1. Imagine that you are either an urban household slave or a rural farm slave in the ancient Roman world who is forced to perform specialized work (of your choice for purposes of this response). Describe your approach to surviving/negotiating your life as a slave. Do you think you mostly would seek ways to accept and/or normalize your experience, so as to make your life tolerable? Assuming it is not possible for you to escape, would you find ways to rebel against or resist your enslavement to assert your own will, agency, and personality?
2. Plautus’s Pseudolus provides a brilliant example of a clever comic slave who, despite his status, takes complete control of the play and owing to his creative powers outsmarts and humiliates his social superiors. Compare and contrast Pseudolus with a character from film (or some other form of modern fiction, e.g. television, a novel, video game) who functions in similar ways as a rebellious and creative resister in her/his/their fictional world.
3. Incorporating what you’ve learned about slavery in this course and your own experience, what aspects of slavery seem to—conceptually, not literally—persist in some interpersonal relationships today? Please restrict your response to one type of (legal) relationship that assumes some of the social and psychological aspects of a master/slave imbalance of power and control.
4. Write an imaginative biography or personal confession of the minor character of Stalagmus (in Plautus’s Captivi), the slave who kidnaps the young Tyndarus when he runs away from his master’s house. Be sure to base your account on what little we learn of Stalagmus’s personal history in the play, and include a rationale for why Stalagmus is so unremorseful for his actions.
5. Why do you think human slavery persists today in some cultures and even (illegally) in the United States? To support your opinions with arguments, be sure to incorporate some materials from this course as well as any other academic perspective(s) you find relevant (for example, evolutionary biology, psychology, history).
6. Focusing on HTVT themes, compare (and contrast) a character from Lucan’s Civil War with a character from film (or some other form of modern fiction, e.g. television, a novel, video game) who exhibits similar thoughts, emotions, motivations, and behaviors.
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