by Jerry Toner
Reward good work and punish failure.
Punish fairly those who have done wrong and in proportion to the damage caused by the crime.
Stay on the estate.
Be sober and don’t go out to dinner.
Don’t think or act as if you’re cleverer than your master.
Don’t treat your master’s friends as if they were your own.
Listen to everything your master tells you, and to whomever your master tells you to listen.
Don’t lend anyone money unless your master allows it.
Insist on immediate repayment if your master does not permit a loan or its extension.
Don’t lend anyone seed, fodder, barley, wine or oil.
Be on friendly terms with two or three neighbouring estates so you can borrow people, goods and implements when you need them.
Go through the accounts with the master regularly.
Don’t use day labourers too much or for more than a day at a time.
Don’t buy anything without your master’s approval.
Don’t keep anything secret from your master.
Don’t have any favourites among the slaves.
Don’t consult diviners, fortune-tellers or astrologers.
Don’t use seed corn sparingly – that way lies disaster.
Make sure you understand how to do everything on the estate and if there are gaps in your knowledge fill them. You will then understand what the slaves themselves are thinking.
Remember the slaves themselves will work more willingly for someone who understands their problems.
Keep healthy and sleep well.
Before going to bed make sure that the farm is secure, the animals are fed, and everyone is sleeping where they should be.
Be first to get out of bed and last to go to bed.
The head of the female slaves is also an important position you should give great care to filling. Normally she will become the manager’s wife. If she does her work well she will help to ensure that the estate produces a profitable income for you. Above all, she will make the farm as self-sufficient as possible by providing many domestic services, from weaving to mending to nursing the sick.
When the weather is bad and the women are unable to work outside, the manageress should occupy them with knitting and sewing. She should use some of the female slaves to do the job of spinning and weaving, with others having prepared it by carding. Making the slaves’ clothes at home on the estate keeps your costs down.
When the weather is good, the manageress should always go around the estate and check that all the slaves have left the buildings and are not shirking in the barns. If she finds a malingerer she must interrogate him as to why he is not working. She must learn to tell whether it is the result of sickness or laziness, for slaves who are the latter will always claim the former. If she believes he is sick then she should take him to the sickbay. Even if she believes he is pretending to be ill, if she thinks he is doing this out of fatigue she can also use her discretion to let him have a day’s rest in the sickbay. It is in the long run better to give a tired slave a rest rather than force him to work so hard that he really does become ill. It is, though, important to make sure that this discretion is not abused.
The manageress should never be sitting still. Her job is to rush about checking on everyone and making sure that the farm is operating smoothly and efficiently. She must go to the loom and teach the workers there new skills. Or she should learn a new skill from any slave who happens to know more than she does. She should check on the kitchens to see that the slaves’ rations are being made properly. She must make sure that the kitchens, the cowsheds and, not least, the pigpens are properly cleaned. She should do the rounds of the sickbay, and even if there aren’t any patients there she should have it cleaned so that it is fit to receive any slave that does fall sick.
If you do not pay great attention to the appointment of your manager and his wife you can quickly find yourself in a nightmare situation. I have heard some horror stories in my time: of a manager who sold part of the estate without his master’s knowledge and then pretended to him that the extra money was in fact increased income from his efficient management of the estate. Or another who cut down most of the trees on the estate, sold them for 20,000 sesterces, added 10,000 to the accounts to boost the profit and pocketed the rest for himself. Bad managers will constantly sell off bits and pieces from your estate to boost the appearance of their performance. To begin with, you, the master, may be unaware of what is going on and may be delighted at how much more money you’re getting from the estate. You will reward the manager with extra rations, fine clothes and time off. But later, when you realise that half of the farm has been sold off, all the things which the estate needs to generate its income, you will punish the manager very severely. But by then it will be too late and it will take you much time and money to put things right.
You must make sure you visit your estates regularly. Nothing is more likely to prevent your managers behaving in such a wanton fashion. For there can be no doubt that slaves are corrupted by their master’s distance. And once corrupted, their greed and shamelessness only multiplies, until you might as well employ pirates to run your farms. In fact, if your estates are remote and it is difficult for you to visit except very occasionally, you would do well to consider having the land farmed by free tenants who will pay you a rent, rather than slaves, who, left to their own devices and safe in the knowledge that you are far away, will watch the estate gently crumble around them. They will let out the cattle for hire, feed the animals poorly, plough the land badly and pretend they have sown lots of seed when in fact they have sold off half of it for their own benefit. And when the meagre harvest does come in it will be further diminished by their constant theft and miscounting of the number of bushels that have been stored. You normally find that the manager and the general slaves are all in cahoots since they all stand to benefit from the arrangement. You, the master, will be the loser.
I often arrive unannounced to make sure I am seeing the estate as it really is and not as it has been brushed up for my visit. Then, once I have arrived, I summon the manager and ask for an immediate tour of inspection. I inspect every part of the estate and meet with slaves in all areas. I try to judge whether my absence has resulted in a relaxation of discipline and attention to detail. I look at the vines to see if they have been well tended, whether the trees look like they have had produce stolen from them. I have the animal stock counted along with the slaves and the farm equipment to see if it tallies with the manager’s inventory. And if you do this year after year you can be assured that you will maintain a well-disciplined and ordered estate that will keep you in comfort into your old age. And however old you are, if you visit regularly you will make sure that the slaves do not take advantage of you and treat you with contempt rather than the respect you deserve.
In fact these visits can be something of an eye-opener about your own mortality. I recently visited an estate of mine and complained to the manager about a dilapidated old barn. The manager insisted it was not because he had been at fault but simply that the wood was old and the building falling down. I remember having this barn built when I was a young man! Then I complained to him about the gnarled old plane trees, and how poorly they were being kept. Again he replied that the problem was just that the trees were too old – but I remember planting them!
Visits can also reveal some nasty surprises. Once I visited an estate I used to own in southern Italy. On my tour of inspection, while walking through the fields of flowers, a woman who had been tied up with thick ropes and was holding a pitchfork threw herself at my feet. Her hair had been cut off, she was filthy and her tunic was ragged. ‘Have pity on me, master,’ she begged. ‘I was born free but was captured by pirates and sold to your manager as a slave.’ I believed her because she spoke elegantly and her facial features had a nobility that spoke of high birth, not servility.
She explained that my manager had tried to for
ce her to share his bed. She begged me to free her and said that she would pay me back the 2,000 she had cost from her family back home across the seas from where the pirates had kidnapped her. She tore off her tunic and showed the terrible scars from where the manager had beaten her. I was very moved by this story.
‘Do not worry, madam,’ I said, ‘you are free to return home and I do not need you to reimburse me. It is a disgrace for such high-born beauty and grace to be held in such conditions.’ Instead, I summoned the manager, a shameless slave called Sosthenes, and said to him: ‘You dreadful man – have you ever seen me treat even the most useless and worthless slaves in this way?’ He then admitted that he had bought her from a pirate slave dealer because he fancied her. I demoted him on the spot from his position as manager, and had the woman bathed and dressed in fresh clothes and sent home.
Perhaps you think me mad to have done that, even though that woman was obviously freeborn. But it will benefit you to treat your slaves with a certain generosity of spirit. You should always be civil to them if they have worked well. Obviously you should not let them be insolent or give them free rein to speak their minds. But if they have positions of authority you should treat them respectfully. As I have said, I consult them, ask their opinions and even their advice if it is on a matter about which they know more than me. I find that slaves respond well to being treated in this way and go about their work with added enthusiasm. But I even apply this approach to those who have been punished by being chained up in the prison block. I visit them and check whether they are carefully chained, but also ask them if they feel they have been treated unjustly. For the lowliest slave is more likely to be punished unjustly for the simple reason that he has so many different layers of superior above him. And it is these simple, ignorant slaves who are most dangerous when they are smarting from being badly and cruelly treated. I even go so far as to let them make complaints about their overseers and, very occasionally, I uphold their complaints. This way the troublemakers are kept in check by being given a vent for their frustrations while the managers and overseers are kept honest by being aware of the fact that even the most useless slave can be asked to give feedback on their management.
For you will not be surprised to learn that slaves are often far more brutal towards each other than their master would ever be. In fact, you find that slaves are always jockeying for position, arguing over gradations of rank and quarrelling over all kinds of petty insults, actual or perceived. Those with the clearest tendency to bully their underlings must be themselves kept under control by fear of you if they are not to impose their own reign of terror on those beneath them. Otherwise you will find that your slaves become brutalised and worthless as a result. It is another reason why it is never a good idea to have too many slaves from the same ethnic origin working in the same household, because they seem to be particularly alert to minor differences and so are always quarrelling and fighting.
And in the final analysis, it is important to remember that your slaves are a significant investment for you and their value needs to be maintained. You must protect your property from any action that will reduce its value. Remember that it is illegal for someone to incite one of your slaves of previously good character to do something wrong. And it is illegal – and you can gain recompense – if someone praises your bad slaves for doing something wrong, such as running away or stealing; for one shouldn’t make a bad slave even worse by praising him. Thus a man is to be found guilty of corrupting a slave whether he is making a good slave bad, or a bad slave worse. In fact there is a long list of acts for which you can gain financial compensation. No one is allowed to get your slaves to falsify their accounts, or have sex with them, or indulge in magic, or waste too much time at the games, or carry out treason, or cause your slave to live luxuriously by fiddling the books, or be disobedient, or gamble, or persuade him to submit to homosexual acts. For whether it derives from brutal treatment to other more subtle forms of corruption you must always be alert to factors that could erode the value of your assets.
COMMENTARY
Many upper-class Roman slave owners were influenced by ideas from Stoic philosophy, which insisted that a slave owner had possession only of the slave’s body and not his soul, which remained free. This meant that they saw slaves as being intrinsically worth something as human beings and so should be treated with some respect. This extended to an obligation to treat them decently and fairly in the same way that hired labourers should be. It is impossible to know the extent to which such ideas penetrated society more widely. It would be nice to think that most Roman masters believed that they had an obligation to all their dependants, including their slaves, even if this was motivated by self-interest and the desire to preserve their assets.
The training of slaves was influenced heavily by the tasks which they were intended to perform. Field workers needed little and could be put straight to work. The surviving Roman agricultural manuals make it clear that it was important to select ambitious slaves to serve as overseers, since it was these individuals who would keep the estate running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Within larger urban households domestic slaves would probably be trained up by other more senior slaves, rather than by the master himself. It is impossible to tell how many slaves had to be ‘broken’. One of the reasons that some Romans favoured home-bred slaves was that they had grown up accustomed to slavery. The fact that Seneca urges owners to show pity towards new slaves when they are forced to carry out degrading tasks suggests that most masters did not. Seneca is probably best seen as arguing against common practice, as otherwise his text would have had little interest to his Roman readership.
Slave rations are listed in the agricultural manuals and are unsurprisingly plain. Clothing is similarly rough and basic. Slaves may have been able to supplement their rations by means of foraging, keeping their own animals and maintaining their own kitchen gardens. Those who worked in chain gangs probably had little opportunity to do any of these things. Slaves in a more senior position were probably allowed greater indulgence to soften their existence.
One of the reasons why many Roman texts are ambivalent about the economic benefits of using slaves to farm estates was that they required so much supervision to keep them working. It was assumed that slaves would be trying hard to work as little as possible, whereas the free tenant had a vested interest in making the land productive. The use of slaves also contrasted with the Roman ideal of the honest yeoman, on whom the success of the republic had been built. It seemed wrong that the land was now being farmed by imported slave labour and could hardly, therefore, be seen as progress. Often the purpose of owning huge estates seems to have been little more than ostentatious display, and the use of a large servile workforce was part of this ostentation. Most owners of large estates probably had their land farmed by a variety of slave and free labour.
The treatment of old and sick slaves also probably varied considerably. The emperor Claudius issued an edict in an attempt to stop people from dumping them on the Tiber island. This may have represented simply a vain attempt to prevent a social nuisance impacting on the centre of Rome rather than any attempt to improve the slaves’ lot. Seneca advocated greater leniency and decency in the treatment of slaves than most Romans but even Seneca, the source for the story of the old doorkeeper, had no recollection of his old childhood playmate. It is hard to see that most Romans would have spent much money on an old asset once it had stopped giving a reasonable return in the form of continued service unless there was some personal reason for doing so, such as supporting an old nursemaid.
At the other end of the age spectrum, child slaves are assumed in one legal text to be working by the age of five. This is not surprising since there was no need for them to be educated and they would have been able to carry out some small tasks around the farm or household.
The farm manager was clearly the most important individual for the owner of an estate. The bad manager is a recurrent theme of ancient literature, including
the Bible. Given that most large landowners were absentee for at least part of the year, they were entirely reliant on this individual to keep their asset producing the surplus that would help pay for their life of dignified leisure in the city. This is why so much emphasis was placed on the importance of visiting estates. Absence, it was assumed, bred contempt, which would lead to the land and farm buildings not being maintained properly and yields declining rapidly as a result.
Slaves were expensive and each owner had to balance the treatment of his slaves with the need to keep them working and, to some extent, incentivised. Brutal treatment doubtless occurred occasionally but it could not be the norm, since this would soon wear out the servile assets. In the country, dividing the slaves into a ‘them and us’, whereby a small group of overseers were motivated by material rewards and the ultimate goal of freedom, probably worked well to keep the system functioning efficiently.
On ancient farming, see Cato On Agriculture. On the goal of self-sufficiency, see Varro On Agriculture 1.16. For ancient discussion of whether it was better to have your land farmed by slaves or free tenants, see Columella On Agriculture 1.7. On gang labour see Pliny the Elder Natural History 18.4. The story of a falling-down barn as a reminder of old age is recounted in Seneca Letters 12, as is the story of the former playmate. On herdsmen, see Varro On Agriculture 2.10. Managers are described in Varro On Agriculture 1.17 and Columella On Agriculture 1.8. Cato On Agriculture 5 lists the duties of the manager. For the manager’s wife, see Columella On Agriculture 12.3. The problems created by a bad manager are described in Cicero Against Verres 2.3.50. The story of the woman who had been captured by pirates and is found being abused on an inspection can be read in the novel Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius 5.17. Cato’s attitudes to slaves can be seen in Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder 4.4, 5.2 and 21.1.