by Sarah Ruden
“Okay. Since you can’t remember nothin’, gut it in front of us.”
The slave got his tunic back on, snatched a knife, and jabbed cautiously at the pig’s stomach here and there. In no time, the weight of the flesh widened the cuts, and sausages and black puddings began to pour out.
The slaves applauded this trick and shouted, “Long live Gaius!”
To be seen and never heard was not the universal rule. Some slaves gained status in households and entered into close relationships with their masters. Cicero’s secretary Tiro is an example. Some masters, like Seneca, vaunted their humanity toward slaves. But I submit that slaves were like pets: good treatment of them was about the masters’ enlightenment, never about the slaves’ inherent equality. The master was absolutely entitled to keep a slave in line, according to his own convenience. Horace depicts his slave Davus’s cornering him and dressing him down during the Saturnalia, the festival that gave slaves broad license; but Davus goes too far:
DAVUS: If a steaming cake tempts me, then I’m no good.
How can posh dinners suit your lofty virtue?
Does my stomach rule me less destructively?
My back gets lashed, but are you punished less
When you go after such expensive food?
Unlimited good things can go quite bitter.
Your put-upon feet balk at carrying
Your bulk. The slave at dusk who steals a scraper
To trade for grapes is bad. To sell estates
In service to your belly isn’t slavish?
And you can’t spend an hour on your own.
You waste time, dodge yourself, a runaway,
A truant hiding out in sleep and wine
From your anxieties.
HORACE: A stone!
DAVUS: Why?
HORACE: Arrows!
DAVUS: He’s crazy—or it’s poetry.
HORACE: Out of here,
Or you’ll join the workers on my Sabine farm.
If women were supposed to be basically wild and lustful, slaves were supposed to be basically naughty, needing, like women, a lot of control. The more quick-witted and adaptable a slave in Plautus, the worse use he makes of his talents, and the more cheerfully unreformable he is. The slave whom the play Pseudolus (Faker) is named for sets in motion and controls the action, an elaborate swindle to put his young master in possession of a prostitute girlfriend whom a pimp is about to sell away; the scheme is hardly the noble enterprise it might pass for nowadays. At the end of The Haunted House, a slave thumbs his nose at the threat of punishment for making a complete fool of his owner, who is going to stay a fool and forgive him.
TRANIO: Now you’ve forgiven him—what about me?
THEOPROPIDES: I’ll tie you up for a flogging, you turd.
TRANIO: Though I’m ashamed?
THEOPROPIDES: If I myself survive, I’ll kill you.
CALLIDAMATES: You should spread your kindness:
Please, can’t you pardon Tranio? Do it for my sake.
THEOPROPIDES: I’d rather you got anything out of me but that.
I’ve got to grind him into the ground for his horrible crimes.
CALLIDAMATES: Please, let him off.
THEOPROPIDES: You see that thug flaunting at the altar?†
CALLIDAMATES: Tone it down, Tranio—be smart.
THEOPROPIDES: You tone it down.
Him I’ll tone down with a beating, put him in his place.
TRANIO: Really, there’s no need.
CALLIDAMATES: Come on, please, give in.
THEOPROPIDES: No, give it up.
CALLIDAMATES: By Hercules, I beg you.
THEOPROPIDES: I beg you: stop.
CALLIDAMATES: No point resisting.
Please—just this single, solitary time—do it for me.
TRANIO: What’s your problem? As if I won’t do something else tomorrow.
Then you can get me good—for either time, for both.
The most subhuman slave was the runaway; his only ties to society had been the uses that real people could make of him, and he now forfeited these ties. He was a little like a raped or adulterous woman, but unlike her he bore all of the loathing and fury, in this case the extreme loathing and fury that come when absolute privilege is disappointed.
As a rule, a runaway was simply a lost cause: a far-out outlaw as long as he could sustain it, and a tortured animal or a carcass when caught. Here is a rare detailed depiction. In Petronius, characters masquerade as caught runaways after they realize they have a choice between being recognized and killed, and becoming objects whose repulsiveness will bar any other impression from onlookers’ minds. They shave their heads as part of the disguise, and even after this act has been reported to the owner of the ship on which they are sailing—haircutting at sea was considered a bad omen—and they must stand in the middle of an angry crowd that includes their longtime enemies, their protector still hopes that their role of degradation will shield their identity:
Lichas was furious. “Somebody cut his hair in my ship—and in the middle of the night? Bring the bastards here. Whoever they are, I’m going to offer their heads to appease the ship’s spirit.”
“I ordered it,” said Eumolpus. “I’m on the same ship, though—I certainly wouldn’t intentionally do anything to provoke divine anger. It was only that a pair of condemned slaves of mine had long, shaggy hair, and I didn’t want to make the ship look like a prison, so I ordered the matted mess removed. And I also didn’t want their hair to cover the writing on their faces; everyone was supposed to see those marks of disgrace. Among their other crimes, they stole money from me and spent it on a shared girlfriend. Last night I dragged them from her house, stinking of perfume and unmixed wine. In a word, they reek of what was left of my family fortune.” …
To appease the guardian spirit of the ship, it was determined that we should each receive forty lashes. Without delay, the enraged sailors stepped up to us and laid in with their ropes, trying to satisfy the god with our blood—our suffering obviously counting for little in this exchange.
Again, who a runaway was—nobody and nothing—tells us who a slave was: nobody and nothing aside from his usefulness. And Aristotle and others indicate that he is inherently that. This is what makes the debate over the letter to Philemon, concentrating on the question of legal freedom, so silly. We are not in the ancient Near East, where the people who were slaves in Egypt become masters in Canaan. Such a change was not conceivable in the polytheistic Roman Empire. Had Philemon freed Onesimus, it would not have turned Onesimus into a full human being. That is what Paul wants, so he does not ask for the tool that won’t achieve it.
Manumission did not confer citizenship, which contained some rights we consider basic, such as due process and the exemption from cruel punishments. Most important, manumission kept the traditional barriers of the household up and prevented slaves (who might in reality be the master’s children) from ever dreaming of competing with legitimate children or other members of the clan. If slaves got their freedom, they went either into permanent subordination or into exile.
The freed slave might stay part of the household and enjoy its support and protection—no small matters in that world—by taking on the status of a dependent. In this case, he would be a sort of servant at large, only partly free, and if he defied his former master, he could be punished or even taken back into slavery. Pliny the Younger, of the late first and early second centuries A.D., wrote a letter of intercession for a freedman who had offended his former master. Pliny does not specify the offense—it could be nearly anything. The problem is the former master’s anger, referred to five times in the short letter, which begins:
Your freedman, at whom you said you were angry, came to me. He collapsed at my feet and clung to them as if they were yours. He cried a lot, begged a lot, was silent for a long time, and in short convinced me that his repentance was real. I believe he’s mended his ways, because he’s aware he went wrong.
On t
he other hand, the freed slave might be completely free, with no obligations—but then the former master would not want him around at all and would never help him. A man of position gave nothing away. Anyone who got food, money, discarded clothes, or even a glance or word from him had to perform rigorous duties as a henchman. Even the freeborn poor, in Roman literature, stumble anxiously through the streets before dawn to join the other “clients” wishing the “patron” good morning. He can send them on virtually any errand, including that of rubbing out somebody else’s clients.
Legend has connected this Onesimus, as a freedman, and the Onesimus who was bishop of Ephesus in the early nineties and a martyr. But legends like to grow on texts the way those rain forest plants with aerial roots grow on trees: there is no other support. To apply the proper skepticism, we have to picture Onesimus’s options in the real world, as Paul would have pictured them if at any point he considered simply telling Philemon to set the slave free. How would Onesimus have survived? Certainly at this period, the church had no formal, salaried posts. And anyway, who would have accepted as a church authority someone who had once been a runaway slave?
To survive on his own, did he have trade skills, or savings to set up a business? Day laborers tended to be half-starved wretches, losing competitors with slaves. If he were to become a client freedman, would he have had any advantages over a well-treated slave? And anyway, a client dealt on his patron’s behalf in public. How could a former runaway do this?
But as I wrote above, Paul had a much more ambitious plan than making Onesimus legally free. He wanted to make him into a human being, and he had a paradigm. As God chose and loved and guided the Israelites, he had now chosen and loved and could guide everyone. The grace of God could make what was subhuman into what was more than human. It was just a question of knowing it and letting it happen.
The way Paul makes the point in his letter to Philemon is beyond ingenious. He equates Onesimus with a son and a brother. He turns what Greco-Roman society saw as the fundamental, insurmountable differences between a slave and his master into an immense joke.
This chapter and previous ones have given some idea of who the most and the least replaceable people were in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans. I just want to stress again how crucial the relationship was between freeborn fathers and their legitimate sons, and between full freeborn brothers. Along with the misconstruing of ancient slavery, a huge barrier to modern readers’ getting Philemon is that we can’t, just from our own experience, see fatherhood and brotherhood as sacred—they have not been so for hundreds of years.
The Greeks and Romans had, until this time, not put much stock in individual or spiritual immortality. Only in a tiny class were education and opportunity so good as to make talent a factor. And only around their edges did polytheistic religion and philosophy promise a better deal in the afterlife: most people didn’t have access to such rituals and ideas. But all ordinary free people found ready in their families a chance to live on. (One of the greatest cruelties of slavery was that, having no legal family, a slave was boxed off in time, without a real tomb or recognized descendants or anything else to ensure he was remembered.) In the long run, the efforts of free people’s lives served mainly the next generation, so of course this next generation had to exist: having children was vital. Men transmitted the clan names and most of the property and represented the family publicly, so the father-son relationship was the most important.
At both ends of epic poetry, early and Greek, and late and Roman, fathers and sons are glorified. In the Iliad, Hector in facing death on the battlefield in the name of honor has a single hope and ambition, that his son, Astyanax (“Lord of the City”), will be better regarded than he himself is:
He kissed his darling baby and caressed him
And sent Zeus and the other gods this prayer:
“Zeus and the other gods, let my child here
Also be great—like me—among the Trojans,
Outstanding, powerful, the lord of Ilium.
Let someone say: ‘Much better than his father!’
As he comes back from war with bloodstained loot
From a dead enemy—to delight his mother.”
In the Aeneid, Aeneas must push on and on past any romantic love or civil peace toward power—because of his son Iulus, who will carry on the dynasty. After a series of disasters and false starts, Aeneas has it very good in Carthage, with a royal girlfriend, Dido. But Hermes descends to shove him on his way, which will cause Dido’s death:
He set his feathered feet among the shanties
And saw Aeneas laying out the towers
And building houses. Tawny jasper flecked
His sword. His shoulders trailed the glowing richness
Of a purple cloak with thin gold stripes, a present
Woven by wealthy Dido. The god scolded:
“Your wife must like you placing the foundations
For lofty Carthage, such a splendid city—
Forgetting your own kingdom that awaits you.
The ruler of the gods, whose strength bends heaven
And earth, has sent me down from bright Olympus,
Commanding that I fly here with this message:
What will this loitering in Libya bring you?
If you’re unmoved by all the coming splendor,
Which is a weight you do not wish to shoulder,
Think of your hopes as Iulus grows, your heir,
Owed an Italian realm and Roman soil.
On this topic, I can let ’er rip. If you want one word to define social organization, religion, and values in general for the Greeks and Romans, you can’t do better than “fatherhood.” Zeus (for the Greeks) or Jupiter (for the Romans) was the father-god of the heavens, which made him king of creation. “The Father” and “the Begetter” are his common epithets. His power directed all the other gods, and his usual great intervention, besides in the weather, was in begetting: heroes, young gods, legendary figures. He was the fountainhead of mythology and ritual.
He was also an excellent symbol of the neurotic extremes of paternal feeling among the mythmakers, in his creepy innovations in fertility that suggest an actual jealousy of the act of giving birth. He is “forced” by his own unthinking promise to incinerate his human lover Semele but somehow manages to snatch her unborn son Dionysus/Liber from her womb, sew him into his own thigh, and give birth to him at full term. His warlike daughter Athena/Minerva, with her masculine intelligence, was born from his head after he devoured her pregnant mother. It would be easy to dismiss these myths as garblings of prehistoric nightmares, were not their ideas so thoroughly borne out during the historical period. Euripides’ tragic hero Hippolytus, for example, wants a means of obtaining children in which women have no part. Why can’t men just buy them at temples, for example, getting better specimens the more they pay? A male fantasy common in the modern West is sex without fertility. A common ancient one was apparently fertility without sex.
The Romans went beyond the Greeks in deifying human fatherhood. A father’s legal power over his child was absolute as long as they were both alive. Legitimate children as a group in a household were termed the liberi, “the free ones,” not because they could do as they liked, but only because they weren’t slaves. Roman fathers could be indulgent in small things, but in the large ones they were the main force behind the iron regimen of conformity in their era: strict chastity for female children, military service for males, and pragmatically advantageous arranged marriages for both—just for a start. Fathers were also the main sources of opportunity: property, income, trades, professions, and social standing tended not to vary much from generation to generation but instead to flow straight through families. They flowed through fathers.
Brothers also played important roles in the Greek and Roman social systems. They were supposed to have close bonds of trust and affection, which were idealized in myth and history. The archetypal brothers were the gods Castor and Pollux. In one version of th
eir story, the immortal brother refuses to accept the death of the mortal one and extracts from Zeus permission to sacrifice part of his own godhead so that the two can remain together: they now spend alternate days on Olympus and in the underworld. In another ending, they become a constellation, the Twins, or Gemini.
In Roman thinking, the legendary first king Romulus’s killing of his brother, Remus, was almost like original sin, a presage of the heinous “fraternal slaughter” in the civil wars: Romans, people of the same blood, essentially of the same clan, tragically echoed Romulus’s crime.
Since there was no rule of primogeniture (by which the eldest son gets most or all of the inheritance) among either the Greeks or the Romans, brothers were on a fairly equal footing and were expected to collaborate constantly for the good of the family. “Brother” could be a metaphor for other close and equal relationships, but Greeks and Romans never used the term to create a sense of closeness and equality out of division. Christians did, which at the start would have seemed bizarre. Imagine the impropriety of calling everybody at an open religious gathering “husbands and wives.” In fact, a rumor that did much damage to the early church was that the meetings of “brothers and sisters” involved incest.
A deep, broad, menacing chasm cut slaves off from legitimate children and free blood siblings. A slave was a filius neminis, a son of no one. No man could claim him as a child, and no slave could make a claim on any man as his father. He could never be sure who his full biological siblings were—not that, officially, it mattered. But Paul unites all of these categories in writing of Onesimus, in the most thoroughgoing, absurd set of paradoxes in all of his letters:
1. Onesimus, though a slave, is Paul’s acknowledged son.
2. Onesimus, though an adult, has just been born.
3. Paul, though a prisoner, has begotten a son.