The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx

by Jerry Toner

  So you can see from these examples how we masters are exposed to all kinds of danger. Treat your slaves brutally and these risks increase. But you should not assume that you will be able to sleep soundly and securely if you treat your slaves indulgently and gently. Not all masters who are killed by their slaves deserve their fate because of their cruelty. Many are simply the victims of slaves who are naturally wicked and capable of the most criminal acts.

  Even if hostile slaves do not go so far as to kill you, they can still inflict great harm. During one of the wars against Hannibal, a number of terrorist atrocities were committed in the city of Rome itself by persons who were supporters of the Carthaginians. Arson attacks targeted the forum, nearby shops, the state prison and a number of private houses. The Temple of Vesta was saved only with difficulty, primarily through the efforts of thirteen slaves who happened to be nearby and fetched water and stamped out the flames. They were subsequently freed as a reward. The fire was fierce and because it had broken out in several places there was no doubt that it had been started intentionally. So the senate announced that anyone who provided information about the culprits would be rewarded with money if they were free, and liberty if they were slaves. As a result of this incentive, a slave called Manus, who belonged to a Campanian noble family, came forward and denounced his owners. The parents of this family had been beheaded by Quintus Fulvius, and the five sons, so the slave said, had started the fires as revenge and to help Hannibal. He also said they were planning many more such attacks.

  The sons were arrested. At first they denied the story, claiming that the slave had run away the previous day after he had been whipped as a punishment, and he was simply acting out of desire for revenge. But when they were interrogated with their accomplices in the forum, they all confessed. They were all executed but Manus was given his freedom and almost ten thousand sesterces. Now obviously in this case we must delight in the fact that enemies of the Roman state were exposed by a brave slave. But you should realise that discontented slaves within the household have a great capacity to reveal information about you that can be at best embarrassing, at worst downright dangerous.

  You must also realise that most of the ways in which your slaves will resist you is not in the style of Spartacus, whose bravery defied his servile status. There is a whole range of things they can do to try to gain some minor victory over you in everyday life. It is this kind of small-scale defiance that you will have to be alert to each and every day you own slaves. They will lie to you about how much food they have taken, or they will cheat you out of some small change by claiming that something costs ten sesterces when in fact it cost eight. They will pretend to be too ill to work and from the great groans and moans they emit you will think it a miracle if they survive, when in fact they are simply acting to get out of some difficult task. They will stand in the kitchen near the oven to generate heat and a sweat and then will stagger towards you as if collapsing from fever.

  In the country your estate slaves will claim to have sown more seed than they have actually used. They will steal from your storage barns to supplement their rations; they will fiddle the books to show that the harvest is not quite as plentiful as you supposed and then sell the surplus in the local market. Or they will just take their time about everything, dawdling along as they work so that a job that should last for an hour or two takes a whole day. And when you complain they will swear by the gods that it was a much more difficult job than you realised and honestly they were doing their best. And if you are not careful you will believe their lies and before long every task that has to be carried out on the farm starts to take twice as long as it should. This is how slaves operate. They constantly push at the boundaries to see what they can get away with. And if you are not careful it will steadily chip away at your authority until it is entirely eaten up and your slaves treat you with disdain.

  Lazy and sleepy city slaves will sneak off into town so they can hang around in bars, or watch the chariot-racing or gamble on the street corners. Or they will go to the baths and enjoy a good soak and a steam at your expense, then enjoy sitting about with their friends from other households, chatting or flirting with slave girls. And when you ask where they have been they will say how busy the streets were and what queues there were. Or they will just stare at you blankly and pretend they are too stupid to understand what you are talking about.

  But a lot of slaves are nowhere near as dim-witted as they make out to be. You should read the story about that clever slave called Aesop, who was always outwitting his master. He does things like taking everything literally:

  ‘Where were you born?’ asked his master.

  ‘In my mother’s belly,’ replies Aesop.

  ‘No, in what place were you born?’ tried the master again.

  ‘My mother didn’t tell me whether it was the bedroom or the dining room.’

  You should remember the old proverb that ‘a clever slave shares the power’, meaning of course that if you do not stay on your guard you will end up having the household slaves deciding who does what when.

  Or they act like complete cowards whenever any vaguely dangerous job comes up. Or they try to appeal to your softer side. It is one of the great irritations of owning slaves that they are constantly coming up to you in tears, begging you to forgive them this or let them off that. Naturally you should try to harden your heart but when it is domestic slaves who have provided good service it is sometimes difficult not to yield. But then you must be on the lookout for those domestic slaves who can kick like an ass. They will spit in your soup, or hide your books just to annoy you or, as even happened to me once, will pretend to trip and pour the fish sauce over your head. I can assure you that I was not fooled by that old trick. Running away is another way they can steal your property and getting them back is tedious and time-consuming. Even then, you are stuck with a recalcitrant slave who has no wish to please you.

  You must always bear in mind that your typical slave is impudent, gossiping, lazy, deceitful, light-fingered and unscrupulous. Very few meet your expectations of a loyal, industrious, diligent and thrifty servant. Even fewer obey you with fear and trembling and in singleness of heart, as they should. Instead, the work-shy and untrustworthy majority spend their time trying to avoid your supervision. They will have parties at night while you sleep and you will wonder how it is that all your slave girls are suddenly getting pregnant.

  They will gossip about you and if you treat them harshly they will go about behind your back telling stories about you to slaves in other households. They would rather reveal their master’s secrets than steal his best Falernian wine. You will then find your friends asking you impertinent questions at dinner parties about your alleged vicious treatment of your slaves. It is all designed to get you to change your behaviour. They figure that you will not want to be thought of as a brutal and unjust master among your friends and acquaintances. Who, after all, can ever aspire to such a reputation?

  So you must be careful to treat your household slaves with some consideration, especially if you are planning to run for political office, because damaging gossip often emanates from households. Otherwise, if you are careful with your management of household provisions you find stories going around about what a great miser you are. Indeed, when I stood for office I recall being advised that the most important thing to do is to remember people’s names, even the slaves’, for nothing is so popular or pleasing.

  Of course no slave would ever say any of this to your face. They are too cowardly for that. If they do want to speak to you about some important matter you often find them using fables. Fables were actually invented to enable a slave to express feelings and thoughts that he otherwise would not dare say aloud for fear of punishment. So if they think you are doing something too quickly they will start telling you the story about the tortoise and the hare. It can be terribly annoying.

  Gossip is an annoyance but plotting is dangerous. It is the clandestine meetings that take place in hushed
tones that you need to be particularly careful to stamp out. Or ban them from using their own kind of language if they start doing that. For they will sometimes invent their own phrases and words that mean nothing to you but conceal their true intentions. There can only be one use for a private language of this kind: sedition.

  A more harmless thing slaves do when they get together is tell each other silly tales in which they get the better of you, the master. In their imaginations, they outwit you and leave you looking foolish. I dare say it makes them feel better about their lowly status and their lack of power. Or they use them to give each other useful advice. One I overheard recently was a story about a jackdaw, which was kept as a pet on a piece of string. It tried to escape but the string got caught, and as he lay dying, the bird said, ‘Stupid idiot! I couldn’t bear being a slave but now I’ve robbed myself of life itself.’ As the storyteller said, ‘Servants long for their old masters only when they get a taste of new ones.’ Which is true indeed.

  Another malevolent act which the disgruntled slave can carry out against you is to employ the black arts of magic. Naturally, I do not myself believe in the power of sorcery to hurt me, but most of the household does and if it gets around that you have had a spell put on you it can generate a general feeling of unease. Unfortunately it can be very hard to detect. For the slaves will often simply have their curse written on a lead tablet and place it among the tombs on the edge of town, the idea being that you the master will soon end up yourself as one of the corpses buried there.

  This anonymous kind of resistance against you is common. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth that those whom you endeavour to treat fairly and justly go behind your back to express their discontent. But in reality it is harmless and they only do it anonymously because they fear you and what you will do to them if they are discovered. You must learn to take it as a compliment to your authority and to the disciplined way in which you manage your household.

  COMMENTARY

  Falx reveals the fears and anxieties that weighed on a master’s mind in this chapter. The story of Spartacus is famous as a result of the 1960 Stanley Kubrick film starring Kirk Douglas. But the image of the heroic freedom fighter, inspiring his followers to stand up and claim collectively that ‘I’m Spartacus!’, gives a false picture of relations between masters and slaves in the Roman world. Given that Roman Italy was one of the great slave-owning societies in history, it is not surprising to find that slaves carried out many acts of resistance. A Roman proverb said that there were as many enemies as there were slaves – quot servi tot hostes. But such resistance did not always have to be as dramatic as that of Spartacus in 73–71 bc. In fact, slave rebellions were rare and, with the exception of Spartacus’s revolt, easily crushed. These revolts were concentrated in periods when there had been a large influx of slaves into a relatively small geographical area. Often the slaves came from similar ethnic backgrounds, meaning that it was easier for them to discuss plans. It also helped that their previous military leadership was still present among their ranks. The huge supply of slaves after republican Rome’s massive conquests made slaves cheap and expendable. There was no incentive for masters to treat their assets decently. This proved a dangerous combination of factors, but it was a mix that only rarely emerged.

  By the time of the empire the slave system was too well oiled to face serious, large-scale threats. Slave resistance coalesced around small acts of lying, cheating, pretending to be ill, and going slow. Such small-scale defiance took many forms and was not always confrontational, involving passive tactics such as evasion and pretending to be stupid. We must be careful not to dramatise social relations into a model that sees Roman society as involved in a constant class conflict between owners and their human capital.

  Characters like Bulla Felix can easily be read today as Robin Hood figures: social bandits who turn the injustice of the normal world on its head and form an egalitarian community to resist the corruption of the regime. However these are texts written for an upper-class audience and it is more likely that the characters within them are a literary convention used to highlight the poor governance of certain corrupt officials and emperors. Nonetheless, the bandit stories do use popular themes of injustice, poverty and corruption to exert pressure on poor-quality rulers. Such stories threw the government’s own standards back in its face when it fell short.

  Some acts of slave resistance can be seen as negotiating techniques between slaves and their masters. By probing to see what they could get away with, they tried to chip away at the boundaries that enslaved them. Being a coward could be a useful tactic for a slave because it might prevent him from being placed in any position of danger. Another was to appeal to the master’s soft side, if he had one. Seneca mentions that one of the irritations of owning slaves was that it meant relying on people who were always breaking down in tears (On Tranquillity of the Mind 8.8). Such crying could have been an actual expression of distress or it could have been a tactic to try to avoid an unpleasant task or punishment. Owners often denied the humanity of their slaves, seeing them as little more than animals. By breaking down in tears, the slaves could try to reverse this process and assert their humanity, showing masters the effects of their brutal treatment. This was probably a tactic that was only likely to benefit some domestic slaves, who were in a position to have some kind of direct relationship with their master.

  Gossip was also a way for slaves to try to actively alter their master’s behaviour. Gossip advertised a master’s maltreatment to a wider audience. It suggested that the master was not a good man and reduced his standing in the community. Advice given to Cicero on electioneering warns that gossip often emanates from households. It says that even slaves should be treated with great consideration in the run-up to an election. Trickster tales, like those of the Aesop Romance, allowed the downtrodden to enjoy situations where the little man won, albeit temporarily. The trickster hero was a clever mischief-maker, who overturned the normal world where the master was in charge. Such a symbolic levelling provided a kind of psychic revenge against the rich, which was in itself a kind of empowerment. Whether any of this kind of small-scale or passive resistance ever really amounted to much is impossible to say.

  The account of the First Slave War in Sicily of c.135–132 BC is in Diodorus Siculus 34.2. The accounts of Spartacus’s rebellion are in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus and Appian Civil Wars 1.14. The story of terrorist attacks in Rome in support of Hannibal is at Livy 26.27. The murder of Larcius Macedo is described in Pliny the Younger Letters 3.14. Bulla Felix is to be found in Dio Cassius 77.10.

  CHAPTER IX

  SETTING SLAVES FREE

  MANY SLAVES LONG for freedom. Despite the fact that they have no social value they feel humiliated and degraded by their treatment. And even though they are, as a rule, morally worthless they think they deserve to be free. Many of them even seem to feel that it is somehow unjust that they are slaves, even in cases when the moral and legal arguments against them are watertight.

  That slaves know they may be freed is actually of great benefit to the owner. It is a carrot with which to incentivise the slave to work diligently and honestly. It is also a stick with which to punish him if he disappoints you in some way. Hope can help men endure all kinds of suffering. Hopelessness can cause them to take desperate measures.

  In fact not all slaves want to be freed. Some are so contented within their household, enjoying a close relationship with their master, that there seems to be little to be gained by becoming free and taking on all the cares and responsibilities of that status. There is the famous case of Gaius Melissus, who was born free at Spoleto, but abandoned as a baby because his parents could not agree what to do with him. A local man rescued him and brought him up as a slave, but educated him to a high standard. Eventually he presented the slave as a gift to the emperor Augustus’s close friend Maecenas to use as a letter-writer. Melissus soon realised that Maecenas treated him as an equal on account of his fine intellect, even accepti
ng him as he would a friend. At this point, his mother suddenly appeared and tried to claim back his freedom, hoping no doubt to get some financial advantage from having a son who was close to the centre of power. But Melissus decided that he would prefer to remain as a slave, since, as Maecenas’s friend, his status could not be improved. Maecenas soon afterwards set him free anyway because of these noble sentiments and Melissus even became friendly with Augustus himself. Indeed the emperor appointed him to build up the library in the Portico of Octavia.

  Bequeathing freedom in a will is the most common form of setting slaves free. But if you choose to do it while you are still alive there is the ancient rod ceremony. In this, you as the master appear before a magistrate who publicly affirms the slave’s new freedom. You then give the slave a slap as a final insult for them to suffer at your hands. There are also more informal methods should you not want to go through such a ritual. The old-fashioned way is to hold the slave’s hand, say, ‘I want this man to be free,’ and then let go of him. This is where we get our word for freeing slaves from, to ‘manumit’, meaning literally to let him go from your hand.

  Often I have simply written a letter to the slave, or I have invited him to sit at table and join me and my friends for dinner, thereby announcing it to them as witnesses. I rather like such relaxed arrangements within the household. The best slaves are those who become part of the family and so it is nice to carry out the procedure among other members of the household. I like it best if I can surprise them – it is a delight to see the mix of shock, joy and gratitude on their faces. The only disadvantage with this is that the rod ceremony is required for the slave to get full legal citizenship, but this can always be done at a later date as a formality.