Invisible Romans (22 page)

Just as bad as the physical abuse was the mental abuse: ‘“Aesop, lay the table. Aesop, heat the bath. Aesop, feed the livestock.” Anything that’s unpleasant or tiresome or painful or menial, that’s what Aesop is ordered to do’ (
Life,
p. 116/Daly). The author Athenaeus gives a peek into the slave’s demeaning world:

Epikrates, in ‘The Hard to Sell Slave,’ makes a slave indignantly say: ‘What is more hateful than to be summoned with Boy, Boy! to where they are drinking; to serve, moreover, some callow youth or bring him a piss-pot, and to see things laid out in front of us – half-eaten cakes and pieces of chicken which, although left from the meal, the women forbid us slaves to eat. But what
really
makes our blood boil is to have them call any of us greedy gluttons when we do eat some of those things! (
Intellectuals Dining
6.262(d))

And Hermeros in Petronius’ novel emphasizes the demeaning treatment that accompanied the slave servant’s life: ‘I bought out of slavery my slave wife, so that no one could wipe his hands on her bosom’ (
Satyricon
57.5–6).

Leaving aside wider cultural and personal reasons for such behavior by the masters, the practical goal of the physical and psychological abuse was submissiveness training. The ideal was to get the slave both to obey without question, and to use his abilities positively to perform whatever the master needed. While one might wonder about the efficacy of beatings and mental torture in creating a willing, thinking slave, this disjunction did not normally occur to masters. The burden of willing obedience was rather transferred mostly to the slaves, as Paul emphasized to the Christians at Colossus:

Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, work heartily, as serving the Lord and not men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward … Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven. (Colossians 3:22–4:1)

And the unknown author of 1 Peter even drops any admonition at all to masters, and puts the entire burden on the slaves:

Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing. For one is approved if, mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly. For what credit is it, if when you do wrong and are beaten for it you take it patiently? But if when you do right and suffer for it you take it patiently, you have God’s approval. (1 Peter 2:18)

Others such as Apollonius were in total agreement in placing the
responsibility on slaves, regardless of what sort of terrible person the master was:

What is more, though masters would incur no reproach for neglecting slaves, for whom they probably may feel a contempt because they are not good, yet the slaves who did not devote themselves wholly to their masters, should be destroyed by them as cursed wretches and chattels hateful to the gods. (Philostratus,
Life of Apollonius
4.40/Conybeare)

The worst was perhaps that combination of physical and psychological: sexual abuse. This most usually stood outside the sadism and submissiveness training of the run-of-the-mill abuse. It, of course, could be rape as an act of violence against the victim, but the casual, deeply ‘normal’ assumption by slaves and free alike that slaves were available as sexual objects meant that overt violence often was not involved. A bit later than the period covered in this book, Salvian wrote in the fifth century ad, ‘Female slaves are forced unwillingly to service their most shameless masters; these sate their lust on them, trapped as they are by their condition, unable to resist’ (
On the Government of God
7.4). And it was not only women who suffered. Petronius tells the tale of Glyco’s slave, who was forced by his master’s wife into her bed. ‘The slave did no wrong; he was forced to do it’ (
Satyricon
45). Male slaves were also the subject of their master’s sexual ravishing. Despite the fact that characters like Trimalchio boasted that they had advanced from master’s favorite in pederasty to his favorite in the household (‘For fourteen years I was the object of my master’s sexual attentions – it is not a base thing to do what your master commands’), to freedom and wealth, the reality of rape must have been very much on boys’ as well as girls’ minds. As the Elder Seneca put it, shameful sexual behavior is criminal in a freeborn person, a necessity in a slave, and a duty in a freedperson (
Declamations
4, Preface 10). Nothing in the New Testament speaks out against this sexual abuse. Rabbinical literature describes when it is all right to have sex with one’s female slave. Even the enlightened Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus wrote, ‘[E]very master has full authority to use his slave as he might wish’ (
Discourse
12.88). The expectation that slaves would be sexually
available anytime, anyplace was well-nigh universal, and so they had to take this into account in their own lives.

In the face of even the most violent physical abuse, slaves had little recourse. While good masters might hear a slave’s complaints and actually do something about them, the very poor opinion of slaves held by the vast majority of masters led them not only to initiate violence against their slaves, but to condone it in their overseers, all in the name of obedience. In theory a slave could take refuge in a temple or at a divine statue, using the ancient right of asylum as a protection against an abusive master. And they did, as a number of anecdotes mention. One must wonder, however, how often this desperate recourse met with long-term success. True, slaves had various legal rulings in theory limiting the almost unlimited arbitrary action of masters. Through the period covered in this book, laws and decrees were issued to prevent owners from throwing their slaves to the beasts, from retrieving abandoned sick slaves if the slaves recovered, from killing a slave with impunity, and against the castration of slaves. There is legal evidence of slaves pursuing justice with regard to such things, but surely it was the rare slave who would find success in a complaint against his master – through a representative, of course, because the slave was not a person at law. The only legal action that seems to have been fairly common and sometimes successful related not to slavery, but to freedom: processes to determine if a person was free born and illegally in an enslaved condition. So the matter at hand was not treatment of a slave, but treatment as a slave of a person claiming to be free. Society in general had some sympathy for people who claimed to be free but were in slavery. The issue was very different from a slave claiming abusive treatment as a slave, and was treated as such. But in any case, an attempt at law ending in failure would most surely also lead to heinous punishment for the slave who tried this. The law therefore offered scant to no aid to a slave in an abusive situation. In fact, the law was a primary tool of control for masters. The fear of gruesome capital punishment meted out to ‘criminal’ slaves on a routine basis by magisterial judgments – crucifixion, burning alive, being torn apart in the arena by wild beasts – was very real. Only the most confident and the best-connected slave would have dared try the magistrate’s judgment. Almost all would have thought about the legal system in terror, not in hope.

A slave identity was a combination of what was imposed upon him, and what he could fashion for himself. The naming of a slave by the master is the most symbolically laden act of identity management. The act of naming reidentifies the slave as the property of the new owner; it embodies the attempt to eliminate that person’s former self and to show that identity is under the control of the new master. But the new slave did not simply forget all that had gone before. In the case of a person sold into slavery by force as an adult, the memory was vivid and remained. One epitaph records this in the case of a Parthian who was captured when young and sold as a slave; he ended up in Ravenna, where eventually he was freed and set up a marker that noted this fact:

Gaius Julius Mygdonius, born a free man of the Parthian race, captured at a tender age, carried over into Roman territory into slavery, then made a Roman citizen thanks to Fate … (
CIL
11.137 =
ILS
1980)

Another enslaved captive, Claudia Aster, ended up in Puteoli (Puzzuoli) on the Bay of Naples, was freed but remembered her origins as a captive in Jerusalem at the end of the Jewish War of ad 70 (
CIL
10.1971). A third, one Arrius Capito, a financial manager while a slave and a moneylender upon gaining his freedom, recalled his origins in Pannonia, across the Danube:

Capito the freedman of Arrius, a moneylender of the Pannonian nation, lies here having lived 35 years. (
CIL
13.7247, Mainz, Germany)

While yet another recalls his father’s name even after years in slavery:

Gaius Ducenius Phoebus, freedman of Gaius, son of Zeno, was born in Nisibis in Syria, and made a freedman in Rome. (
CIL
6.700 =
ILS
3944, Rome)

Finally, a man taken across the imperial borders and sold into slavery in Gaul eloquently speaks of his enslavement and winning his freedom:

Gaius Ofilius Arimnestus, freedman of Caius, of the Palatine voting district, while still living set up this monument to himself and to Mindia Prima daughter of Marcus, his wife, and to Gaius Ofilius Proculus, his son. A barbarian land gave me birth. Profit handed me over to undeserved slavery so that my whole being changed. Yet I did all that I could to honor the name received from my father. When I could not prevail with entreaties, I obtained my freedom with my own money. I won over my master through carrying out my duties – I never had to be beaten, I received no rewards … (
CIL
12.5026, Narbonne, France)

While such documentation is scarce, the slave’s memory of life before slavery surely remained clear; certainly slaves in the American South and in Brazil, as a comparison, vividly recalled their lives in Africa before capture and slavery. I would fully expect the same retention of memories as a form of maintaining an identity beyond that imposed by the masters.

In a stimulating retrieval of the voices of invisible Romans, Sandra Joshel has emphasized how important occupation was to the formation and maintenance of identity among slaves. Her careful, convincing study highlights how in epigraphy slaves mention occupation far more than free persons do, and how this is the slaves’ decision, not the masters’. In work the slave could establish an identity because occupational excellence served to satisfy the master, who valued and even rewarded skillful slaves; to mark off one’s excellence in relationship to fellow slaves; and to garner money that might ultimately be used to purchase freedom for himself and, perhaps, also for loved ones among the other slaves. There was simply no downside to being good at your occupation, so given the opportunity slaves could work hard and be proud of it.

Not that I for a moment think a slave’s work was sweetness and light. Many slaves never had a chance to learn a trade or skill, so could not take advantage of excelling in it. Others neglected opportunities when they arose. Masters worked slaves very hard, both as a practical matter of getting necessary jobs done and as a way of maintaining order and submission. Still, pride in work was possible on various levels, and many slaves were able to center themselves through focusing on this element of their lives over which they had some control, for a master
was not likely to tell a slave to stop doing an excellent job, and there was at least the chance of reward.

Thinking in slavery

As slaves thought about their lives and its limited possibilities, slavery itself channeled their thinking. The most fundamental aspect of this thinking was a lack – the lack of any possibility of a changed or alternative society, one without slavery. There was simply no social existence conceivable that did not have slavery as an accepted, integral part of it. Whereas from the mid eighteenth century ad in the West the concept of the intrinsic wrongness of slavery gained ground and spread to the slaves themselves and abolition movements steadily gained steam, nothing of the sort ever happened in the Romano-Grecian world. So one aspect of slave thinking, the hatred of slavery as an institution and the belief that not only could one escape personally, but the whole edifice could and should be dismantled, was entirely lacking to slaves of the period covered in this book. Thus the most radical thought was to escape slavery – never to end it unconditionally for all. This outlook framed all other thought. When slaves thought about their situation and the ways to deal with it, considerations were exclusively practical.

Insecurity was always on a slave’s mind. The very fact of being owned created this fundamental condition. Nothing was assured. One might do everything the master wished, and do it well, and still be sold, or be separated from loved ones, or grow sick and be abandoned, or old and be left to wither away in neglect, or worse. Some solace and guidance could be found in homespun wisdom, popular philosophy, and other attempts to reconcile the human condition with the reality of a slave’s existence. Groaning, grumbling, and dissatisfaction were weak resorts; in the end, recognition of the unfairness of life and resignation to the lot that fate had spun must usually have been the only mental defense against the angst produced by the inherently insecure and stressful situation. The guard in Plautus’
The Prisoners
(196–197) had advice, cold as it was: ‘Now, you men … if it’s gods’ will that you have to be the unlucky ones [to be enslaved], the best thing you can do is to take it patiently; that way, it won’t seem so hard.’