A comedy of errors: The comic slave in Greek art

Since the Greek word theatron, derived from the verb theasthai, was a place for ‘seeing’ and slaves were regularly portrayed in Attic comedy, comedies and art depicting comic characters are useful starting points for an examination of Greek ideas about slaves. Although the majority of the extant literature is mainly confined to the views and concerns of the elite members of Greek society, the comedies appear to ‘speak’ to Greeks from all social and economic classes. This is suggested not only by the performances themselves, but also by the fact that there was an extensive cross-economic market in comic terracotta sculpture, spanning mainland Greece, Crete, Rhodes, Asia Minor, southern Russia and North Africa. Though less common, scenes from comedies are also seen on pots of varying quality and artistic merit, from exquisite red figure to the less aesthetically impressive polychrome vessels. Helene Foley notes in her study of the comic body that, while tragic scenes are often found on finer ware, comic scenes are more common on ‘rough, household ware’, illustrating the popular appeal of comedy and the high accessibility of comic imagery. The substantial value of comedy as a source for popular ideas about slaves, however, is not suitably reflected in modern scholarship, where one struggles to find more than a handful of treatments of comic slaves (see also Akrigg, this volume). Perhaps this is at least partly due to the fact that, up until quite recently, scholarship tended to undervalue grotesque imagery and characters (such as slaves) in favour of the ideal and the beautiful (such as heroes and heroines). Caroline Hutton’s study of Greek terracotta figurines, which remains the most extensive of its kind, concentrates upon those she found appealing, while the grotesque figurines are passed over as merely representative of ‘the decline of Greece’ in the fourth and third centuries. Hutton was in good company – as Jeffrey Henderson writes, ‘even in antiquity the classical period had begun to be idealized as a time of cultural perfection, and the language and artefacts of its high culture were selected, attributed to men of genius and fast-frozen as a canon for the edification of posterity. All that was irrational, crude and unseemly was put out of sight or explained away.’ More recent studies generally recognize that relegating the grotesque to a footnote is anachronistic and inhibits an understanding of Greek culture.