Invisible Romans (20 page)

But it is also helpful to be smart. Many fables emphasize how an intelligent analysis and appropriate response to a situation pays off handsomely. For example, ‘The Lion and the Fox’:

A lion got too old to go on the hunt. He lay stretched out toward the back of his cave as if he were kept there by illness. He pretended to have weak breathing and smoothed his harsh voice. This news spread through the haunts of the wild beasts. All were concerned about the weakness of the lion, and each entered the cave in order to see for himself. The lion had no trouble devouring them one after the other. So he had found a way to live plentifully in spite of his old age. A clever fox suspected the situation and said, keeping his distance, ‘O King, how are you doing?’ The lion replied, ‘Greetings, you who are most dear to me of all the animals. Why don’t you come closer instead of looking at me from a distance? Come here, my friend, and by your various, colorful stories lighten my final days.’ ‘Watch after yourself!’ replied the fox. ‘But please excuse me if I must go. I am put off by the tracks of so many animals that go into your cave, but you don’t show me any coming out.’ (Babrius,
Fables
103)

As hostile as the poor were to the wealthy and their power, wealth in and of itself, beyond its role in hierarchical strife, was important to the poor. They knew that wealth was power, but they also knew the risks. Poverty was not good. But the reality of riches and its appeal was somewhat fraught. Greed could lead to disaster, as in the fable of the mouse in the soup:

A mouse fell into a cooking pot full of soup that did not have a lid. Choked by the grease and on the point of death, he said, ‘I have eaten, I have drunk, I have enjoyed all the pleasures of life; it is time for me to die.’ (Babrius,
Fables
60)

Proverbs are also ambivalent about wealth. On the one hand, it provides opportunities and so is welcome. But on the other, there is some suspicion of it, for example for the borrower. There is also the common implication that wealth is gained by treachery, theft, and other antisocial means. So the basic aim is to keep what one has, rather than to increase it greatly – the strategy is decidedly defensive, conservative, and aimed at self-preservation above all. The proverb ‘better to be poor on land than rich at sea’ (Diogenianus 2.62) catches the tone of caution. If you are poor, you make the best of it.

This view of wealth and poverty does not lead to questioning of the existing order of things; proverbs convey a very strong sense of hierarchy, as does, for example, the fable ‘The Jackdaw and the Eagle’:

An eagle snatched a sleek lamb in his talons to give to his offspring to eat. A jackdaw was spurred on to do the same thing. So he swooped down on a ram. But he entangled his claws in his fleece, and beat his wings in vain trying to carry off his theft. A shepherd came running up, seized him, and cut his wings. The bird then confessed, ‘I am rightly punished. Why did I, being only a jackdaw, try to act like an eagle?’ (Babrius,
Fables
137)

But at the same time I note that the most frequent expression of the poor’s attitude toward those more fortunate than themselves is illustrated by what Tyndaris says of them in Plautus’
The Prisoners
(583), ‘…
est miserorum, ut malevolentes sint atque invideant bonis’
(‘it is the nature of the downtrodden to be discontented and to envy the wealthy’). If the poor had the time and inclination to dream, that dream and desire was not the overthrow of the rich, but to have what they have.

Survival

The tenuous economic condition of the poor guided their lives. Their position in the social hierarchy was bad and not likely to get better. But their strategies for survival served them well. A combination of cooperation and competition assured as much success as possible within their constrained circumstances. Fate provided a framework for understanding their universe. They dealt with subjection to the more powerful by accommodation and resistance. They could hope for a just world in which they would be in a better situation, but its unlikelihood did not keep them from working hard and, quite naturally, from envying those who had more than they.

4
COPING IN BONDAGE: SLAVES

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS
and the beginning of slavery go hand in hand, for a person is potentially the most useful of all animals. Thus from early times humans have tried and often succeeded in dominating other humans to further their own welfare. This longstanding, organic development of slavery in parallel with the more general use of animals subordinated to humans’ needs explains why in antiquity the institution of slavery was never seriously contested as being other than a normal, acceptable way of relating to other human beings. Slavery was omnipresent in the Romano-Grecian world. Its specific forms and applications varied according to local factors, but its existence was not questioned in any practical way. The physical and psychological toll that slavery visited upon individual slaves occasionally came to the attention of masters; the fundamentally arbitrary ways of demarcating a difference between ‘slave’ and ‘not slave’ troubled philosophers. But except for a few rare and uninfluential outliers, neither those who thought about slaves and slavery, nor those who just used slaves, nor those who had dealings with others’ slaves in their daily lives, considered the merits or practicality of abolition; the story of slavery is one of accommodation to it or attempts to escape or avoid it, not to overthrowing the condition itself within society.

This cultural reality provides the guide to seeing slaves living out their lives. Slavery does not so much reduce the slave to a dehumanized
‘thing,’ as it creates a different order of existence, an environment in which the slave is ‘rehumanized’ in a social or cultural role. Romans never denied the ‘humanity’ of slaves, their ‘personhood’ as men, not beasts, no matter how much they compared them to beasts as chattel property, or spoke of them as morally inferior, weak human beings. They just wanted them to be socialized to their slavish role. From the slave’s perspective, his or her life as negotiation of that slavish role reveals what it meant to be a human in an enslaved condition.

9. Into slavery. A sad procession of men, women, and children is led into slavery, to be sold by the trader Aulus Caprilius Timotheus, who proudly boasts of his unsavory (even to the ancients) profession on his tombstone.

Coming to a general picture of slaves in their slave experience is complicated by the complexity and variety of that experience. The evidence for the slave’s mind world, scanty as it is, is never entirely coherent. Challenges also arise because the Westerner tends to use knowledge or impressions of New World slavery to make sense of what is known of Romano-Grecian slavery. As I will show, there are important, revealing points of comparison, but the differences are stark as well; I mention here only the most obvious, the lack of race as a basic element in ancient slavery and the much wider diversity of slave life in antiquity.

A slave voice?

Are there actual slave voices in ancient sources? A few authors who wrote for the elite had begun or spent part of their lives as slaves:
Plautus, the comedic writer of the Roman Republic; Diogenes, the Greek founder of Cynic philosophy; Epictetus, the Roman Stoic philosopher of the early empire; and the fabulists Aesop and Phaedrus all claimed or have been claimed directly or indirectly to have begun life as slaves, or to have been enslaved during a portion of their lives. What is most striking is that no author who demonstrably is or was a slave explicitly takes on the task of writing about his experience
as a slave.
Epictetus and Plautus come the closest, for the former’s use of slave examples and the latter’s use of slave characters in his plays clearly address the three main concerns of a slave’s outlook. Still, one might expect to find among the tens of thousands of pages of Latin and Greek works one that was explicitly written by a slave about the slave experience – or at least among the thousands of titles of ancient Latin and Greek works that once existed but no longer survive. After all, we know that many slaves were educated. For example, one, Phlegon of Tralles, wrote history and other matters during the time of the emperor Hadrian, while another, Q. Remmius Palaemon, once he gained his freedom was a famous professor of literature at Rome. But there are no nonfiction works that even claim to be by slaves about slaves, and only one piece of fiction:
The Life of Aesop,
written by an unknown author. There are fictional works that famously foreground the ‘slave experience’: Petronius’
Satyricon,
Apuleius’
Golden Ass,
various ancient romances, and Lucian in
The Runaways
and some other tales speak at various times and in various ways from a slave’s perspective.
Satyricon
and
The Golden Ass
are certainly written by elites – Petronius was of the imperial court and Apuleius a provincial elite. The background of the authors of the romances is unknown.
The Life of Aesop
would seem from its simple language and style to come from the pen of an ordinary person, while Lucian was raised in an artisan family and has some claim to firsthand knowledge of nonelite life and outlooks.

Of course historians and other elite literary and legal sources mention slaves. Traditionally, these have formed the backbone of all discussion of ancient slavery. My project, however, is to seek the slaves’ mind world without the cultural bias and contamination that inevitably exists when these elites touch on slaves and slavery. It can be argued, quite properly, that the standard elite sources can be used if care is taken to account for their social point of view; many scholars have done just that. But I wish
to leave them aside in order to emphasize the picture that can be painted without them. It is an experiment of sorts, but I believe a more immediate experience of the slave mind world is accessible without their interference. As a result, although I use some elites such as agricultural writers and the novelists Petronius and Apuleius who are striving to see the slaves’ world, standard elite historians, biographers, and letter-writers only occasionally figure in my narrative.

There might be some hope of finding slave voices in Christian literature given the participation of slaves in early Christian worship and social groups. In the Gospels there are forthright examples of slavery in action, as well as some understanding of slave attitudes. But in the New Testament epistles only the First Letter of Peter seems to speak of slaves from a slave’s point of view, despite all the rhetoric about slaves being a significant part of the Christian community, and if the author was a slave, he has disguised this well. Later Christian literature is also unhelpful. So in Christian as in pagan literature the voice of the slave is hard to find.

At a slight remove, the many references to issues of concern to slaves, particularly those relating to sexuality and to running away, show that dream interpretation and astrological works were responding directly to slaves and their concerns. And fables, while applicable to a wide range of statuses, were rightly seen in antiquity, as now, as in many cases expressing genuine attitudes and strategies of slaves. But this makes it puzzling to realize just how unexamined the life of a slave was in other popular literature. In proverbs and gnomic sayings, slavery is virtually invisible. It remains strange that fables should seem to evoke the situation of slaves, while proverbs and other popular literature do not.

Outside of literature, certainly slaves left their own voices as epitaphs, mostly very short, on their graves. These gravestones are more easily imagined as the true voices of slaves and are a valuable window onto their slave experience; I use them extensively. Other archaeological evidence for slavery is rather limited, and what does exist is difficult to relate to the slaves’ mind world. Thus material culture does not add much to the discussion here. Papyri, though, offer a very useful source for thinking about slaves, providing demographic as well as contextual evidence that greatly enriches our understanding.

Numbers and sources of slaves

The demography of slavery helps to provide some background for the slaves’ mind world. Slavery was not the predominant form of rural labor in the empire; there were heavy concentrations on a relatively few broad estates, mostly in Italy and Sicily, plus a higher than average percentage of slaves in larger towns and cities. Although the regional variation was obviously great, overall perhaps only one household in seven owned a slave, with most of these being owned by the elite and employed not in agriculture or trade, but in domestic work. Very many subelite economic units would not have been able to afford a slave, or make slave labor economically viable (as Aristotle from an earlier age put it, ‘Because they have no slaves, it is necessary that the poor use their wives and offspring to do what slaves would normally do’ (
Politics
5.1323A)). An educated guess – and the sources, scattered and fragmentary as they are, allow little more – would put the number at about 15 percent of the entire population, and much less in many places. As I look at the slaves of the Romano-Grecian world, it is important to keep these facts in mind. Slaves lived in a society with many other slaves, but their numbers and importance varied from place to place. This truth does not mitigate the often terrible conditions of ancient slavery, but it does mean that slaves’ lives might be less restricted, less oppressed, and less close-ended than would have been the case had society depended on many more of them.