Race, Rhetoric, and Infidelity in Calpurnius Flaccus's Natus Aethiops

In Calpurnius Flaccus's Declamation 2, a Roman wife is accused of infidelity on the grounds that she has given birth to an "Aethiopian" ( Aethiops ). The present article seeks to contextualize this relatively understudied declamation within the recent efflorescence of scholarship on ancient race, highlighting its connections to conventional discourses of race in Latin literature. In what follows, I identify a system of racial categorization as a component of Rome's imperializing vision of the world and demonstrate how discourses of race regulate domestic concerns at Rome, such as marriage, extramarital desire, and reproduction. The article also seeks to show how anxieties of racial contact, exemplified by blackness as index of symbolic exteriority, collide with anxieties regarding the presence of enslaved people within the Roman household.