This chapter compares two fictional texts of the imperial period that represent freed persons, Xenophon of Ephesus’ Ephesiaca and Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis. The comparison advances our understanding of how Roman freed persons may have come to terms with the experience of slavery. Ephesiaca expresses sympathy for the enslaved elite protagonists Habrocomes and Anthia not only as enslaved elites, but as enslaved persons per se. The novel continues its sympathy for the protagonists after they have been restored to freedom. In particular, the conclusion of Ephesiaca offers a sympathetic depiction of the protagonists’ response to what they had endured in slavery: Habrocomes and Anthia dedicate memorials to their parents, who had died while the protagonists were still enslaved; they withdraw from the wider community and reconstitute a family that includes their fellow freed persons; they spend the rest of their lives in celebration that is shadowed by their recollection of the past and the anticipation of their own mortality. The same motifs, viz., memorialization, recollection of a painful past, seclusion from the wider community, family constituted on the basis of shared experience rather than biology, and melancholic celebration, mark the representation of Trimalchio and his fellow freed persons in the Cena. The parallels suggest the possibility that these motifs typified the representation of the experience of freed persons, sympathetically in Ephesiaca and derisively in the Cena.

A parting discussion takes up the figure of the first-person narrator-in-transit of Apuleius' Metamorphoses and suggests that such a narrative persona has a deep affiliation with the moralizing stance of the rhetoric of Roman transportation.