ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how Xenophon has constructed a sympathetic account of his elite protagonists’ experience of slavery – even when they act like stereotypically bad slaves – through a range of narrative stratagems: a contrast between the protagonists’ metaphorical enslavement to love, servitium amoris, and their experience of actual slavery; the use of repeated folktales; a satiric contrast between Habrocomes’ tutor, a stereotypically good slave who dies, and the protagonists, bad slaves who survive; the solidarity established between the enslaved protagonists and real slaves. Xenophon also adopts strategies that qualify his sympathy for the protagonists’ bad-slave behavior. At the end of the novel, the protagonists are rejoined and restored to their original status in Ephesus but not the status quo ante. Slavery has changed them.