Invisible Romans (23 page)

The slave community

Slaves’ thoughts also turned to trying to take some control to relieve the stress and to bring a measure of normality to their lives. The place to begin this process was within the slave community itself. Although the master sought work and obedience, all understood that slaves, as human beings, interacted with each other. A master might isolate ‘troublesome’ slaves, and in particularly dangerous conditions such as mining the possibilities for community were severely attenuated. But under normal conditions, whether in a great house, a smaller establishment, or in a rural situation, slaves formed bonds and negotiated interrelationships that gave meaning to their lives, despite the underlying insecurity and brutality of it all. There is much evidence of solidarity and friendship among slaves. Here one ex-slave recalls a lifelong friendship reaching back into common slavery:

Aulus Memmius Urbanus set this up to Aulus Memmius Clarus, fellow freedman and companion most dear. Between you and me, my most valued fellow freedman, I know there never was ever a quarrel. I also with this inscription bring the gods above and below to witness that you and I, bought at the same time as slaves in the same household, were freed together as well. No day ever separated us except that of your fateful death. (
CIL
6.22355a =
ILS
8432, Rome)

The case of Jucundus in the household of Taurus is another example:

Jucundus, slave of Taurus, a litter-bearer, was a real man as long as he lived. Throughout his life he watched out for himself and for the others. Callista and Philologus, fellow slaves, set this up. (
CIL
6.6308 =
ILS
7408d, Rome)

The use of the word for ‘real man’ (
vir)
captures the fact that this slave and others like him were able to see in themselves and others the trait prized in the culture as a whole, manliness. And Jucundus’ habit of watching out for his fellow slaves embodies the solidarity of the slave community, which is often seen, although, as I will discuss shortly, often subverted as well. An example is the fact that when the Roman senator Pedanius Secundus was murdered by his slaves, not a single
fellow slave tried to stop it, or betrayed who had done it, despite the most savage punishment (Tacitus,
Annals
14.43). And in the
Life of Aesop
his fellow slaves act as a group in their opposition to him as an outsider, as well as trying to make him take the blame for their own wrongdoing.

Groups of slaves also acted together in religious life. A votive set up in Gaud (southwestern France) states:

To the God Garris. Geminus, a slave, paid the vow freely also on behalf of his fellow slaves. (
CIL
13.49, Gaud, France)

As a further example, slaves often organized themselves into burial societies, either within a household, if it were large, or across households or as fellows in a common endeavor, for example as the gold miners in Dacia, or wool workers in Italy:

The wool combers set up this monument to Acceptus, slave of Chia, their fellow. (
CIL
5.4501, Brescia)

In Luceria, in Italy, slaves buried one of their own under this headstone:

To the Gods of the Netherworld and to Gelasmus the slave of Sittia. His colleagues from the Hercules and Apollo Association set this up. He lived 25 years, 3 months, and 21 days. (
AE
1983.213)

But as in the case of Aesop, there could also be competition within the community. Rivalry for the master’s favor naturally occurred. The fictional Hermeros describes this:

I tried very hard to satisfy my master, who was a dignified and august man. And in the household I was dealing with people who tried to trip me up whenever they could. But in the end I won out, thanks be to my master! (Petronius,
Satyricon
57)

Among the slaves there could be vicious gossip, quarreling, and sabotage of each other’s work, as is well illustrated by the stressful household Augustine describes in his
Confessions
in which the slaves
were drawn into the strife between family members. It was necessary to have dispute resolution mechanisms in place to settle quarrels that could arise over just about anything – in the case of Aesop, the women of the household argued over who would get his sexual favors. Perhaps the most insidious undercutting of slave solidarity were the
silentiarii,
those slaves whose job it was to keep order among them.

They fear their fellow slaves, the drivers and the informants
[silentiarii]
among them to enforce their submission, as well as the overseers set to manage them. Indeed, slaves are slaves to these almost as much as to their actual masters: any of them can flog or kill them, any can grind them down. What more can be said? Many slaves take refuge at their master’s feet, since they fear their fellow slaves so. For this reason we ought not blame those slaves who flee such a situation; rather look to those whose treatment compels them to become runaways. (Salvian,
On the Government of God
4.3)

The general way slaves were organized invited abuse of slave on slave; for example, Aesop states that a handsome slave would make sexual advances on another who ‘caught his fancy’ (
Life,
p. 125). Free men were not hired as overseers and managers; rather, slaves were given these responsibilities. This was true whether the household needed the managing slaves, or it was a rural property with an absent owner. As in other slave societies, such foremen were deeply hated by the other slaves. Especially if they were unsupervised by the master, they had no restriction on the punishments they could inflict, their assignment of slaves for their personal benefit, and their sexual depredations – not to mention cheating the master by cooking the books, conducting personal business, and the like. One of the strongest admonitions of the agricultural writers is to keep close track of the slave overseers to be sure they do not treat the slaves cruelly. Slaves could in theory appeal to the master against the abuses of overseers and fellow slaves, and a good master is advised to facilitate such appeals. But as the quotation from Salvian above attests, often the only escape from a fellow slave was to run away.

Besides the powerful and hated overseer, slaves feared also their fellow slaves who were torturers and punishers. While routine floggings
and other sorts of corporal abuse took place at the hands of fellow slaves under the master’s direct authority, it was common practice to outsource more serious physical punishment simply because to do it ‘in house’ was much more disruptive to life in the slave community. There were, therefore, professionals who specialized in dealing with slaves that masters considered exceptionally recalcitrant or vicious. A good example can be found in Matthew 18:21–34. In this story, Jesus tell of the king who forgave a servant of his a great debt; the servant then went to a man who owed him money in turn – but refused the poor man’s plea for mercy in collecting the debt and sold him and his family to meet the obligation. When the king learned of this, he ‘turned him over to the torturers, until he should pay back all he owed.’ And Apuleius in his novel has slaves punishing other slaves.

Life in the slave community was complex: individual slaves had to make judgments about their fellows, form friendships and alliances, and ward off as much grief as possible. The same complexity extended to life beyond the immediate slaves around him to the free population outside the household. The basic issue to decide is whether slaves and those free in the world at large were fundamentally divided from one another by the free persons’ feeling of superiority over slaves simply from the fact of being free. While there is no doubt that the elite and in all probability the fairly well-off felt such a disdain and maintained a huge psychological barrier between themselves and any slave, we have to ask if most ordinary people would feel that way. Modern opinions differ. Some think that any free person would have marked himself off from slaves, proud in his freedom and sure in a superiority it gave him over slaves, even if a given slave had more money, influence, and prospects than he did. Others point out that the actual lives of ordinary people were very similar to those of many slaves, and so there is every reason to suppose that slave and free persons in the same conditions thought more about the things they had in common than a designation ‘slave’ or ‘free.’ They also had in common a huge distance from the elite and could easily share a resentment, even hatred, toward the tiny ruling minority. When the senator Pedanius Secundus was murdered by his slaves, for example, and the whole of the household slaves were condemned to be crucified as a punishment and object lesson, since none had divulged the plot nor prevented its carrying out, the common people slave and
free formed a large, angry mob and at first prevented the punishment from being inflicted; only Emperor Nero’s assignment of troops to clear the way allowed the executions to proceed (Tacitus,
Annals
14.42–5).

Even if one wished to separate slaves from ordinary people, it would have been hard. I have noted that for the most part slaves looked and spoke like freemen. Slaves as a rule wore no distinctive clothing. There were exceptions, of course: branded slaves, or those with a ‘slave cut’ – closely cropped hair, or those wearing a master’s special livery. But apart from those in business and formal wear – the toga – all men looked pretty much the same in daily life. Petronius has his character Hermeros say, ‘I was a slave for forty years and nobody knew whether I was slave or free.’

Slaves were active outside the doors of households and often lived outside. They were entrusted with duties great and small by their masters that free persons also performed at times, such as work in construction and carrying, artisanry, mercantile trade, and moneylending. Given the similarity in background, culture, and occupation, it is no wonder that slave and free belonged to the same religious and secular organizations. There are many examples of freeborn, ex-slaves (freedmen), and slaves belonging to the same association. Some with a recent past of slavery held no empathy for those still enslaved; one such was Larcius Macedo, son of a freedman, who was especially cruel to his slaves and was killed by one (Pliny,
Letters
3.14). Many more maintained ties with slaves on an equal basis in professional and religious associations whose purpose was ostensibly funereal but, in fact, were social gatherings. At Praeneste an association of fullers was mixed: several slaves are listed as well as a freedman; at Ostia a society of freedmen and slaves of the town set up a monument to the divinity Bellona; at Lanuvium they participated with freeborn in the cults of Antinous and Diana, although masters’ permission was required. Slaves were challenged to negotiate a world in which at times they lived and acted with and almost as free persons; but they were always aware that a run-in with the authorities would reveal their fundamental difference in civil and criminal law, particularly with regard to swift recourse to physical punishment in the case of a slave, even if the only charge was littering:

Marcus Alfius Paulus, city manager, orders this: Whoever might wish to throw away excrement in this place, take warning that this is not allowed! If anyone act against this proclamation, let him if a free person pay a fine – if a slave, whip his ass as a warning! (
AE
1962.234, Herculaneum)

Slaves and their masters

In the midst of life as a slave among other slaves and among the free population, four topics were always on his mind. These are revealed by three questions which appear in the
Oracles of Astrampsychus,
and which are particularly appropriate for thinking about slave attitudes – ‘Will I come to terms with my masters?’; ‘Am I going to be sold?’; and ‘Will I be freed?’ – and a fourth question asked not by slaves but by masters, which is indirectly related: ‘Will I find the fugitive [slave]?’ Thus slaves were concerned about relationships with their masters, about being sold, and about being freed, while the masters’ focus on fugitives indicates a slave’s mind was frequently on running away. These concerns are reflected in much the same way in various dream interpretations found in Artemidorus. The commonest reference is to gaining one’s freedom, to various relations with a master (good, bad, changing), and to running away; being sold seems to appear only once as a topic. If these concerns are combined with those interpersonal behavioral traits mentioned on gravestones, it would seem that a reasonable sweep of a slave’s mind world was focused on survival in the moment, with hope alternating with fear about the future. What is missing is much indication of dwelling on the status of ‘slavehood’ itself, of any of the interiority that one might assume must have occupied a slave’s mind. And there is little outcry against the injustice of this slavery, only recognition of the personal situation a slave might find himself in – although the epitaph from Rome of a slave is evocative:

Here I, Lemiso, lie. Nothing save death ended my toil. (
CIL
6.6049 =
ILLRP
932, Rome)

Still, it is reassuring to know that the slaves themselves, with their own voices, offer at least a general delineation of what was paramount in their minds. The picture that emerges is one of active slave lives forging spaces of action and, if possible, working for their freedom.

Negotiating relations with masters consumed much of a slave’s thinking.
The Life of Aesop
takes as fundamental the conflict between slave and master, and shows how the slave could effectively deal with this. Some masters were better to their slaves than others; some slaves were more entrepreneurial in their adjustment to slavery than others. The permutations were potentially infinite, but each slave had to develop specific responses to his specific situation.