The Enslaved Muse

Apostrophe cuts to the core of the fragile poetic speech act. What happens to this trope in the slave society of ancient Rome, where enslaved literary secretaries were routinely used for dictation, and poetry itself was thus turned into a practice of address to a domestic human landscape purposefully summoned as responsive? This essay tries to think the political consequences of apostrophe—after Barbara Johnson, Lauren Berlant, and Virginia Jackson—into a context of Roman slavery, under which the trope became a focal point for enslaver anxieties of authorship.