Looking at the Laboring: Fictions, “Realities”, and a Culture of Competence

Why did people look at images of work and workers and discuss exertion by visible means, in the Roman world? What did they get from looking at others’ competencies? In this chapter I focus on representational artifacts: images, objects, and monuments, as well as the settings that they charged with meaning and that shaped response to them. I consider avenues of further attention and posit both questions and premises for the importance of “looking at the laboring”. Across a host of academic disciplines, and also in non-academic and popular attention to the Roman imperium, there is a palpable fascination with images and things that implicate Roman “work”. Already in the third century, rich people in Latium amused themselves with images on luxury artifacts of lowly people working. Into the Roman sphere migrated examples of the Hellenistic fascination to depict the animated bustle behind real performance that was ritual, ceremonious, dramatic, and more, extant in Roman house decorations by the first century BCE, as did mythological images of labor. Think about the megalographic images of the noted red hall of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, for instance, of ca. 80 BCE: much of the walls’ surface shows preparation for religious ritual as well as its enactment. On the long wall where women prepare a ceremony hierarchy seems to play out, with more important/free women assisted by lower-status/slave women. Fitting to my theme is the scene of a young woman having her hair dressed for a bridal ceremony: a female slave does the grooming, while an animated servitor-statue of Cupid holds up the mirror, a pendant divine page watching. Satyr-shepherd and shepherdess tend to goats; a slave-boy assists the ritualists.