This contribution brings racial affect theory to bear on the literary representation of Roman manumission, in the process developing new critical tools for the history of Roman slavery as a mechanism for racialization. Through a close reading of the freed man Hermeros’ diatribe in the Cena Trimalchionis, I argue for the centrality of racial melancholy to the discursive and social forms by which manumission came to be experienced and figured. The operation of this racial melancholy in Petronius’ text is decomposable into two distinct, but complementary, sentimental performances: paranoia on the one hand, and compulsion into (evasive) autobiographical confession on the other. The interlinking of these performances within Hermeros’ speech generates a melancholic affect, which I conceptualize as a disposition for managing and negotiating the grief of enslavement and manumission. In formulating and grounding this claim, I hope to clear a space for mutually enriching exchange among historians of Roman slavery, historians of premodern race, and those literary critics and cultural theorists who have been influential in setting the terms for the “affective turn.”

This chapter compares two fictional texts of the imperial period that represent freed persons, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca and Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis. The comparison advances our understanding of how Roman freed persons may have come to terms with the experience of slavery. Ephesiaca expresses sympathy for the enslaved elite protagonists Habrocomes and Anthia not only as enslaved elites, but as enslaved persons per se. The novel continues its sympathy for the protagonists after they have been restored to freedom. In particular, the conclusion of Ephesiaca offers a sympathetic depiction of the protagonists’ response to what they had endured in slavery: Habrocomes and Anthia dedicate memorials to their parents, who had died while the protagonists were still enslaved; they withdraw from the wider community and reconstitute a family that includes their fellow freed persons; they spend the rest of their lives in celebration that is shadowed by their recollection of the past and the anticipation of their own mortality. The same motifs, viz., memorialization, recollection of a painful past, seclusion from the wider community, family constituted on the basis of shared experience rather than biology, and melancholic celebration, mark the representation of Trimalchio and his fellow freed persons in the Cena. The parallels suggest the possibility that these motifs typified the representation of the experience of freed persons, sympathetically in Ephesiaca and derisively in the Cena.

This chapter explores meat-eating as an important way by which humans define themselves and explores it as part of a broader ‘anthropology’ of food and eating. It tells the story of a boastful consumption of a wild boar at a (fictional) Roman dinner party to show that in the ancient world (as in the modern), what you eat is who you are.