stigmamachine.com/2020/01/20/the-ancient-penal-history-of-stigma/Page duBois draws our attention to a play written by Herondas in the third-century BC, in which ‘a slave is tattooed on the forehead with the proverbial words “know thyself”’. This tattooing was a punishment meted out by a mistress upon a slave who is her lover, but who ‘has lost sight of his position as a slave’ by cheating on her. The choice of the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’ underscores the way in which a penal stigmatisation functioned as an injunction to a particular kind of self-knowledge: a mortifying punishment through which you were taught to ‘know yourself’ by ‘knowing your place’ in a highly stratified social order.
Stigmatisation was thus an act of pedagogical violence through which a person was tutored back into a place of unfreedom, and a means through which domestic slaves, indentured miners, soldiers, roadbuilders, munitions workers could be ‘marked for life with the insignia of their professions’ –
stigmata signaled that that your labour (and body) was owned by anotherThis Graeco-Roman practice of writing a crime or criminal sentence into the skin adds a literal dimension to the practice of being sentenced. As Steven Connor suggests, in ‘the mark incised or pricked or burned upon the body of the criminal, the law precipitates a lasting sign of its action, the letter of the law made actual and present.’[xvi] As a ‘running advertisement of one’s guilt and subjugation’, stigmatisation was designed to permanently lower your social status.[xvii] For example, in Ancient Rome, where slaves could theoretically earn their freedom, a Roman law from the fourth-century AD details that slaves who had been tattooed on account of a crime should never be allowed to become free citizens. If a tattooed slave later earned their freedom they were consigned ‘to the lowest possible category of free non-citizens’.[xviii] A penal tattoo (a stigma) relegated the stigmatised to a bottom rung in the extant social hierarchy. The letters on your body marked your exclusion from citizenship (and rights).
The Ancient Greeks associated voluntary tattooing, undertaken as an aesthetic and/or a religious practice, with ‘barbarians’ and in particular with their despised northern neighbours, the Thracians.[xix] Surviving Greek pottery portrays Thracian women as marked with decorative tattoos.[xx] Indeed, within the iconography of vase painting, Greek artists employed tattoos to visually differentiate Thracian women, other foreigners and enslaved people from their unmarked Greek superiors.
In ‘Stigma and Tattoo’, Christopher Jones suggests that it was likely because of this abject cultural association between tattoos and feminised foreign others that the Greeks developed the practice of tattooing slaves as a humiliating punishment. As we shall see, the association between voluntarily acquired tattoos and ‘barbarians’ was revived in eugenicist social scientific discourses in the nineteenth century, when the tattoo became foundational to the development of the discipline of criminology, and its ancient connotations of ‘barbarianism’ were viciously reworked as a means of classifying the ‘lower orders’ both within the European interior, and its Imperial outposts – including as we shall see in colonial era India.[xxi]
Penal stigmatisation was so entrenched a practice in antiquity that it began to be
used metaphorically as a term of disgrace. The Greek orator and writer Aelius Aristides (117–181 BC) attacks Plato for slander with the words ‘you never tattooed any of your own slaves but you have as good as tattooed the most honoured of the Greeks’.[xxii] The Roman Poet Martial (circa AD 38–104) also employs stigma as a metaphor, writing that ‘whatever the heat of my anger burns into you will remain for good and be read throughout the world, and Cinnamus [an acclaimed historian] with his cunning skill will not erase the tattoos’.[xxiii] The Roman writer known as Nicanor Stigmatias (in the early second century) was given the name Stigmatias as a teasing reference to his work as a grammatican, a labour which involved punctuating text; the joke being that it was unimaginable that a citizen, especially one of such high standing, would be actually stigmatised. It is in these ancient allegorical uses of the term stigma, that the modern understanding of stigma as a symbolic mark of disgrace was forged. Indeed, these metaphorical uses mark the beginning of a traffic in the meaning of stigma, between stigma as a literal punishment, and the more psychological meanings that stigma subsequently acquired
In the Ancient Graeco-Roman world, penal stigmas had a specific economic function as a mechanism for the systematic exploitation of specific classes of people. That is, stigmatisation was a way of marking bodies in order to secure an indentured or slave labour force. Over time, the economic efficacy of penal tattooing intensified as ‘the sentence of exile and, most likely, hard labour’, became ‘part of the total package of which the penal tattoo [was] the sign’.[xxiv] Indeed, the Romans extended practices of penal stigmatisation to ‘all classes virtually indentured to the state’ employing stigma en masse to generate new sources of slave labour for the vast economies and infrastructures of expanding Empires.[xxv]
In the Roman period, while a penal stigma might still record the name of a specific crime or infraction, it was as likely to spell out the type and length of the criminal sentence bequeathed by a court of law, or the name of the emperor under whose jurisdiction a sentence of hard labour was enforced. As the classics scholar Mark Gustafson details, there is extensive evidence in late antiquity of the words metallicae damnationis (condemned to the mines) being tattooed on the foreheads of those convicted in Roman courts. People marked in this way were called the metallic. They were tattooed, ‘beaten with clubs’ and chained, before being transported, by land and sea, to Imperial outposts, where they would be lucky indeed to survive their sentence of hard labour.[xxvi]The Romans also regularly tattooed captured enemy soldiers during border skirmishes and expropriation of territory, and tattooed army recruits (evidence suggests mainly on the wrists) so they could be ‘recognised if they go into hiding’.[xxvii]
As the classics scholarship suggests, the meaning of stigma is entwined with slavery, with the punishment of the enslaved and with the capture of people as unfree labour. In Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), the Roman writer Apuleius (c.AD 124–170) describes an utterly abject scene of labourers working in a public flour mill. Whip marks have left their skin ‘painted with livid welts’, their heads are half-shaven, and their feet are chained together.[xxviii]
What marks out these mill-workers as slaves who have been sentenced to indentured labour is their tattooed foreheads (frontes litterati).Graeco-Roman economies were ‘slave economies’: ‘slaves were essential in mining, worked on the rural estates and in the workshops and businesses of the wealthy, and served them in their homes’.[xxix] There is a tendency to ‘forget’ that slavery was the economic structure which underpinned these often-venerated cradles of European civilisation and democracy. Or rather, ancient systems of slavery have been mystified and romanticised in ways that disguise the material realities of enslavement, including the fact that ‘the ancient Greeks and Romans routinely tortured slaves’.[xxx] As Page duBois suggests, the ‘torturability’ of slaves and their susceptibility to being written upon marked ‘the boundary between slaves and free beings’.[xxxi]
Penal stigmatisation was particularly associated with people’s attempts to escape enslavement. Indeed, a penal stigma was often a record of an escape attempt. In some cases, slaves who had previously tried to escape would be collared rather than tattooed. These slave collars were iron neck rings which would have been riveted in place, and the inscriptions on them ‘often provide the owner’s name, status, occupation, and the address to which the slave should be returned’.[xxxii] Several Roman slave collars ‘have been found in funerary contexts, suggesting that, for some slaves at least, a metal neck collar was permanent’.[xxxiii] One surviving fourth- or fifth-century Roman slave collar has a bronze tag that reads: ‘I have run away; hold me. When you have brought me back to my master Zoninus, you will receive a gold coin.’[xxxiv]
Like the advertisements for runaway chattel slaves posted in British and North American newspapers more than 1,000 years later, these penal forms of stigmatisation signalled commodification and ownership, and were a means of identification, capture and retrieval.
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www.tattoo.com/blog/tattoos-dark-days-ancient-greece-rome/The practice was so feared and despised by the Greek citizens that it appears in many Greek texts. Well-known Grecian authors and philosophers discuss the act of marking the unworthy in their works, detailing the atrocity that was Greek tattooing. Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived from 484 to 426 BC, wrote of those who received tattoos in Greece, describing criminals, slaves, and prisoners of war. On occasion, his writings tell us, individuals would be tattooed as a way of relaying secret messages through enemy lines. This, however, was the only acceptable form of voluntary tattooing. The Greeks had a firm belief that anyone who participated in the act of voluntary tattooing was a barbarian – such as the Thracian (Maenads) women, whose name roughly translates to the “Mad Women” or “Raving Ones.” Many other writers of the period discussed the use of tattoos in a disciplinary sense, as well. Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aelius Aristides, Aeschines, and Herodus have all mentioned the process in their works. Still there were some, like Plato, who encouraged the practice. He once wrote that thieves should have their offense marked on their hands and face, and those who were found guilty of sacrilege should be branded with a mark and banished from society. The historian Zonare wrote of a particularly nasty tale in which the Greek Emperor Theophilus used tattoos to punish two monks who publicly disparaged him. His drastic retaliation included having eleven verses of vulgar iambic pentameter inked across their foreheads and faces
The Grecian method of tattooing as punishment was replicated in Roman society – but, as Romans tended to do, in a much larger fashion. They continued to ink their marks on slaves, criminals, and others deemed unfit by the Roman government. Slaves being exported in trade, for example, would have the words “Tax Paid” marked upon their foreheads. Many Emperors have been documented as participating in this direct form of punishment, including Julius Caesar, Cicero, Galen, and Seneca. However, it was Emperor Caligula that perhaps took this heinous act to the next level. Suetone, one of the early writers of the Roman Era, detailed events in which the sadistic, mad Emperor would erratically take it upon himself to tattoo members of his court – as if some form of past time or hobby.
Punitive tattooing continued into the war waged between Romans and Christians. There are mentions throughout the historic texts that speaks of
Christians surviving Roman imprisonment and returning home where their tattoos were worn as badges of honor as they were upheld as heroes by their community.
As most injustices do, tattooing the face as punishment did finally reach its end when Rome entered into Emperor Constantine’s rule. As Rome’s first Christian Emperor,
Constantine – who ruled from 306 to 337 AD – banned tattooing stating that man’s face was crafted in God’s image, and it was a sacrilege to deface it, regardless of the merit of the individual-----------------------
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Notes
