ABSTRACT
The tortured body retains scars, marks that recall the violence inflicted upon it by the torturer. In part because slaves were often tattooed in the ancient world, such marks of torture resonate in the Greek mind with tattoos, and with other forms of metaphorical inscription, in Greek thinking considered analogous to writing on the body. In other contexts in ancient Greece, slave tattooing serves as a sort of label. It is as if writing on the slave body indicated the contents of that body. Such a function of writing recalls the work of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, who argues that writing originates in the markings on the outside of packages recording their contents. The fifth mime establishes a connection among writing, tattooing, punishment, and torture. The mime reveals some aspects of daily life of the third century, gives a flavor of the absolute authority of a slave's owner, of the intimacy of slaves and mistress in an ordinary household.
