This post is part of a series about the “Mutual Interests: Collaboration Across the Arts and Humanities” exhibition developed by faculty in the Society, Technology, and Environment Cluster at Grand Valley State University.

“The king of Asine a void under the mask
everywhere with us, everywhere with us, under a name:
“Αsίνην te… Αsίνην te…”
and his children statues
and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind
in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships
anchored in a vanished port:
under the mask a void.”
Giorgos Seferis, The King of Asine

In his masterful 1940 poem The King of Asine, Greek poet Giorgos Seferis calls up his experience working as an archaeologist at the excavations of the Mycenaean citadel and port site of Asine. The site has been famous for nearly 3,000 years, first appearing in the “Catalogue of Ships” in Homer’s Iliad. In the opening of the poem, Seferis calls to mind the golden death mask (“The Mask of Agamemnon”) famously found in Mycenae. The poet keeps trying to imagine the face of Asine’s legendary nameless king, who remains, in the words of literary translator Jenny Kellogg, a “palpable absence” throughout the poem.¹ Everywhere the excavators go on the citadel, they look for him, sometimes getting so close that they touch “with [their] fingers his touch upon the stones.” But everywhere they go, he’s a ghostly absence—“under the mask a void.” 

The act of feeling and trying to understand or even resurrect an absent presence—the “hauntology of remains,” to quote Yannis Hamilakis—is a familiar one in archaeology.² Hamilakis uses the term to describe the subjective, affective, and also political condition of allowing the remains of past violence, subjugation, and destruction to demand attention and response in the present. Recently, Lylaah Bhalerao has interrogated Hamilakis’ archaeological-hauntological approach using Black feminist thought in the field of Roman archaeology. Bhalerao explains that Saidiya Hartman asks how we might bear witness to women whose “lives were lost to the transatlantic slave trade,” when the evidence for them survives mainly from their abusers’ perspectives.³ Hartman’s answer is to engage in what she calls “critical fabulation”—engaging in an imaginative exploration of what could have been while keeping visible the limits of what we can and cannot know. Bhalerao states that we must, “refrain from projecting emotions and reactions onto our subjects or offering them a path, towards emancipation from the violence of the archive, that did not exist.”⁴ As Hamilakis suggests, such stories can “operate, in fact, as ways of taming the haunting potential of remains.”⁵ Instead of denaturing the ghosts, as it were, it is our ethical duty to allow the ambiguities, discontinuities, and loss of the past to “haunt” us.

Our collaboration for “Mutual Interests” began with a Roman slave-sale receipt that Maggie had encountered while researching a book chapter. A Roman economic historian and archaeologist working on non-élite lives, she was haunted by these hints of people whose lives became momentarily visible in the receipt’s legalese. Shalom, a multidisciplinary designer whose professional and scholarly work focuses on contemporary human rights and social justice, was interested but initially felt more distant from the document. Maggie’s students too had struggled to connect with it, and it was this struggle that prompted the collaboration.

Found near London’s Walbrook Stream, the late-first- or early-second-century AD tablet records the sale (and warranty) of Fortunata, a Diablintian girl from northern Gaul (in modern France), by a certain Albicianus, to Vegetus, the slave of an imperial slave, for 600 denarii.⁶ Her name means “the fortunate one,” and the receipt is the only record of her life to survive. 

We wanted to explore whether an animated collage might help students connect with these fragmentary lives while keeping the limits of our knowledge visible for our viewers. It would combine archaeological material with imagined figures—a visual experiment in critical fabulation. But finding those figures exposed the problem at the heart of our project: many visual representations of Roman slavery repeatedly sexualize or denigrate the people depicted. This may help viewers understand Roman slavery as an institution, but it risks participating in another type of dehumanization, that is, depicting a person’s victimization as the only salient feature of her personhood, denying her any dignity. Ancient images of enslaved people are surprisingly rare given the ubiquity of slavery in the Roman world, and in many cases it can be difficult to know whether a given image depicts an enslaved person at all. 

While ancient images of enslaved people depict them according to different sets of stereotypes than modern depictions, Roman images are often equally dehumanizing.⁷ In Roman frescoes, for instance, enslaved women are most often shown as physically small, nondescript, and often in the background of an image, as in the case of the figure in the far-left corner in both of the frescoes below.

Following Bhalerao, Hartman, and Hamilakis, we had serious doubts about using both stereotyping images and sanitized ones that might obfuscate the oppression of Fortunata, Vegetus, and perhaps even Albicianus. The most accurate way to represent the characters might be as silhouettes—the “void” under the “mask”. Doing so would highlight the irrecoverability of their lives. But, as Shalom pointed out, the silhouette fails to provide enough visual information to help non-specialist viewers move past stereotypes towards connection.

We began considering the use of AI generated figures as a way to explore and possibly challenge bias (positive and negative) that is so prevalent in depictions of enslaved Romans.⁸ We wondered if generating and revising images might allow us to try out different archaeological hypotheses (discussed at further length below).⁹ We also hoped that the figures’ clearly artificial appearance might draw attention to their status as figments of the modern imagination, while simultaneously giving our students an image with which to “connect.” But we quickly realized that even seemingly minor design choices required us to go down research rabbit holes that even Maggie’s Roman archaeology background could not quickly or easily resolve. 

What colour should Fortunata’s dress be? Many Roman frescoes, including those shown above, depict women or girls thought to be enslaved wearing bright coloured tunicae, one with a turquoise palla or shawl around her waist. In the fresco from the Casa di Amore Punito above, slave girl’s purple dress perfectly mirrors the purple palla worn by Venus. Was this realism on the part of the ancient artist (indicating that perhaps local Pompeiians, free and enslaved alike, wore jewel-toned clothing) or was this simply a compositional choice geared toward colour-coordinating the painting on the office wall? 

In many cases, as in that painting, putative slaves are shown bare-armed, while their mistresses wear tunicae or pallae that cover their upper arms. Would this have been the same in the cold of Roman Londinium, as well as in Campania? What should Fortunata wear on her feet? Bare-ankled “… nudo talo…” is how the Roman poet Juvenal describes enslaved boys, while Pliny the Elder records slaves being sold with chalked feet.¹⁰ Again, we wondered whether this would have been common practice in the cold and wet of a normal day in Londinium. 

Likewise, scholars are unclear on Fortunata’s age. The 600 denarii for which she was sold was, in contemporary London, a fairly large sum of money—equal to two years of pay for a Roman legionary soldier.¹¹ Does this indicate that she was in her teens or even twenties when she was sold? There is no way of knowing. Even choosing her gaze and the position of her hands meant suggesting something about an emotional life we cannot know.

We also do not know if Vegetus may have purchased Fortunata for himself or for his owner. The Neronian author Petronius, in his Satyricon, describes the drama that ensues when a household slave leaves an expensive purple cloak (owned by his master, another slave) at the baths.¹² Again, it is unclear how this satirical depiction might map onto the members of the imperial familia stationed in Britain. 

Similarly, we know little about Albicianus (Fortunata’s seller). His name could suggest a Gallic origin, and the fact that he was presented in a legal document with only a single name might indicate he was not a Roman citizen. What he may have worn, how he might have dressed or looked or acted, whether he was selling Fortunata alone or as part of a larger sale—all these details remain unknown. 

Of course, no amount of information that may someday come to light about the shoe colours of women sold into slavery in the Roman world or about the work-lives of the average Roman mango (slave dealer) can possibly supply us with the voices, the faces, the personalities, and the “moving and experiencing bod[ies]” of the people whose lives have survived in only the brief mentions in the Fortunata tablet.¹³ To paraphrase Hamilakis once more, we can only hope that our students and viewers will allow themselves to be haunted, even just for a moment, by these remains.

Download the Artvive app using the QR code below and experience the images in augmented reality.

1. Jennifer Kellogg, “George Seferis and Homer’s Light,” Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, accessed October 23, 2026, https://chs.harvard.edu/jennifer-kellogg-george-seferis-and-homers-light/. ↩︎
2. Yannis Hamilakis, “Archaeology as a Hauntology of Remains,” in Shadow Archaeologies: In the Shadow of Antiquity or For Other Modes of Archaeological Worldmaking, ed. Assaf Nativ and Gavin Lucas (Routledge, 2025), 274–75, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032644448-21. ↩︎
3. Lylaah L. Bhalerao, “Black Feminisms in Roman Archaeology? Approaches Beyond Critical Fabulation, from Pompeii to Hadrian’s Wall,” Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal 9, no. 1 (2026): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.16995/traj.26529. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. ↩︎
4. Bhalerao, “Black Feminisms.” ↩︎
5. Hamilakis, “Archaeology as Hauntology,” 292. ↩︎
6. The English-language translation, by Roger Tomlin, is accessible (along with additional information) on the Roman Inscriptions of Britain website (Brit. 34.22). It reads: ‘Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor and sometime assistant slave of Iucundus, has bought and received by mancipium the girl Fortunata, or by whatever name she is known, by nationality a Diablintian, from Albicianus […] for six hundred denarii. And that the girl in question is transferred in good health, that she is warranted not to be liable to wander or run away, but that if anyone lays claim to the girl in question or to any share in her, […] in the wax tablet which he has written and sworn by the genius of the Emperor Caesar […].’ ↩︎
7. Ellie Sadler, “Art in Chains,” DoSSE Project, August 8, 2025, https://www.dosseproject.com/art-in-chains/. See also Noel Lenski, “Working Models: Functional Art and Roman Conceptions of Slavery,” in Roman Slavery and Material Culture, ed.  Michele George (University of Toronto Press, 2018), 129–57. ↩︎
8. David Peddar, “Steps towards Inclusivity: Modifying Challenging Content, Navigating Pedagogical Materials and Initiating Student Reflection within the Classics Classroom,” Journal of Classics Teaching 25, no. 49 (2024): 4–6. See also Kelly P. Dugan, “The ‘Happy Slave’ Narrative and Classics Pedagogy: A Verbal and Visual Analysis of Beginning Greek and Latin Textbooks,” New England Classical Journal 46, no. 1 (2019): 62–87.  ↩︎
9. Use of AI-generated imagery in Classics pedagogy naturally is still in its infancy. Scholarship exploring use of AI to examine, challenge, or combat racial, gender-based, status-based, or other stereotyping was of particular interest to us, especially the following sources: Lisa Maurice, “GenAI Images of ‘Roman Britain’ as Tools of Reception,” Journal of Classics Teaching, published online April 14, 2026. See also Matthew Magnani and Jon Clindaniel, “Artificial Intelligence and Archaeological Illustration,” Advances in Archaeological Practice 11, no. 4 (2023): 452–60 and Carlos Díaz-Sánchez and Diego Chapinal-Heras, “Use of Open Access AI in Teaching Classical Antiquity: A Methodological Proposal,” Journal of Classics Teaching 25, no. 49 (2024): 17–21. ↩︎
10. Juvenal, Satire 7.16; Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 35.199. ↩︎
11. Suetonius, Domitian 7.3. ↩︎
12. Petronius, Satyricon 30. ↩︎
13. Hamilakis, “Archaeology as Hauntology,” 279. ↩︎

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Maggie ten Berge and Shalom Yabilsu-Anyaduba

Shalom Yabilsu-Anyaduba and Maggie ten Berge are Assistant Professors at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan (USA). They come to their collaboration with shared interests in human rights—both ancient and modern. Shalom is a multidisciplinary communication designer, educator and researcher whose work focuses on how existing and emergent technologies can serve as tools for social change and community development. Maggie is a Roman economic historian and archaeologist whose work focuses on the ways that ordinary people were drawn into and affected by the machinery of empire.

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