Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (Little, Brown and Company, 2024), 78-79:
Collaboration with enslaved workers is invisible to us not only because dependence upon one’s social inferior’s was embarrassing, but also become some ancient theories of the household pictured enslaved people as extensions of the body of the enslaver. Descriptions of enslaved workers portray them as tools, body parts, or prosthetic devices through which the freeborn “master” could extend himself. Cicero famously notes that without Tiro his work is silent and Martial absorbs his stenographer into his body as his “hand.” These are not outlying examples. In the context of writing, the secretary or clerk was described as the hand of the enslaving author, or simply just a hand, as if all hands were interchangeable. Language like this folds the contributions and agency of the secretary into the figure of the enslaver. The underlying argument is reductive and dehumanizing: certain people are not people; they are mindless objects or body parts. As body parts, they did not threaten the judgment of the elite person or their status as thinker and author.
Featured Image: Marble statuette of an enslaved boy holding a lantern (Wikimedia Commons).
The Amateur Exegete 