This chapter begins with a unique and remarkable artifact – a terracotta tile that bears the footprints of two slaves, along with a bilingual inscription in Oscan and Latin (Fig. 66). The Oscan inscription reads “Detfri slave of Herennius Sattius / signed with a footprint,” and the Latin one, “Amica slave of Herennius / signed when / we were placing the tile.” The footprints function as signatures of a sort, but they also show something that is otherwise unrecorded, and largely unrecordable, in the remains of Roman cities – the literal footprints of individual slaves. These imprints were captured while the clay was soft, before the firing of the tile, leaving the slaves’ indelible footpaths as they traversed the tile. The reasons that this object merits mention are twofold. On the one hand, virtually no footprints from ancient Roman cities survive, and to have those of slaves is both unexpected and arresting. On the other hand, the tile was placed on the roof of the temple at Pietrabbondante, where no one could really see it and where footprints did not belong in any case. It is as if the footprints tactically claim a trace of existing, or better yet walking, a trace otherwise largely unrecognized in ancient and modern accounts of life in the city and on its streets.

In 2008, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an exhibition entitled Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples. The paintings, mosaics, statuary, tableware, jewelry, and decorative objects in the show well fulfilled the goal of its guest curator, Carol C. Mattusch, to give its viewers “a glimpse of the good life as it played out for Romans and their guests within the Campanian seaside villa and its surroundings” (2008, 1). As impressive as the exhibition was, at the same time, it nearly eliminated the bondsmen and bondswomen who made possible the “good life” in the villas around the Bay of Naples. The essays that front the catalog, for example, do not mention a single slave, although many of the activities mentioned required slave labor. This absence is frequent in much of the rich scholarship on the Roman villa except in the search for slave quarters, service areas, and agricultural apparatus. In this chapter, we look at the ways this silence reproduces the particular silences in ancient texts, and we try to meld literature, law, and archaeological evidence to relocate Roman slaves in the material realities of the Roman villa.

In The City & the City, a novel by China Miéville, the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma exist side by side. At points, areas of the cities overlap and interweave, so the same street, albeit with a different name, can belong to both. Although no wall separates the two cities, the people of Besźel must have no visual or physical contact with the people of Ul Qoma: in the terms of the novel, they must not “breach.” Thus, two people may “live, grosstopically, next door to each other . . . , each in their own city, . . . never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border” (134). From childhood, the inhabitants of each city learn the key signifiers of difference in order to see only the buildings, people, animals, and vehicles in their own city and to un-see everything in the other city. Yet, as a weary Inspector Tyador Borlú of Besźel makes clear, un-seeing takes effort because nothing but “unseeing others with care” or “polite unsensing” separates the sights and sounds of his own Besźel from those of the supposedly alien Ul Qoma. And when Borlú officially crosses over to Ul Qoma, he must see what he has always un-seen and un-see what he has always seen.

Walking north along Via Stabiana in Pompeii, visitors pass one rectangular space after another (Fig. 88). Identified as shops or workshops, these spaces appear as variations on a theme: the one or two rooms have rubble or gravel floors and unpainted walls; wide front doorways open directly on the sidewalk or street, their thresholds grooved for wooden shutters. Most often, it should be said, we bypass these places – after all, they appear empty. The same experience could be repeated on other streets in both Pompeii and Ostia. Yet in many of these rooms slaves worked, ate, slept, and led their daily lives. Their workplaces remain, yet they seem invisible now that the tools, tables, and shop signs are long gone. In a few cases, however, distinctive features leave traces of workers’ activities in the archaeological landscape: mills and ovens clearly indicate ancient bakeries, and stalls and basins, fulleries. These features allow us to do what is impossible for the myriad empty shops and workshops – examine the material life of Roman workers in the ancient city. Since our concern is with slave workers, we focus on one of the identifiable urban workshops, the bakery, where literature and law testify to the certain presence of slaves. At key points the chapter turns briefly to fulleries to explore the conditions of laboring for slaves in the city and to highlight aspects of reading the archaeological record.

In 79 CE before the eruption of Vesuvius buried the city of Pompeii, the prostitutes in the Large Brothel (VII.12.18) and the workers in a wool-treatment shop (VII.12.17) were next-door neighbors, the entryways of their places of business opening on Vicolo del Lupanare (Figs. 1–2). Both the sex workers and the wool workers were in all likelihood slaves. Side by side, brothel and workshop reveal something of the material life of two groups of slaves in ancient Roman society: at the least, their arrangements of space and equipment show us something of the material conditions of their laborers. In the brothel, prostitutes serviced their customers in the five cramped cubicles, each with its own masonry bed, opening off a central hallway. The erotic paintings on the walls above the doorways, which show couples in different sexual positions, may well display the sex acts performed by the women. Some 134 separate graffiti name sexual activities, the male customers, and the women themselves. There are no surviving pictures of the work in the wool-treatment shop, only a list or calculations written in charcoal and now no longer visible. What exactly took place in the workshop – fulling, dyeing, wool washing – has been the subject of scholarly debate. Yet the features of the shop point to the kinds of movements of the workers and even to their tasks: two large basins; a hearth; a long, low counter with two lead-lined bowls heated by built-in furnaces beneath; and a room with nail holes, perhaps for hanging lines.