Domestic violence and servile vulnerability in the House of the Vettii, Pompeii

This article explores the susceptibility of enslaved household members to physical and sexual violence, using the House of the Vettii at Pompeii as a case study. It first re-examines the house’s material evidence (including frescoes of cupids and psyches performing manual labour and statuettes of children with bound hands) to highlight previously overlooked similarities with the real tasks and punishments that enslaved children and adults might have faced. To give a vivid sense of the physical and affective dimensions of violence in this house, the article then offers an archive-based short story (using critical fabulation, a methodology developed by Saidiya Hartman to study trans-Atlantic slavery) about a real enslaved woman named Eutychis, whom graffiti record as a prostituted homeborn slave (verna). Ultimately, the article illuminates both the acute and long-lasting forms of violence that enslaved individuals encountered on a regular basis.