Slave collars that speak, but not in the wearer's interest
Slave collars from the fourth and fifth centuries CE are inscribed with variations on “Hold me! I have run away.”
Classicist Jennifer Trimble writes that the collars make visible the lives of some of the most invisible people in the historical record. Yet their first-person inscriptions often say where and to whom the wearer should be returned—presumably not what someone hoping to escape slavery would choose to say in their own voice.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Take
The collar is a grim piece of ventriloquism: it speaks in the first person, but the script serves the owner.
Pushback
Trimble's phrase about visibility is fair, but it is visibility on the owner's terms: the inscription records where the wearer belongs and to whom, not the wearer's own account.