Stigma: Tattooing and Branding in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Abstract

One of the best episodes in Petronius' Satyrica involves the presence of the narrator, Encolpius, his lover Giton, and the rogue-poet Eumolpus, on board a ship owned by Lichas, of which another passenger is the flighty matron, Tryphaena. In an earlier episode of the novel, Lichas seems to have been the lover of Encolpius and Tryphaena of Giton, though both affairs had ended in enmity. There ensues a comic deliberation between Encolpius and Giton about ways of escape. One of them involves the ink which Eumolpus has brought aboard as a man of literature. Encolpius suggests that he and Giton dye themselves with it from head to foot and pretend to be Eumolpus' Ethiopian (that is, African) slaves. Giton contemptuously dismisses the idea, and proposes suicide. Eumolpus intervenes with what he considers a better idea. His manservant, who is a barber, will shave the heads and eyebrows of Encolpius and Giton, and then he himself 'will mark your faces with an elaborate inscription to give the impression that you have been punished with a mark. That way the same letters will both allay the suspicions of your pursuers and hide your faces with the appearance of punishment' ('sequar ego frontes notans inscriptione sollerti, ut uideamini stigmate esse puniti. ita eaedem litterae et suspicionem declinabunt quaerentium et uultus umbra supplicii tegent'). This is agreed to, and 'Eumolpus filled the foreheads of us both with huge letters, and with generous hand covered our whole faces with the wellknown inscription of runaway slaves' ('impleuit Eumolpus frontes utriusque ingentibus litteris et notum fugitiuorum epigramma per totam faciem liberali manu duxit').