Seeing Subjection: Tiro, Cicero, and the Pernicious Sentimentality of Classical Studies

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• Seeing Subjection:Tiro, Cicero, and the Pernicious Sentimentality of Classical Studies
• Denise Eileen McCoskey

But those who keep subjects in check by force would of course have to employ severity—masters, for example, toward their servants, when these cannot be held in control in any other way.

—Cicero De officiis 2.24 (trans. Walter Miller)

Any slave would have been exceptionally lucky to be bound to Cicero's household.

—Bankston 2012: 206

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel … and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

—James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

having worked at a predominantly undergraduate institution for my entire career—where there has been a reduction of faculty in Classics by approximately two-thirds since my arrival in the 1990s—I have long felt that my growth as a professional academic was more informed by my interactions with colleagues and students in fields other than Classics. In many ways, this has been a boon, especially when it comes to working with colleagues in my university's Black World Studies program, who have made an inestimable contribution to the development of my teaching and research. But it has also meant that my own sense of belonging in Classics has been vexed; and, as non-Classics colleagues over the years occasionally sought my opinion "as a classicist," I would find myself wondering how I could explain to them that a certain topic was not discussed in Classics or how I could outline the disciplinary procedures that had come to dictate both the types of questions that mattered in Classics and the limits of their deliberation.

I have therefore watched with pleasure as the field of Classics has become increasingly unsettled by calls for transforming its methods and goals, especially when it comes to race—calls which have faced the perhaps predictable [End Page 63] backlash. While it has been amusing to hear labels like "woke" weaponized against such endeavors,¹ I admit that I was unprepared to learn that those seeking to redress Classics' many exclusions are also "joyless,"² as if it was somehow our job to Marie Kondo the ancient world.³ However, even as I have been inspired by such demands for change, I have often wanted to see more concrete suggestions for changes we can immediately make to our thinking and writing about the ancient world, especially given that many potential allies face limits not in terms of will, but rather of time and energy when it comes to decolonizing Classics.⁴ So, I would like to propose here such a change after first outlining the ways my thinking about—and beyond—the limits of Classics was motivated by my participation in interdisciplinary discussions on the topic of slavery at my university.

In 2021–2022, I participated in the annual John W. Altman Program in the Humanities administered by Miami University's Humanities Center, which that year featured the topic "Race and Racism: The Problem of Persistence."⁵ As part of the program's seminar series, the Altman scholars (chosen from a range of departments) were asked to read a chapter from Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (2022). It was a work I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with until then, and it is an understatement to say that I found Hartman's attempts to forge a "critical lexicon that would elucidate slavery and its modes of power and forms of subjection," including a "language" for the "afterlife of slavery" (2022: xxxv), both profoundly challenging and deeply inspiring. Yet, in the same week that we were scheduled to discuss Hartman's work, a debate broke out among classicists on Twitter concerning a book written in the voice of a fictional Roman slave owner, Marcus Sidonius Falx, entitled How to Manage [End Page 64] Your Slaves.⁶ Trying to reconcile these two things broke my brain: how could I, as the "resident classicist," explain to a roomful of my Altman colleagues that while an American historian was examining the experiences of both enslaved and emancipated persons with...