The Mind of the Slave untangles the double nature of slaves as property and as human beings under the law in the Roman world. As human beings, slaves had free will and legally recognized autonomy while acting for their owner. Although their autonomy was fundamental to the Roman economy, it had the potential to lead to insecurity in the day-to-day experiences of the owner and enslaved person. Will an enslaved agent decide to act in the best interest of their owner? To sell their secrets? To run away? These moments of insecurity are the subject of this book; they reveal an owner’s struggle to know the mind of the slave and to reconcile ownership over a reasoning, emotional, and purposive human being. Nicole J. Giannella argues that this reliance on the mind of the slave reveals fault lines in the ownership of the enslaved. This is where we can glimpse beyond the trappings of law and see the need for negotiation, incentives, and ultimately, the trust that the owner puts in their slave. 

In order to place Roman jurists in conversation with both technical and literary sources, Giannella grounds this study in philology and argues that conceptions of the mind of the slave were at the heart of legal and cultural debates about the nature of slavery and ownership. It also contributes to a wider debate about selfhood and autonomy, since philosophers often used the figure of the slave as a representation of humanity as its limits.

Nicole J. Giannella is Assistant Professor of Classics at Cornell University.