Hanc itaque conpendiariam excogitavit: magna summa emit servos, unum, qui Homerum teneret, alterum, qui Hesiodum; novem praeterea lyricis singulos adsignavit. (27.5-6)
And so he thought of this shortcut: with a great deal of money he bought slaves, one who held Homer, another who held Hesiod. Meanwhile he assigned the nine lyric points to individual slaves.
The point of this story for Seneca is that when Sabinus ultimately fails to use these slaves effectively it demonstrates that knowledge can’t be bought, it can only be learned.
However, apparently other slave-owners either did get this moral, or realized that slaves’ memories could be used for other purposes. Note Larensius' speech in the Deipnosophists:
"How much better it is that our cooks should learn such things as these, rather than the things they learn at the house of a certain compatriot of ours! He, puffed up with wealth and luxury, used to compel the cooks to learn the dialogues of the most admirable Plato, and, as they brought in the dishes, to say ‘One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is he who was the fourth among our guests of yesterday, who to‑day are our hosts?’ [This is the beginning of Plato’s Timaeus] Then another answered: 'Some illness has fallen upon him, Socrates.' And so the slaves would go through with most of the dialogue in this manner. The result was that the feasters were bored, and that pedantic fellow was insulted every day, and for that reason many men of nice taste solemnly declined to attend the entertainments at his house. (9.381f-382a)
Next time I want to explore the idea that slaves were integral to the construction of encyclopedic texts. Jacob points to Pliny 3.5 in order to say this about the Deipnosophists:
“The context described by Pliny can without doubt explain the genesis of the Deipnosophists, and makes it possible for us to imagine Athenaeus receiving the help of Larensius’ slaves in order to collect and classify his immense documentation.” (Jacob 2013: 74 n.3)
This kind of collaboration is appealing to me, for if Athenaeus is work with another man’s slaves, it could point to the circumstances in which it was possible for him to develop an interest in slave history.