'The Bitter Chain of Slavery'_ Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome

Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Annual Lectures Keith Bradley, Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Lectures, Howard University, 'The Bitter Chain of Slavery': Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome, http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online-print-books.ssp/frank-m.-snowden-jr./. Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC. November, 2005 'The Bitter Chain of Slavery': Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome Keith Bradley Towards the middle of the fifth century AD the Christian presbyter and moralist Salvian of Marseilles composed a highly polemical tract, On the Governance of God, in which he explained to the decadent Romans around him how it was that the destructive presence in their midst of barbarian invaders was the result not of God's neglect of the world but of their own moral bankruptcy. In their general comportment the Romans, though Christians, were full of moral failings and were far more morally culpable than the slaves they owned. Their slaves committed crimes such as stealing, running away, and lying, but they did so under the comprehensible and forgivable compulsion of hunger or fear of physical chastisement, whereas the Romans were simply wicked and had forfeited all claims to forgiveness because of their terrible behaviour. Among other things the Christian slaveowners had completely desecrated the institution of marriage: regarding their female slaves as natural outlets for their sexual appetites and considering adultery unexceptional, they thought nothing of acting upon their impulses and of satisfying their desires. As a result, Salvian said in an ironic metaphor, they had become the bad slaves of a good Master, which meant that the barbarian invaders, while pagans, were in fact their moral superiors. In Salvian's judgement it was this moral superiority that accounted for the barbarians' stunning invasionary success (On the Governance of God 4.13-29; 6.92; 7.16-20; cf. 3.50; 8.14). Despite his critical assault on Roman slaveowners, Salvian makes very clear the low esteem in which slaves were held in his society. Slaves were naturally inferior, criminous, and corrupt, they lived only to satisfy their 1 base wishes, and they were expected to show unquestioning obedience to their owners, including sexual obedience. In recognising the motives that drove them to steal, lie, and run away, Salvian was notably sympathetic to them and he maintained that kindly treatment was a useful alternative to physical coercion in rendering slaves submissive. But he never questioned the reality of slavery, and he could proclaim without any sign of discomfort: 'It is generally agreed that slaves are wicked and worthy of our contempt' (4.29). Such views were hardly new. Images of immoral and criminous slaves, appeals for adopting a carrot-and-stick approach to handling them, and statements that obedience should be expected of them can be found in any number of earlier Greek and Latin writers. The precise form of slavery Salvian knew in fifth-century Gaul is a matter of controversy, but the terms he used to describe it, and the conceptual attitudes underlying them, were those which Greek and Roman slaveowners had used and drawn on for centuries past. His remarks nonetheless are striking. Salvian was writing at a very late date in classical history, and while directed to Romans in general his audience in the first instance was an entirely local body of men, the wealthy lords of southern Gaul--and both he and his local audience were of course Christian. Despite its conventional aspects, therefore, Salvian's evidence brings into sharp focus two well-known but important facts. The first is that there was no time or place in Greco-Roman antiquity, even on the margins of time and place, that was altogether free from the presence or influence of slavery. Across the vast chronological interval from the Mycenaeans to the Roman Empire of the fifth century and beyond, and in all the regions where Greco-Roman culture took root--Europe, the Near East, North Africa--slavery in one form or other was an integral part of the social order. The second is that across time and space no one, not even Christians, ever seriously thought to question slavery and slaveowning. To moderns living in societies in whose democratic traditions the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century is a landmark event, it may seem problematical that a call to end slavery never arose, especially in view of the appearance in late antiquity of a socially sensitive attitude like Salvian's. But this is a modern not an ancient problem, and it is not the absence of an abolitionist movement in classical antiquity, even Christian antiquity, that is historically peculiar so much as the rise of abolitionism in post-Enlightenment Europe and North America. For most of human history, the enslavement of one group in society by another, or of one people by another, has been a quintessential element of normal social relations. Western liberalism cannot be allowed to obscure this fundamental truth, or to justify the assumption that the absence of slavery is in any sense socially normative, no matter how socially desirable. There is a world of difference between Salvian and, say, the nineteenth-century opponent of slavery Henri Wallon, who in his celebrated Histoire de l'esclavage dans l'antiquité (1847), wrote in a climate when slavery had come to be regarded in Christian ethics, in a mode of thought totally alien to classical antiquity, as a sin. The forms of servitude known in the classical world varied across time and place. They included debt-bondage, helotage, temple slavery and serfdom, but also chattel slavery, an absolute form of unfreedom in which enslaved persons were assimilated to commodities, akin to livestock, over whom, or which, owners enjoyed complete mastery. Chattel slavery was not found in all times and places in antiquity, but it was especially evident in Italy during the central era of Roman history and it is with Roman chattel slavery that I am concerned here. I want to consider the nature of the master-slave relationship and the basic character of Roman chattel slavery, and to suggest from a cultural point of view why slavery at Rome, as I understand it, never could present itself as problematical. For the sake of convenience and because it is relatively well-attested, I concentrate particularly on Roman domestic slavery. My account is necessarily generalised, impressionistic, even superficial and schematic, and at every stage allowance must be made for the ambiguous and the exceptional. I take as a starting-point the observation from the Roman Antiquities of the Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.9.4; cf. 4.23.7), that when Romans manumitted their slaves they conferred on them not only freedom but citizenship as well. To Dionysius and the Greeks for whom in the age of Augustus he was writing this was an unusual and generous practice. And it has seemed unusual and generous to moderns as well, so much so that scholars have often concluded that Roman slavery was a mild institution, milder by implication at least than the race-based slavery systems of the New World. As an example let me quote a passage from 2 another celebrated book, Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome, which was first published in the United States in 1940, a year after the French original, and which I select because it has always enjoyed enormous influence and is currently enjoying a new lease of life in re-edited versions. Carcopino is speaking of the age of the Antonines: Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves, who in the second century raised their standard of living to the level of the 'ingenui'. Legislation had grown more and more humane and had progressively lightened their chains and favoured their emancipation. The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from showing cruelty towards the 'servi'. They had always treated their slaves with consideration, as Cato had treated his plough oxen; however far back we go in history we find the Romans spurring their slaves to effort by offering them pay and bonuses which accumulated to form a nest egg that as a rule served ultimately to buy their freedom. With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable; but never had it been lighter or easier to escape from than under the Antonines. More recently and more compellingly, the preeminent historian Susan Treggiari has shown how a relatively benign picture of Roman slavery like that of Carcopino might emerge. Exploiting two types of evidence, commemorative epitaphs and the writings of Roman jurists, Treggiari has investigated in a remarkable series of studies the personal lives of slaves and former slaves who worked as domestic servants in the resplendent households of the Roman elite under the early Principate, and she has proved that much can be learned about the world these people created for themselves. What emerges, first, is the vast range of highly specialised work-roles that helped slaves to establish individual identities for themselves, and, secondly, the formation of familial relationships, sometimes of long duration, that restored to slaves something of the human dignity of which slavery deprived them. The value found in their work as domestic servants becomes clear, and the manner in which despite their legal incapacity slaves constructed and memorialised familial ties is repeatedly made plain. Special attention is paid, moreover, to the roles played by women and what might be termed the female contribution to the infrastructure of Roman society is brought to the fore as evidence is compiled of the spinners and weavers (quasillariae, textrices), the clothes-makers and menders (uestificae, sarcinatrices), the dressers (ornatrices), nurses and midwives (nutrices, opstetrices) who populated the domestic establishments of the Roman elite. With the perceived development under the Principate of a more humane attitude to slaves--a view that goes back beyond Carcopino to at least Gibbon's belief that a certain 'progress of manners' alleviated the hardships of slavery in the imperial age--a confident picture of life in slavery is presented. Here are three representative statements: The Monumentum Liviae gives us the first full and vivid evidence both for the staff of a Roman woman and for the middle class of domestic servants, a class which enjoyed scope for a variety of talents and which displays esprit de corps and considerable satisfaction in being employed by the wife and mother of a 'princeps' and the daughter of a god. In the large, hierarchical but closely-knit society of the rich household, with its records of births, deaths, manumissions, and 'contubernia', slave family life could often attain comparative security and dignity. Scraps of evidence, the commemoration of parents, brothers, sisters, and sometimes other relatives, friendships close enough to be honoured after death, 'contubernia' which lasted a lifetime, help to illustrate this. We can see in the inscriptions evidence for a tightly-knit and supportive community, creating its own goals and work ethic and organizing its own social life, under the supervision of freed administrators and largely without the interference of the upper class masters whom the staff was bred or bought to serve. There are other avenues of investigation which lead in the same incontestable direction. In an absorbing recent book, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans, John Clarke suggests that the response of slaves to certain works of Roman art was to encourage hopes of manumission among them that presuppose while they were waiting an unquestioning willingness to accept and conform to the values of established free society. The grain 3 measurers (mensores) who can be seen in a mosaic from the Piazza delle Corporazione at Ostia will have communicated to slave viewers how they had to work hard to win their freedom ('and perhaps an easier life'). A tomb such as that of the freedman C. Julius Apella at Ostia would allow slaves from the familia who waited at table at the dinners held there to delight in its decorations and to imagine eventually coming to rest there themselves as liberti. The household shrine (lararium) from the House of the Sarno in Pompeii, which apparently depicts a master and his slaves at work on the river, would foster among the viewing slaves in the garden where the shrine was located, as Clarke puts it, 'a certain pride in seeing themselves with their owner every day as they stood behind him to sacrifice to his Genius and the Lares.' The assumptions are clear that that the slavery system was benign, that within it the boundary between slavery and freedom was easily permeable, and that Roman slaves, always acquiescent to their masters' demands, wanted nothing more than to cross the boundary and strove in every way to do so. There is much of course to show that many Roman slaves did adopt the enticements of the free to conform to the dominant ideology, and also that they successfully make the transition from slavery to freedom and fully integrated themselves into the life of established society. One impressive illustration is the way in which slaves and former slaves willingly responded to the emperor Augustus' division of Rome in 7 BC into 265 administrative districts (uici) and agreed to become officiants (magistri and ministri) in the renovated cult of the Lares Compitales, now the cult of the Lares Augusti, which was in effect a not so subtle form of emperor worship. Felix, slave of L. Crautanius, Florus, slave of Sex. Avienus, Eudoxsus, slave of C. Caesius, Polyclitus, slave of Sex. Ancharius (ILS 9250)--these names typify the many men who participated in the cult. Another illustration is the willingness of wealthy freedmen to enter the new status-category of Augustales created by Augustus and to use their wealth, much like free men higher in the social hierarchy, to provide games and shows and other public benefits in the towns and cities of Italy, as though they were citizens of longstanding devoted to the promotion of the established civic and social order. The freedman C. Lusius Storax, who died about AD 40, was acclaimed for his provision of gladiatorial games at Teate Marrucinorum and built a monument commemorating himself and his generosity in the enclosure of the burial society (collegium) to which he belonged. There can be no doubt that over time there were many like him, slaves who were set free and subsequently made vital contributions to the well-being of Roman society; and it can readily be granted that as slaves they aspired to achieving manumission and worked diligently to this end. The 'optimistic' view of Roman slavery has much to commend it. In my view, however, this is only one, partial, aspect of the picture. Roman slavery also had a much darker side, and it is to this darker side that I now want to turn, asking especially how slavery might have been fully experienced within the domestic context about which so much seems knowable. My intent is not at all to dispute the views of the contemporary scholars to whom I have just referred, but to point to the complexities of Roman slavery as I understand them. The question raises methodological issues. There are no extended accounts from slaves themselves to allow the historian a direct view of life in slavery, and much simply has to be inferred from sources that represent (and perhaps continually influenced and shaped) the attitudes and ideology of the slaveowning classes. These sources are primarily literary --sometimes imaginative and sometimes anecdotal -- of a sort that historians of modern slavery systems would often dismiss as of minimal value. But there is scarcely any alternative. Epitaphs and legal sources are immensely important, but they are by themselves insufficient; and epitaphs, especially, cannot be expected to reveal much that is critical of slavery when they celebrate for the most part individuals who found ways to achieve some sort of conventional success in life. In what follows, therefore, I offer a set of inferential observations from my reading of certain literary authors of the Principate, who allow, I believe, credible glimpses of life in slavery that stand in strong contrast to what has been seen so far. The first point to emphasise is one that slavery historians, especially modern slavery historians, have always known, namely that slavery in Roman antiquity was not a soulless legal condition--a point of view common in legal studies of Roman slavery--but a human relationship in which slave and master were always inextricably bound together. The relationship was obviously asymmetrical, comparable according to the third-century Greek author Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.42) to that between a tyrant and his subjects. But it 4 was not completely one-sided. In theory the slave was powerless: No slave is really happy,' the Hellenized Jew Philo wrote, 'For what greater misery is there than to live with no power over anything, including oneself?' (Every Good Man is Free 41), and the slave was always subject to constraint, so that the medical authority Celsus could write (On Medicine 3.21.2) that a slave habituated to a life of compulsion endured the harsh treatment needed to cure an illness more eaily than the free. Yet because slaves were a human form of property, human agency could and did manifest itself in the relationship from moment to moment. Unlike the animals to which they were often compared, slaves were not easily manipulable, but had to be managed with thought and discretion to make sure that they did what was required of them and to prevent 'criminal' acts of the sort to which Salvian was still sensitive in late antiquity. The relationship therefore was one that on both sides involved constant adjustment, refinement, and negotiation. Some slaves, sure enough, enjoyed a privileged status in their households. Those who were stewards or managers of estates or supervisors of lowlier slaves or chaperons of their masters' wives and orphaned children held positions of authority because they were trustworthy and so resembled the free; and yet, as Philo said in the same work (35), whatever influence these slaves had they remained slaves regardless and to that extent they could never be free from the constricting tie to those who owned them and the struggle for power the tie involved. My point is well illustrated by an anecdote from Plutarch (Moralia 511D-E) concerning the consul of 61 BC, Marcus Pupius Piso. As follows: The orator Piso, wishing to avoid being unnecessarily disturbed, ordered his slaves to answer his questions but not add anything to their answers. He then wanted to give a welcome to Clodius, who was holding office, and gave instructions that he should be invited to dinner. He set up a splendid feast. The time came, the other guests arrived, Clodius was expected. Piso kept sending the slave who was responsible for invitations to see if he was coming. Evening came; Clodius was despaired of. 'Did you invite him?' Piso asked his slave. 'Yes.' 'Then why didn't he come?' 'Because he declined.' 'Then why didn't you tell me?' 'Because you didn't ask.' Such is the way of the Roman slave! An anecdote like this, as everyone will be aware, cannot be taken at face value, as if literally true. It is what the story symbolises that is important: the fact that at any time any slave at Rome had the potential to challenge the authority the slaveowner commanded, which means accordingly that the relationship between slave and master always implicated the energies of both sides in a never-ending struggle for supremacy, and clearly it was not always the master who won. Owners knew this (as the anecdote shows) and they had to reconcile themselves