A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (5 page)

Of course, most Roman wives did not have a slave flogged to give them an appetite while they were being dressed for dinner (or while choosing material for a new set of curtains), nor did every
well-heeled husband abuse his slave boys, and the prurience of the satirists describing this behaviour surely contains a sliver of disapproval. The ancient world might have considered some
twentieth-century activities, like the purveying of ‘snuff movies’, inhuman, though Romans took an unashamed and guiltless pleasure in the display of cruelty, perhaps not understanding
how much of their pleasure was sexual.

SLAVERY

Slavery is as old as mankind, indeed an early sign of human organization. The absence of slavery in the modern First World is a recent phenomenon. Declared illegal by an
English judge in the seventeenth century, abolished in the United States and Russia in the nineteenth, slavery flourished a hundred years ago in parts of Latin America, notably Brazil (
The
Masters and the Slaves
by Gilberto Freyre, published by Knopf in 1956, is one the most remarkable books on any subject).

Slavery still exists in Arabia, where auctions have been recorded recently, and, by extension, in Eaton Square, London SW1, where indentured Filipino girls are found sobbing in the streets,
complaining about their attempted rape by the sons of their employers.

We react to revelations of slavery or of quasi-slavery – child labour in the Far East, for example – with horror, but this reaction is only as old as the existence of the motor car,
say a hundred years. For the Romans in our period, from the birth of Julius Caesar to the death of Nero, the last of his clan (37
BC
–
AD
68),
slavery was a mostly unquestioned part of life. The behaviour of human beings towards each other, however inhumane, always has its
justificatif.
Geneticists from California were invited to
Germany by the Nazis to justify the concentration camps. The institution of slavery
had the most respectable apologists: Aristotle approved, subject to ‘no outrage, no
familiarity’, limitations which were spectacularly ignored. Euripides, the great humanitarian, ‘could not conceive of its abolition’, a view shared by the Hellenist Jewish
philosopher Philo. The Stoics considered slavery to be an external accident about which nothing could be done. Hannah Arendt, the existentialist political theorist, explains in
The Human
Condition:
‘The institution of slavery in antiquity . . . was not a device for cheap labour, nor an instrument of exploitation for profit, but rather an attempt to exclude labour from the
conditions of a man’s life.’

Put the other way, the ancient world considered some tasks, essential to life, so disagreeable that they could and should not be performed by proper human beings, so slaves were invoked to
perform them. Therefore slaves cannot be considered as completely human. They were ‘tame animals’, interested only, said Euripides, in filling their stomachs. Under Roman law, because
slaves do not naturally tell the truth, their evidence in court was only allowed if obtained under torture. When a slave was freed he rejoined his ‘nature’ – i.e., was transmuted
from a
res
to a
persona.

Seneca – playwright, philosopher, tutor to Nero – was alone in disapproving of slavery and of the bloodletting of the Games, but then he was a very rare and a very rich man.
Seneca’s contemporary in Rome, St Paul, with whom fifth-century Christians invented a correspondence, said easily: ‘We are all slaves before God.’ It was not until the reign of
Trajan, nearly fifty years later, that the institution was thought to be ‘unnatural’, and not until the Emperors Antoninus Pius and Claudius Aurelius that a slave could complain of
ill-treatment and that the power of life and death was removed from the masters.

A Roman of senatorial rank could be a soldier, an administrator or an advocate (unpaid) but never a businessman in a regular way, though speculation was, strangely,
considered OK. The poorer Roman citizen, the plebeian, who had only his vote to sell, would never sell his labour. So all the
work,
physical and mental, was performed by slaves. They were
doctors, secretaries, book-keepers, major-domos. Both sides used slaves as soldiers in the Civil Wars, Emperor Augustus as Imperial Guardsmen. Gladiators and actors almost had to be slaves, which
explains the downfall of the Emperors Caligula and Nero, whose performance in these roles, though they delighted the plebs, engendered the fatal distaste of the Roman upper classes. The first was
murdered by young nobs and the second outlawed by senatorial decree.

A man born into this world was weaned, coddled, taught, fed, entertained and indeed often loved by a variety of slaves from the cradle to the grave. Long-serving slaves were manumitted on his
deathbed – Seneca’s was the classical example – and the rest were left as part of his estate. Slaves in Rome were completely inside society and indeed often, if a play on words is
permissible, inside their owners. By the end of our period few families in Rome were not laced with slave blood, which may have diminished Roman
severitas
but also made Romans more tolerant.
Rich people bought handsome slaves of all sexes for pleasure and display just as randy duchesses in the eighteenth century relished a well-turned calf in a footman or a groom both for public
contemplation and for private enjoyment. Marcus Aurelius, listing the austere attitudes of indifference to sensual pleasures of his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius – a remarkable pair of pure
Emperors – adds that he did not notice ‘the beauty of his slaves’.

The field slave or mining slave did not fare so well; one Roman matron, a big landowner, the Mrs Helmsley of her day, maintained it was cheaper to work her slaves to death
and replace them than to feed them properly. If slaves wrote love poems they have not come down to us. There are moments in Latin literature describing the love and affection of masters for their
slaves of which Virgil’s second
Eclogue
is the most famous. The desperate love of Corydon for Alexis is told at length and heart-wringingly. Alas the pampered slave boy belongs to
another. Such a beauty in the open market would have cost 24,000
denarii
– the cost of a Porsche today. A run-of-the-mill slave at this time, at the beginning of our millennium, cost
only 500
denarii
and his day’s labour half a
denarius
, but the poets were not interested in such fellows. The size of the Empire and the extent and variety of its conquests
meant that slaves, shuffled anonymously in the markets, could have come from anywhere and be anybody. Virgil’s contemporary, Horace, writes to a friend:

The reason for the
Lex Aelia Sentia,
which prohibited the manumission of slaves under thirty by masters under twenty, can be imagined. A slave in Rome had many routes to the
‘status’ of freedom, which gave him liberty but not citizenship. Then he could wear the conical little hat of liberty, revived in the French Revolution. He might purchase his
manumission from his master with his
peculium
(literally
‘private property’, usually an accumulation of tips). He might earn his freedom through public
service in the fire brigade or as a street cleaner. But the most common way of manumission was from the affection or deathbed gesture of the master. Cicero, whose manumitted slave Tiro edited his
letters, claimed that it should only take six years for a slave to become a freedman and then, if he were shrewd and industrious, he could become a millionaire like Trimalchio – the exuberant
party-giver satirized by Petronius and filmed by Fellini. Pliny records one freedman who became rich enough to leave 4,116 slaves in his will.

Members of the Roman intelligentsia were often descended from slaves. The father of Horace was a freedman who became a tax-collector or possibly an auctioneer’s assistant but in a
substantial enough way to leave him the competence of a gentleman. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, was slave as a boy to Epaphroditus, one of Nero’s courtiers.

Of course, the life of slaves, even in Rome, could be heavy with humiliation and cruelty. Ovid writes of porters being chained in Rome. Vedius Pollio, a Roman aristocrat, fed his slaves to his
lampreys for ‘trivial offences’. The 400 slaves (a large enough number to have included
silentarii
– slaves employed to keep the others quiet) of the household of the
Prefect Pedanius Secundus were led off to execution by soldiers, through a sullen crowd, after one of them had murdered him.

In the early days, the concept of slavery – of one man helping another till the soil – could be described by the historian Mommsen as ‘innocent’. But as the numbers of
slaves increased so did the Romans’ fear of them. Laws relating to slavery under Nero, for instance, were both repressive, through fear, and humane, through a sense of justice. The law under
which the 400 slaves of Pedanius Secundus were executed in
AD
61 had been initiated by Augustus but the
classical schoolmaster’s favourite,
Seneca, so famous for his clemency, did not even attend the agonizing debate in the Senate deciding that the law be enforced in this case (Professor Michael Grant suggests that the slave who
murdered his master may have been in love with him!). The Senate’s decision was truly Roman: the law was cruel but clear, it had to be implemented.

The supply of slaves came mainly through conquest. Men, women and children from defeated Italian towns were the earliest source. Then Rome was flooded by the entire population of Sardinia and
the phrase ‘cheap as a Sardinian’ became current. As the Empire expanded, slaves were shipped in from all over the world and the flow only stopped, as Gibbon pointed out, with the
completion of the Roman system of conquest. The international big business of slavery was centred on the little Cycladic island of Delos, where the turnover of 10,000 slaves a day was recorded in
the time of Augustus. Before they were suppressed, kidnappers and pirates dumped slaves anonymously on to Delos. Julius Caesar was himself kidnapped and held to ransom, as a young man. As a general
in Gaul he records selling (the sale of slaves was the general’s perk) 53,000 Aduatuci (defeated Gallic tribesmen) in one day. Perhaps he needed the money to repay Crassus . . .

There was no uniform for slaves in case they should realize how many they were. The system was based on force and was occasionally broken by greater force. Sicily was the first scene of
effective slave revolts. In that unblessed island, chain-gangs of slaves, mainly Greeks, were used by bulk farmers to run the grain business, which supplied more than half the Roman market. In 104
BC
, under the consulship of Marius, the mad young son of a Roman knight, one Titus, armed 500 slaves with weapons being auctioned off by a gladiatorial school and in no time
had an army 4,000 strong. This
revolt was put down and all participants executed. The second Sicilian revolt lasted longer. Two slave kings emerged – one called Salvius,
an Italian freedman and snake charmer, the other a Greek called Athenio – and raised an army of 60,000 well-armed slaves and 5,000 cavalry, but enthusiasm and indignation cannot glue armies
together for ever. It was not until the revolt of Spartacus in 73
BC
that the Romans were seriously threatened by ‘their enormous slave population’, which
outnumbered them three to one.

Spartacus and his ultimate destroyer, Crassus, were the stuff movies are made of: one noble, forgiving, heroic, the other greedy, cruel and charmless, the unacceptable face of Roman capitalism.
Crassus, a slave trainer and dealer on an enormous scale, bought houses when they were on fire at a cut-down price – otherwise he refused to put them out. He financed Caesar and was the third
man in the triumvirate with Caesar and Pompey. After four years Crassus defeated Spartacus and lined the Appian Way with the crucified bodies of rebellious slaves.