Dr Laura Donati PhD, FHEA

Research Overview

My main research interests are ancient slavery, chiefly Roman, and the relationship between law, society and its cultural outputs (notably literature), focusing especially on moments of tension that are caused by social hierarchies.

My doctoral thesis, which I am currently revising for publication as a monograph, used the lens of ‘crime and punishment’ in Roman slavery to investigate how Roman enslavers configured their relationship with and authority over those they held in slavery. While Roman law endowed slave-owners with an almost uncontested power over their human property, the constant threat of what from their perspective constituted servile delinquency challenged this very notion of power, providing in turn a highly productive focal point for modern discussion of servile responses to slave management on the one hand and masterly authority and discretion on the other. Analysing Roman legal texts in conjunction with (other) literary evidence, including prescriptive, satirical and novelistic writings, I explored how Roman enslavers drew on legal thought to conceptualize (and buttress) their role as owners of human property. Doing so reveals some considerable anxiety on the part of Roman domini in respect of their slave-owning that necessitated their regular recourse to the law and the wider legal discourse in defence of their role in slaving. In brief, keeping the enslaved in their place on a conceptual level required, much as the everyday practice of slaving, the constant input from Roman slave-owners, articulated not just through the obvious channels, such as in Roman legal writing, but also through much more unexpected avenues, such as Varro’s agricultural manual or Pliny’s letters. My research thus foregrounds that Roman slavery was less secure, obvious and uncontested than often imagined, but also that law was not in the exclusive remit of lawyers in ancient Rome.

In my next research project, I intend to explore the role of interpersonal violence in Roman slavery.