. Here, I'll get myself back on here. Thank you so much. I think one of the absolutely important takeaways from something like this is that studies of inequities and discrimination and so forth are always going to be complicated and that people are complicated. And what you've shown is and I really like your phrase bumps in the road, which seemed like a small thing, but really, really important perspectives to use all that evidence. So thanks. Thanks so much. I also take a second here to remind everybody we did start about 1215. We can go over one o'clock. But since Kim Shelton has to leave at one o'clock before we launch into yet another perspective on the Roman Empire, let's just have a possibility of asking Kim a question or two that have come up in the chat box. Kim, are you up for that? OK, I'm in here. All right, great. Right. So that one of the questions here came up from Kim Gill, and he wonders whether there was any significance with regard to gender of the fact that some of the gods were women, such as Athena, and wondered if that that was part of the. Yes, it was some of the I think it represented many of the goddesses represented either the ideal of what the men would prefer. So Athena, of course, a maiden goddess was therefore non non threatening in some ways and represented an ideal, but they also played out, I think, some of their fears through the creation of their their deities and some other very colorful characters like Medea in the mythology, who very much represented the worst case scenario, what they were, in fact, keeping their women from by by keeping them out of general society. And one other question was from Veronica, wondering whether you want to say something about the education of the Athenian citizen women versus the Attara in classical times. In in general, that's true, that there was potentially more education opportunity for actually even the medics in the society, the the non citizen foreign residents, but generally education was only for for boys and men. So women would learn based on their experiences. It was more practical learning and that includes the women who were mostly learning at home. We know that there were some slaves, in fact, that were teachers and they would often handle some of the education of girls at home and and younger male members of the society. And I imagine, although we don't really have very good records of this for other elements of the population. Good. Thank you so much. We will now go from Greece back to Rome. And hopefully I can share Ted Pena's screen. You may have to start talking. Let's see what I can do here. Get get my desktop screen here. Going. Right. Right. Share screen. All right. Try again. OK. Yeah, it looks good. All right, Ted. Great. OK, so Meg, I'll just I'll just tell you next. I want you to answer right next. Let's see if I can if next will happen. Right. That's the question. Let's see. Doesn't seem to. All right. Here we go. All right. This one. Yeah, that's right. So I'm going to say a little bit about the nature of slavery in the Roman world. And I'll start with the slide because it reminds us that this is an expression of what scholars refer to as legal status. That is, this is formally recognized in Roman law. People were either freeborn if you were a male, that meant you were ingenuous or a female in Genua. You were someone who was a slave enslaved. If you were a male, you were a serwis or a female serwa. But there also were substantial numbers of people who had been manumitted or emancipated. That is, had been freed from the status of slavery and become free. And if you were a male, you were a Libertas or a Libertà. Now, understanding this system, which which permeates Roman society and Roman economy, has been a big challenge for scholars. What percentage of the population was in any one of these categories? How did this vary through time and across space from Italy to various provinces of the empire between cities and towns and rural areas? Or the varieties of experience of people who were enslaved, ranging from agricultural slaves to slaves who staffed craft production workshops, either annexed or rural villas or in towns to slaves who were, in effect, household servants of families of quite widely varying social economic status. These are all issues that scholars are trying to grapple with. A couple of elements, though, of this aspect of Roman social organization that are worth emphasizing are, however, that we in the Americas often default to thinking analogously about the new world experience of slavery. And it's worth emphasizing in the Roman world, this didn't have any fundamental racial basis as it has in the Americas in recent centuries. Another thing worth keeping in mind is that there was quite a bit of mobility. That is that there were substantial numbers of men and women who, in fact, were manumitted were emancipated. And so there was this robust group of freedmen and freedwomen who, among other things, seemed to have constituted something of a business class in the Roman world and so people could begin life as a slave. And even as a slave, be people of considerable power and influence. If, for example, you were a slave of an important elite family or of the imperial household, but upon manumission, you could also advance and become a person of very considerable wealth. You would still have certain limitations and the possibility, for example, of running for and holding municipal offices and things like that. So it has quite different contours from maybe what we think about analogously in the Roman world. Meg, if you could move to the next slide. Here I'm just showing you a couple of casts of funerary monuments which have epitaphs on them, which if we had the time we could parse and understand how the one on the left is a piscatrix, a fisherwoman or a female fish seller who was a freedwoman and her relations with the other people on the monument, on the right, a money lender who has a monument set up by someone else who was a freedman of the emperor. But this is one of the main bodies of evidence that historians have had to try to come to terms with these facets of Roman social and economic structure that are tied in with with legal status and it's quite a rich body of many hundreds of thousands of epitaphs that have been recovered and published. There's also quite a bit of information in the surviving literary sources ranging from casual one off references to more systematic discussions of, for example, the management of agricultural slaves and the writings of the Latin agronomists that have come down to us. You can move to the next now, Meg. It's been relatively recently, though, that archaeologists have begun some kind of systematic effort to leverage the archaeological record to elucidate these sorts of issues and in particular the lived experience of slaves in the Roman world. And here I show you the covers of a couple of fairly recent books that are very representative of this. Michelle George's edited volume, Roman slavery and Roman material culture to the left and then to the right. Sandra Joshua and Lauren Hackworth, Peterson's the material life of Roman slaves. The latter in particular includes, to me, a very, very interesting and informative analysis of the interactions between slaves and their masters in the context of various contexts out around the town, but also in the context of domestic, of residences in towns and villas in the countryside and trying to get at the kind of social spatial dynamics that would have shaped existence in these these extended households, which include included slaves and the people who own them. You can move to the next now, Meg. Some of the work I'm doing in Pompeii through this project that I direct, called the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project, is allowing us to get at some of these issues. And in particular, works like those I just alluded to have done some sophisticated work looking at the plans of structures, but they haven't done very much at looking at the nitty gritty of things like portable material culture and how this can be leveraged to get at these these kinds of issues. So you can move to the next now, Meg. And that's something we're doing in Palhippe. So in particular, the last couple of years and the gods of COVID willing into the next few years, we've been in particular analyzing the sets of portable items that have been recovered in a set of residences in one particular block inside Pompeii. This is Block Regio 1, Insula 11, which is sort of towards the center of the town. You see it here blocked out in red. Next, Meg. And now you have a plan of Insula 111 with the boundaries of the various properties outlined for you and a synopsis of the various properties there on the left, their addresses and identification of what sort of a structure it is. And the names that archaeologists use for them, a couple of different efforts to calculate the ground floor area of these spaces. And then what in the last column of card called quartile. And this refers to a study done of a sampling of residences at Pompeii and Herculaneum, where they were arranged in quartiles by the size of their ground floor surface area of a way of sort of characterizing smaller and increasingly larger residences moving towards people who are wealthier and have higher socioeconomic status. And our work in 111 is directed towards looking at these kinds of issues among residential groups, among households that are towards the middle and the bottom of the scale. There's been quite a bit of work done at the large spectacularly atrium houses. But less looking at at the middle range and the lower range. And so this block gives us the opportunity to do that because these are even the largest ones, which are at the very bottom of the largest or the next largest quartile are actually fairly modest compared to the well known elite residences at at Pompeii. And this is particularly interesting because ostensibly what we're doing here when we're looking at these is we're crossing the boundary between households that were of sufficient socioeconomic status that they did include slaves and then below some threshold, the households that were such a modest socioeconomic status that they did not include slaves. This, of course, is tricky because the structures themselves are static and the the social economic circumstances of households can be quite volatile, right? You might acquire a slave, but you're not going to move to a bigger house or something like that, but we think, nonetheless, that we're able to look at the material world in terms of portable material culture inside these residences that are straddling this boundary between households, which did possess slaves and those which did not. Can you move to the next now, Meg? I couldn't resist doing this to pick up a bit on what Eric was talking about. One of these residences, and here I've outlined it for you and read on the plan and then bracket it in red on the table is the one that are just archaeologists called the Kazadel Haram, which has this intriguing graffito on the wall, which seems to be some sort of effort to transliterate Hebrew into maybe Greek or Latin. And it's complicated. I won't go into it, but there's a good argument that the people who lived in this residence, at least some of them, knew Hebrew and we do know that there were Jews at Pompeii. So this particular block was in terms of Jews and Goiom, an integrated block, apparently. But let's move on to the next slide, Meg. And here I want to talk about first of two particular residences that we've been looking at. And I've been working on, actually, when I've been on sabbatical. And this is one of the larger residences in the block, the so-called House of Luchius Abonius Primus. It's just at the very top of the third quartile, and so it represents something that's on the large end. And here I show you the facade of that block on the bottom. And I have the the modest facade of that house blocked out for you there in in red. If we go to the plan, though, which is the next slide, you can see that this is a modest expression of your standard Roman atrium house with a narrow entry corridor off the road and then a large atrium space, off of which various other spaces open at the back of which it's six is a tabloid and a formal reception room. Next to that is a nice court garden, seven, maybe a dining room behind that, eight, and then kind of the the service rooms at the back end of the house there off to the right rooms, ten through ten through seventeen. And I've labeled for you what we think, functionally, these rooms might have principally served for and what some of the Latin names were, but also point out that this is just the ground floor. We know that there were blocks of rooms above the front part of the house and also the rear part of the house. And so the ground floor, the downstairs, so to speak, shows you just one one expression of this. Now, if you go to the next Meg, what you see here is a slide of a bronze seal ring, which bears the name of the person who we like to infer was probably the head of household, maybe the owner, but it could have been a renter in the property in which it was found. This actually relates to the second house I'm going to talk about, but we'll pretend it relates to the first one here, Lucia Sabonia's primus. And I think you can see in reverse and raised letters, the writing. And what that is, is that in the possessive form is the the name of this individual, his in this case, his trianomina, his three names that are the the standard names for a free Roman. So this is great evidence for the people who ostensibly were the head of household. Meg, if you would go to the next, I want to expand this a little bit. So we know that this this seal tells us the person named Lucia Sabonia's primus, who was this person? He might well have been a freedman. That primus, the third name, the cognome, is a very common cognome for freedmen and prima for freed women. So that's by no means definitive, but it's compatible with this idea. And in fact, you can imagine a slave who started out as a slave person named Primus, who was owned by someone named Lucia Sabonia's Eucundus here. I've picked up another Lucia Sabonia's that we know actually lived in Pompeii. And he actually served as duo here, one of the two principal municipal officers, so very high ranking person. He also had as part of his name besides his Trianomina, his Prinomenus nomen and his cognome. I put it here in parentheses, also his filiation. The Romans would indicate who their their father was, much as you might, let's say, in Russia today, be Ivanovic or something like that. Right. So he's Lucifilius, so he's Lucia Sabonius, Lucifilius Eucundus, so he would have owned this primus. And then Primus is manumitted down there to the next block of text. What happens when a slave is manumitted is in a case of a male, he will usually adopt the first two names of his former master, their Prinomen and nomen as his Prinomen and nomen. He has to have the Trianomina now that he's a free person. He'll then take his slave name and adopt that as his third name is Cognoma. So Primus becomes Lucia Sabonius Primus, but he doesn't have regular filiation. He has no father in Roman legal terms. And so instead of telling you who his father was, he'll tell you the Prinomen of his former master. So he would be Lucia Sabonius, Lucilibertus Primus as his name. Now, filiation is sometimes included, sometimes not included, increasingly not from the second century forward. And so if someone does include filiation, you can tell if they were, in the male case, ingenuous, freeborn, or Libertus. In this case, of course, we don't have that filiation, so we don't know. But it's entirely possible that the fellow who owned this house started out life as a slave. Next slide, please. One of the fun things you can do at Pompeii is we have so much evidence that you can actually pick up people elsewhere in the epigraphic, the inscriptional record. So it turns out there's this other Lucia Sabonius, or Alucia Sabonius, who shows up in an obscene graffito and scratched on a tomb outside one of the south gates of the town. I'll give you the Latin text there, which I can't translate because we might be in mixed company, but you can kind of look it up later if you want, using Google Translate or something like that. And it's entirely possible that this Lucia Sabonius were not given his cognome. And that's typical, too. You don't always give people your, let's say, middle name now, if you're giving your name, and it could be the same person or it could be a male relation or another freedman of the same master, we don't know. But for what it's worth, there we go. Now, go to the next, if you would, Meg. One of the things that looms of interest, let's say, in trying to sort of get at the material expression of slave-master relations inside residences has to do with basically nailing down stuff that we know from, for example, the Latin agronomists and from other sources and also by comparative reasoning that if you enslave people, they're going to find their own ways of carving out their own worlds. And that often will involve resisting master's efforts to make them do things by finding little spaces where they can get their own time and by doing what they want with the loose stuff that's around a residence. And so one of the interesting things to think about is the disposition of portable material culture. This is what I'm working on. Where were things put? How was access to these things controlled? How can this be read in terms of the presence of free people and enslaved people living in the same household? And if you'd go to the next, Meg, one of the great expressions of this has to do with storage furniture, because this is where you can put things away and lock them up and control access to them and make sure that stuff is not kind of wandering and falling off the back of the truck and things like that. Now, it turns out that at Pompeii, wood is usually not preserved unlike at Herculaneum, but we do find what we do find preserved are the metal components that were part of wooden storage furniture, like chests and cupboards and things like that. So we find showing you the four typical things we find in our houses at the top. A and B are two different kinds of hinges, strap hinges and angled overlay hinges, which would have hinged doors and lids to trunks, respectively, and things like that. You also have these ring poles at the lower left to sort of open up the door and then don't ask me how Roman locks work. That'll take me about an hour to explain. On the lower right, what you have is a bronze deadbolt of what would have been a Roman lock, probably on a cupboard or something like that. And so you can take this stuff, go to the next slide, Meg, and you can use that to reconstruct the kinds of storage furniture that would have been disposed inside a house like Lucchia Soponia's Primus and what they would have been like. So here I'm showing you some of the evidence. The upper left, we have a fresco showing you these little cupid perfume makers, but they're working in front of a big cupboard that's opened up. And you can see inside, there's a statue on the upper shelf and bottles and jars on the lower shelves. At the lower left, we have an actual carbonized small cupboard with a drawer preserved from Herculaneum. In the top center, we have plaster casts of the lower parts of cupids from a house at Pompeii. You've probably seen that they can make plaster casts of bodies, we can also make plaster casts of things like wooden furniture, if you're a bit careful and clever. At the bottom, you see a reconstruction of a storage box that's been put back together using the original bronze components. And on the far right, we see a similar reconstruction of a large of a large cupboard or armoire. And so we can use our components to kind of figure out what sorts of storage furniture was where in our houses. So if you go to the next Meg, what I'm showing you here is a detail on the right of the atrium, which it's real clear was the main storage space in the house. And it was pretty chock-a-block with wooden storage furniture. One way to reconstruct this is as I've done here, where there are three chests and then there those are the pinkish things. And blue are these three cupboards, which would have had lockable doors and maybe also a big set of some kind of open shelves over there on the lower right, or maybe the family would have put things like its fancy silverware on display so that visitors to the house could be impressed with this. At least that's one way of of reading it. And so we can begin to understand the dynamic of how the owners of this nice, not super nice Roman house, we're trying to kind of nail down all of the small portable objects. And this is a house that would have been of a scale that there certainly would have been a certain number of slaves inside it. Go to the next now, Meg, I can finish up with this. We can then go to another house in the block, one eleven seventeen, where we know the owner. We also found a bronze seal ring there. And this fellow's name is Lucius Kylius Januarius. This is only a hundred and forty meters square. So go to the next, if you would, Meg. And so this is a substantially smaller footprint. It falls at the top of the second quartile. And this is a house that's small enough and simple enough without a formal set of reception spaces, what extensive work rooms at the back where you can imagine a a smallish household that might not have included any slaves or maybe did include a slave or some slaves. We really can't answer that question particularly well. This would have had some upstairs rooms over the front part of the house by looking at the sorts of artifacts we find there, the cups and plates and dipping vessels and things like that. You can surmise there might have been four to five residents in the household, at least of an age where they were using those sorts of things to take meals. We also know that they were probably involved in some kind of craft activity on the premises that involved manufacturing stuff like ink and maybe ungwints and things of that sort. Go to the next, if you would, Meg. Here, I've got the same thing about the name of this guy. I'll just skate over that because probably time is running out. This guy similarly could have begun life as a freedman, though, following the same sort of reasoning that I followed before. And if we then go to the next slide, Meg, you can then see here the reconstruction of the equivalent kind of space, what I'll call the front hall, where there's much less in the way of storage furniture, but there's still to some maybe two lockable armoires in lower right there and then a massive probably open shelf storage unit in the upper left of that space, which would have been tucked underneath the stairs. That's where the stairs would have run up. So just like Harry Potter living under a staircase or whatever, the Romans like to take that dead space and store lots of stuff there. And you can compare this then with the set of storage items of furniture in the other house and begin to see a little bit about what's going on in this more modest household. I'll finish up, though, by taking us. Let's go the next one now, if you would, Meg, taking us to one space where we can plausibly surmise if there was a slave in this household, this is presumably where he, because this probably would have been a male, would have spent a fair amount of his time. And that's this basically this Kella Ostiaria, this Porter's Lodge or a doorkeeper's room, if that's what you want. It's just to the left of the entry corridor. This is a classic space where you would have a servant, usually an enslaved when we think would be called an Ostiarias or a Yanator, a doorman, where they would presumably staff the entrance to the house. And we have one of these even in this modest house. And so let's look at the sorts of portable material culture that was recovered by the archaeologists who dug this back in 1960. I might add here, so if you go to the next one, Meg, first of all, there was a wonderful set of ten nearly matching bronze and iron bells, bronze cast with an iron clapper, which would have been hung all together to make a tentanabulum, like a big wind chime thing that probably would have been hung in the door so that you could shake it maybe and signal people that you wanted entrance or maybe set up in some way that people would have trouble sneaking in. So this is a classic thing you might have sort of at the entry to a Roman house. Then if you go to the next, we have out of this space a variety of vessels for holding liquids, maybe water, wine and olive oil, the sorts of things that if you were doing your turn in the dormant space or maybe even living there, you would want to consume on some regular basis. There's also this nice blown glass cup in the lower left. So vessels and bronze and glass, maybe for someone spending long hours in this small space, if you go to the next, Meg, also found there it's not in good condition anymore in the lower left. There's this large bronze casserole with good suiting on it and patched. So something for cooking hot meals. And so you can imagine that maybe hot meals were carried into this guy that I'm imagining spending long hours here and no plate to consume things. But I'm imagining that maybe in the upper right, this shallow handled vessel called the Patra, which normally we find this, we imagine it's used for pouring libations in connection with the religious rituals, this theoretically could have been used to consume meals. And those meals might have been prepared in the back of the house here back in room nine, where we have a nice masonry cooktop in the kitchen and brought around to the front room. But if you go back to the plan of this block, which I won't do now, you'll see the space immediately to the north of this and the space immediately to the south of it actually were carry out fast food joints. And so it's entirely possible even that the house might have sent this cookpot out next door, just kind of a second line thing. They had better ones were inside the house where they might have cooked up some food for whoever it was that was camping out in this Kella, Ostiaria. If you go to the next Meg, well, what goes in must come out. And so we have here in the upper right is a bronze vessel that is probably what the Romans would call a scoffium, which we know served as a chamber pot and a lid for that with a handle on it. You see below that. And so this is a full service facility. You know that you're spending a long hours there. You got to go, you got to go. This could be later dimpled into the pit latrine back there at number 10 and maybe washed at the cistern, which is along the west wall and room number eight. And if you go to the next Meg, this is kind of intriguing is also found in this room where these quite nice a set of 40 very nice finance beads that would have been strung together to make a necklace or maybe a couple bracelets or something like that. And you might be thinking, yeah, you know, like it wasn't all grinding poverty and abuse if you were a slave. Maybe you got something nice. But as it turns out at Pompeii, one of the issues is we have a lot of trouble telling if stuff was actually disposed in ground floor spaces or if it fell into it from second story spaces when those got ripped off the buildings by the pyroclastic surges. And recently, this is more the kind of thing that would have been kept up in someone's private space on the second floor. And so I wouldn't rush to assume that these were actually disposed inside this space when Vesuvius went up in AD 79. So this is a little bit of the kind of work we're doing, which allows us to get at the expression of the lived experiences of these people, slaves and their masters in these houses in Pompeii. Much of it is speculative, but we can by looking at the disposition of these these portable items of material culture, understand kind of how the owners of the household were disposing of these things and trying to control access to them. And in some cases, look at the things that were in spaces where plausibly enslaved people might have been spending substantial chunks of their day and night. So I'll stop at that and turn things back over to Meg to for more questions or to finish up. Great. Thanks. Thanks so much, Chad. And, you know, we knew we had a lot of good material to cover today. So thank you for expanding our understanding and how archaeology can help us figure out some of these important social circumstances. So we have a couple of questions here, both for Eric Gruen and for Tadpania. So let me just say to Eric, if you're willing, we've got a couple of questions here. First of all, I was asked if you could provide some citations for the osteocytes regarding Jewish presence and whether Augustine might have interacted with that community. We don't know of the act. We don't have specific evidence for interaction, but the we don't have comparable archaeological evidence for a Jewish community in Rome. But since there was or almost certainly was a substantial synagogue in Austria would be very unlikely if there wasn't something comparable in Rome itself. It would be very surprised whether there was any interaction between the two. We don't have that evidence. But again, I would be very surprised if there weren't. There was plenty of intercommunication among Jews generally in the diaspora. And with such a nearby site, it would have certainly been true in between Austria and Rome. Right. And now we have greetings to you from David Friedman in London, who has this question. And you wondered, given Roman Rome's openness to alien creeds, why did they not allow the temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt in after 70 CE? Well, part of the reason was that the Roman victory in 70 was claimed as a glorious triumph and accomplishment by a new dynasty that took over in Rome, the Flavian Dynasty, dynasty that succeeded the Julia Claudians after the death of Nero and the Roman War. The victory would have been compromised if the Romans had allowed the temple to be to be rebuilt. I think it was more a matter of the public image of Rome that demanded that they refrain from the rebuilding of the temple. And one last question for you at the moment until more keep piling in here from Christine Hastorf, the director of the archaeological research facility. She wonders, why would the followers of ISIS and Jews be expelled and not those following Mithras in other non-local deity followers? Well, the evidence of the actual expulsion of the Jews together with ISIS followers and astrologers comes from a period earlier than the spread of Mithraism to the Roman Empire. Had the adherents of Mithras been equally conspicuous, shall we say, in Rome, they probably would have gone as well. Thank you. And now a couple of for Ted here. One is, I propose the current issue of low income housing in the suburbs. Is it true that wealthy villas usually house laborers dwelling so that neighborhoods would naturally be very mixed? I'm not certain what exactly is being referred to there, but certainly when we look at the complexion of neighborhoods in Roman settlements, we do see that there's quite a variety of different sorts of residences and and shops and workshops and things like that. So there tends not to be the sort of socioeconomic zoning that perhaps we assumed have been the case in and well, the case in our towns and cities. It's also the case that the household inside any particular residence, particularly a large one, would have included people of many different social, many different statuses, maybe even legal statuses. Friedman might continue to live with their former owners, for example, after they had been manumitted. And so in that sense, there was a lot of an internal variability in in social status and to some extent also economic status within individual residences, maybe in a way that, again, we would find unusual or or strange. So that may be kind of what this question is getting at. All right. Great. Thank you. And one, let's follow up. We've got a couple of questions here from Vic Avi Rosenzweig and says, whether permitting, people would be spending their time out front or on the patio or in the yard, right? The ground surrounding the walls and rooms is just as important as the interiors. Is that the case? Again, a question to me. Yeah, but in both Breakin and Roman societies, particularly in towns and cities, structures had open internal spaces, not external spaces, as we do in the way we set up our houses, right? So the equivalent of your backyard would have been an interior courtyard of some sort. So so, yes, that's quite true. And indeed, anyone who spent a winter in the Mediterranean knows that to warm up, you go outside, among other things. But in terms of privacy and and things like that, you're you're behind blind walls, right? Windows aren't to look out of they're set up high and small and have bars in them. So they're just to let a little bit of air and light circulate in. And so the way that houses function spatially is quite different, for example, from ones that would have external yards. Having said that, in rural areas, it is still that way to some extent, but could also differ quite a bit because, of course, you're not packed in tightly. Archeologists, though, rarely excavate outside the structure, so we don't know a great deal about outbuildings and things of that sort. Great. Good. And I think we'll close it then. We're just at 130. We've done a wonderful job. We've seen some very important and interesting dimensions that start to fill in the blanks also help us understand that the problems of using stereotypes and gross generalizations don't play out when archaeologists are in textual readings are able to get into the fine details of the complicated relationships among human beings in the ancient Mediterranean. So thank you all for your contributions, your participation. And for, again, helping us better understand the nature, the extent and the complications of human social life. Have a good week. Take care and go vote. Thank you. Thank you, Meg.