Lost and (Not) Found: An Enslaved Woman’s Voice in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus

Plutarch’s Life of Crassus preserves something extremely rare in our historical record: the secondhand testimony of an enslaved woman, who lived in a cave for eight months with a young Crassus in 85 BCE. This article uses the episode as a case study to explore the challenges of recovering enslaved perspectives. Examining the woman’s speech as it functions in the anecdote itself, in its transmission, and in its reception, I show that at each of these levels her voice is coopted by others. The anecdote does not, then, transmit an enslaved woman’s voice, but it does demonstrate the means by which such voices were (and continue to be) silenced.