by Jerry Toner
Criminal slaves who were condemned to the mines, to work in the galleys of ships, or to be thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre were seen as completely deserving of their fate. It is tempting to think that the Romans will have felt some pity for poor men and women being thrown to the lions, but there is little evidence for this. They seem to have regarded such punishment as just deserts for slaves who were so worthless that they could not even be good at being slaves.
Runaways were a recurrent problem for masters. The loss of capital this represented was something they sought hard to avoid. In the Oracles of Astrampsychus, one of the questions is of a master seeking an answer to ‘Will I find the fugitive?’ It is heartening to find that the odds implied by the ten possible responses favour the runaway. The replies suggest that 60 per cent will not be found, 30 per cent will be and 10 per cent only after a time. Perhaps this is why so many slaves appear to have tried to flee: it often worked. The resources masters had to try to track down an individual in the vast expanse of the Roman empire were limited. There was no police force to help and so long as the slave managed to escape from the immediate vicinity in which he might be recognised, then there was probably a reasonable possibility of starting life afresh as a free man.
The story of Androcles and the lion here related is a later expansion of the old Aesop fable. In this Roman version it is interesting that the slave gives his own account of his motivation for running away: his brutal and unjust treatment. While this is probably a fictional story (although the writer claims to have got it from an eyewitness at the event), it does give some indication of how some slaves bristled at their dreadful treatment and were prepared to take enormous risks to their personal safety in order to achieve the possibility of living in freedom. See Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, pp. 107–8.
The story of Vedius Pollio is in Dio Cassius 54.23.1. Pollio’s actions are also criticised by Seneca, On Anger 3.40. The description of slaves being punished by working in the flour mill comes from Apuleius’s novel, The Golden Ass 9.12. On the dreadful conditions in the mines, see Diodorus Siculus 5.36–8. The story of Statilia is in the Justinian Code 3.36.5. For people injuring themselves by hitting their slaves, see Galen The Diseases of the Mind 4. An example of a wealthy owner trying to use his contacts to get his runaways returned can be found in Symmachus Letters 9.140. On the right of a slave to appeal to the gods or a statue of the divine emperor, see Justinian Institutes 1.8.2.
CHAPTER VI
WHEN ONLY TORTURE WILL DO
THE PUNISHMENTS I HAVE OUTLINED in the previous chapter should enable you to maintain discipline and authority within your household. There are times, though, when one of your slaves might become involved with the law. On these occasions, whenever a slave has to appear as a witness in court, it is a legal requirement that they give their evidence under torture. The reason for this is obvious. Slaves are habitual liars and so it is only when they suffer pain that they can be expected to reveal the truth. The only requirement is that the slave’s owner has willingly offered up the slave for torture. The only exception is that the slave cannot testify against his master, apart from in cases of treason.
Slaves themselves are for the most part morally worthless, a fact that is reflected in their extreme cowardice in the face of fear. It is pathetic to observe their whimpers, their voluble confessions and their terror when faced with the implements of torture. None of which does them any good, of course, because their evidence will only be taken under torture. Otherwise they might say anything to get themselves, literally, off the hook. The prudence and humaneness of this course can be seen in the example of the slave Primitivus. He was so desperate to get away from his master that he even accused himself of murder and went so far as to name accomplices. It was only when he was put to the torture that the truth emerged, which was that no such crime had ever been committed. If it had not been for the torture, a slave would have been executed, innocent others would have been condemned to the mines, and a law-abiding owner would have been deprived of his property.
The torture of slaves is a common sight in the law courts. I did once hear of someone objecting to a slave being tortured. It was a case of joint ownership, of a beautiful slave girl, by two men who had then fallen out about some business affair and had a fight in which one was badly wounded. The injured party took the other to court where the accused refused to allow the torture of the slave girl because he claimed he was in love with her. Naturally, the wounded man argued that she was in the ideal position to give evidence about the matter, since she was owned equally by the two of them and was able to see who had caused the fight and who had struck the first blow. He also said that the accused’s own slaves, who the accused owned outright and was happy to put up for examination, would probably just have tried to make their master happy by telling all kinds of lies about the accuser. Unfortunately, I do not recall what happened in the end.
There are several standard ways of carrying out the torture. In the first, the slave will have his hands tied, be hung up by a rope and then flogged with a whip. Some of these whips will have tips made of sharp metal or bone that will cut into the flesh. In the second, the slave will be racked, either on a wooden frame, which is known as the ‘little horse’, or else placed on an implement called the ‘lyre-strings’, both of which are designed to use a system of weights to slowly stretch, dislocate and finally separate limb from limb. Or two heavy pieces of wood will be used to break the legs. Another method is burning. Boiling pitch, hot metal plates, or flaming torches will be applied to the slave to extract the evidence that the court requires. Finally there are the hooks, whose razor-sharp teeth are drawn across the flesh of the victim’s sides. All of these procedures are carried out in public, within the courtroom.
Despite the vigour of these methods, care is taken that the slaves do not die under interrogation, although it has to be said that in practice they frequently do. And once the evidence has been obtained it has to be remembered that we are talking here about slaves. They can never be fully trusted and you should bear in mind that some will not reveal the truth but say anything just to get the torture to stop. And torture should only be used as a last resort in an investigation, at the point when someone is actually being suspected of committing a crime and no other proof from other means has been forthcoming.
I mentioned that slaves cannot be tortured for evidence against their own masters without their permission. Our divine emperor Augustus, though, set the precedent for avoiding this legal nicety. He ordered that whenever this situation should arise in an investigation, the slave in question should be forcibly sold to the public treasury or to the emperor himself, so that the slave would no longer belong to the same owner and could be interrogated in the usual way. Not surprisingly, there were some who were opposed to false sales of this type since they argued it made a mockery of the law. But others argued that it was vital for such transactions to be carried out, otherwise the many plots that were being made against the emperor under cover of this provision, and which were a constant threat to the stability of the state, might not be discovered.
The murder of a master must be given a special mention. The law states that whenever slaves are present under the same roof when the master is murdered, and they do nothing to help him escape such a fate, then they shall all be questioned under torture and then executed. The reasons for this law are obvious. First and foremost is that fact that no household could ever be safe if the slaves were not compelled to protect their master’s life, whether the threat came from other household members or not, even if it meant placing their own lives at risk.
There are clearly some legal technicalities that have to be addressed here. What does the term ‘under the same roof’ mean? Does it mean within the walls of the house or in the same room? In fact it is generally taken to mean ‘within earshot of the murder’, for if the slaves were close enough to be able to hear their master’s cries for help then they were also close enough to be able t
o offer it. Of course, some people have a louder voice than others, and some have better hearing, so it will be for the court to adjudicate on what seems reasonable in each case. Also, any last will the deceased owner had made must not be opened until the investigation is finished. Otherwise, the slaves in question might be named as beneficiaries and be freed, a freedom which would then spare them from the demands of the law for the torture of slaves.
By ‘murdered’ the law means all who have died as a result of violence or bloodshed, such as being strangled, thrown from a great height, or being hit with a blunt object or other such weapon. But if the master has been secretly poisoned then this law does not apply. For the purpose of this law is to ensure that slaves lend assistance to their master when it is clear that he needs it most. Since they cannot be expected to know that their master was being surreptitiously poisoned, they could not have prevented it from happening (and, in this case, other laws will take vengeance for the master’s death on those who were responsible for it). But the law does apply if the poison was being administered by force.
If the master commits suicide then this law does not apply and the slaves under the same roof should not be tortured and executed. But if the owner has turned his hand against himself within sight of his slaves and they could have prevented him from doing so, then the law will apply and they will be punished. If they were not able to help, then they will be acquitted.
The divine emperor Hadrian decreed that the law should certainly be applied to those in the same room as the murder victim. He also stated that no mercy should be shown to slaves who had failed to act simply out of fear of being killed themselves, and that slaves must assist their owners in some way, if only by just shouting for help from others. However, he conceded that if the murder happened to have taken place when the master was out in his country estate, where a cry might carry for a great distance, then it would be highly unjust if all the slaves in his property were to be tortured and punished. In his great mercy, the emperor decreed that it was sufficient to interrogate only those slaves who were with their master when he was killed and are suspected of having either carried it out or having been accomplices. If the master was travelling and happened to be alone, then the law does not apply. Slave boys who are children and slave girls who are not yet of marriageable age should also not be tortured, since some allowance should be made for their youth.
If there is perhaps an objection to the use of evidence obtained from slaves, it is not that it has been obtained via torture – which is necessary for there to be any possibility that the truth might emerge – but that it comes from men who are generally morally worthless. This is certainly the case when their evidence is put against that of free men. It hardly seems right that the words of a slave should be believed instead of those of a free man. Moreover, slaves will certainly have done many wicked things in their lives whereas the free man will have done his best to serve the state in a variety of capacities.
It is true that in the past some owners went too far in torturing their slaves in order to try to force them to reveal the so-called truth. A woman called Sassia was once trying to fabricate evidence that her son Cluentius had murdered his stepfather, Oppianicus. She therefore tortured three slaves, whose names were Strato, Ascla and Nicostratus, but they withstood the ordeal. Not a woman to be resisted, she tried again, using tortures of the most exquisite cruelty. Witnesses were unable to bear the sight. In the end even the torturer was worn out. Furious, Sassia demanded that the torturer press on but one of the witnesses complained that he feared the interrogation was now being performed not so much to discover the truth as to make the slaves say something untrue. The other witnesses agreed and together they left. But she continued to pursue the slaves. Eventually, the slave Nicostratus died, and she had Strato crucified after having his tongue cut out to prevent him from incriminating her.
In those days, Sassia had every right to torture her slaves to help her find out the truth of what had happened. But she pursued them with a vigour that would no longer be permitted now that our great emperors have chosen to involve themselves in the relations between a master and his slaves. As we have seen, masters can no longer just kill their slaves for no good reason. Slaves have the right to appeal to a magistrate and also have rights of asylum against abusive masters. And as I’ve mentioned before, they can also take refuge before a statue of the emperor.
Most shockingly, even one of our own emperors abused the use of torture to obtain evidence from slaves to secure the condemnation of their masters. So Domitian, whenever he wished to fill up the state coffers and line his own pocket, would target certain super-rich individuals. But finding himself unable to secure their prosecution in legal ways, he would charge them with high treason. He would then torture the household slaves (for which he did not need the master’s permission because of the severity of the charge), to ascertain so-called facts about their owner’s anti-imperial conspiracies. In fact, he often did not bother with the torture. He just encouraged and bribed the slaves to reveal what their masters had allegedly been up to. In doing so, he did in fact reveal that he had no better morals than a slave himself.
COMMENTARY
The routine torture of slaves in legal proceedings is, to the modern reader, one of the most shocking abuses. But the Romans saw such treatment as completely normal. Slaves were too unimportant and morally weak to be relied upon to tell the truth. Torture was seen simply as a way of getting at the truth and so was both sensible and served the cause of justice. The fact that slaves had few legal rights meant that they were liable to the roughest kind of treatment. In fact, their lack of social status was seen as requiring rough treatment to make sure that they acted properly and told the truth.
The Romans did realise that evidence obtained under torture needed to be treated with caution. Plenty of examples attest to slaves lying to get the pain to stop. But such examples did not, in their eyes, reduce the benefit of the practice as a whole. Also, the Romans did not resort to torture lightly. It was used in the later stages of a criminal investigation once it had been established that a crime had been committed and there was insufficient alternative evidence to gain a conviction by other means.
The laws concerning the murder of masters by slaves were especially harsh. Killing all those who were present generated intriguing legal questions but also made sure that household slaves had a vested interest in revealing any kind of plot that other slaves might have been hatching under the same roof. It also made sure that slaves were more likely to come to their master’s aid in any attack on him. Examples of master-murder are actually remarkably rare in the surviving Roman sources. It is hard to know how this should be interpreted. It might suggest that master-slave relations were not as conflictual as we might imagine. Or maybe it simply reflects the fact that the brutal laws successfully terrorised the servile population into leaving their owners well alone. Or it might be that our sources only record a few celebrated cases, when in reality master-murder was more common, especially among the non-elite population.
Slaves owners had once had the right to treat their slaves as they wished, which included torturing them. The story about Sassia shows that some went to extremes, even though this episode is recorded because of its uniqueness. Various emperors restricted this right so that masters had to justify their actions. Slaves were also given the legal right of appeal against abusive treatment. In common with other imperial legislation concerning slaves, this should probably not be interpreted as emperors wishing to improve the conditions of the servile population. As emperors came to be more and more involved in all aspects of life, people simply looked to them to give guidance on what limits there should be in the treatment of slaves.
The laws about the torture of slaves can be found in Digest 48.18. The legal discussion about the technicalities of which slaves should be executed when their master is murdered can be found in Digest 29.5. On the restriction of the rights of owners to execute slaves, see Digest 18.1.42 and Theod
osian Code 9.12.1. For Augustus circumventing the restriction against torturing slaves to give evidence against their masters, see Dio Cassius 55.5. On the torture of slaves even to incriminate their masters in cases of treason, see Theodosian Code 9.6. The story of a lover wanting to spare his jointly owned slave from torture comes from Lysias 4. The story of Sassia is in Cicero’s speech In Defence of Cluentius.
CHAPTER VII
FUN AND GAMES
A SLAVE’S FATE IS TO WORK. It is a life of toiling to keep his master happy. The slave must be ever watchful to the needs of his master, his family or his representatives. But being a slave is not all sweat and labour. It is only right that there should be some time for relaxation and silly entertainments. This is prudent, if only to ensure that your slaves maintain their morale and so can carry out their hard work. For a contented slave is a productive slave. Conversely, those slaves who have sunk into misery will hang about aimlessly, always trying to shirk the work that has been allotted to them. Or they will just whinge constantly. It is the festival of the Saturnalia that gives them the best opportunity to let off steam.
The Saturnalia date back to ancient history, but they celebrate the time when Saturn ruled the world in a golden age of equality. Then neither rank nor social hierarchy existed. Slavery and even private property were unknown, and all men owned everything in common. The festival starts on 17 December and lasts for several days. In olden times, one single day was deemed sufficient but now, in our age of leisure and softness, greater licence is permitted. It is a time of great excitement and you will find all Rome at fever pitch. A public feast is held at the temple of Saturn and shouts of ‘Io Saturnalia’ fill the air. The common people get carried away. They go around revelling, singing frivolous and obscene songs, doing so even in the streets and the marketplaces, which would on a normal day be a practice that would signal disgrace and ridicule for a rich man and insanity for a poor man. Their feasting is dissolute and their dancing licentious. The feast reflects the fact that this is a time of plenty for all, not just the elite whose jaws are always at Saturnalia. This is more than a mere holiday. It is when the whole world is turned upside down. All that is normally seen as good behaviour is reversed, so that it is seen as proper to be blasphemous, coarse, dirty and drunken. There are spectacles held in the theatres and amphitheatres, pageants in the streets, and comic shows in the marketplace. A whole range of itinerant entertainers, jugglers and snake charmers fill the forum. People go about telling jokes about the city officials. The crowd ridicules everything, including the gods, and even mocks the emperor, swearing and laughing at his statues.