Invisible Romans (21 page)

Besides the importance of understanding the relative paucity of slaves and their concentration in the hands of the more well-off city-dwellers, it is also relevant to point out that slaves in large measure shared the same basic somatic features, cultural assumptions, and often language with their masters. Slaves with radically different skin color and facial features were always rare, although sub-Saharan Africans were enslaved and appear in the Romano-Grecian world, as do tall, blond, light-skinned Germanic types, for instance. The ability of the majority of slaves to blend into the physical ‘look’ of society as a whole, combined with the fact that in most instances slaves dressed exactly like ordinary people of similar occupation, meant that there was no easy, visible signal of slavery unless a brand, haircut, tattoo, slave collar, or other purpose-specific marker existed. Thus during slavery it was easy and natural for slave and free, especially recently freed slaves,
to associate with one another – and if a slave ran away, it was easy to blend into the population while attempting to escape detection. The lack of physical and somatic markers of slavery created opportunities for life that were lacking in some other historical societies with slaves.

People could come into slavery in a variety of ways. While war captives provided the most spectacular and perhaps even most numerous slaves during the expansion of Roman rule in the days of the republic, by the time of Augustus massive wars that produced large numbers of captives were relatively few and far between. Another source involved raising offspring slaves to adulthood. Births to slaves were of course slaves themselves, so children born to slaves were raised in slavery. Unwanted births to free persons could be and were abandoned, and anyone taking in such a child could raise it; although Roman law asserted that such foundlings always remained freeborn, in fact if raised in slavery it was virtually impossible to prove ‘original freedom.’ Thus foundlings were a steady source of new slaves.

The fourth main, though less important, source was enslavement of grown men and women. Although occasionally still war captives, these came primarily from bandits and pirates who were ready to kidnap travelers and other vulnerable people in towns or the countryside. Augustine attests to the horror of their indiscriminate raids on free populations in isolated areas and across the imperial borders:

So great is the number in the province of Africa of those who are called in common parlance ‘slavers,’ that they practically clear the province of human beings by carrying off people to sell in places across the sea – and almost all are free persons. For very few are discovered to be sold by parents – and even these are not sold as indentured for twenty-five years as is allowed by Roman law, but indeed they are sold as true slaves and sold across the sea as slaves. The slave traders buy real slaves from their masters only very rarely. Moreover, because of this mob of slavers a throng of predators and kidnappers is so out of control that in hordes fearsomely dressed like soldiers or wild men they swoop down on certain underpopulated rural areas screaming like banshees and forcibly drag off the people whom they then sell to the slave dealers. (
Letter
^*
10)

Gaius Tadius was one such unfortunate, as his grave attests:

Dedicated to Gaius Tadius Severus, son of Gaius, kidnapped by bandits at age 35, and his son Proculus, 6 years old. Limbricia Primigenia, freedwoman of Lucius, set this monument up for her husband and son. Alas, the son ought to have put up the gravestone for the mother! (
ILS
8506)

10. A slave on the block. The man stands on a dias for display during the auction. An auctioneer and bidder stand nearby.

11. Auctioning a slave. The auctioneer is at left, while the portly bidder turns the naked slave to examine him closely.

Despite the fact that the Roman
Lex Cornelia
forbade the sale of
citizens into slavery, slave dealers were notorious for not asking any questions. And regardless of the existence of a legal ‘plea for restoration of freedom’ before a magistrate, it must have been fairly rare for a person once kidnapped and sold to be able to assert his freedom through the legal process. In addition a father, who had total legal control over offspring, could sell a child into slavery, often to pay a debt or stave off starvation; although Roman law fussed about this, it is clear that both in the case of Roman citizens and provincials, children continued to be sold throughout our period; the quotation from Augustine above is one of the many confirmations. And there was also legal self-enslavement. While debt slavery – selling a free person into slavery to pay that person’s debts – was illegal, and technically at least a Roman citizen could not sell himself into slavery, a person could, in fact, ‘contract’ himself to become a slave, giving up his rights as a free man in return for money. ‘Many men being free sell themselves over into slavery, with the result that they are “contract slaves,” at times on difficult terms, or rather on the most harsh imaginable’ (Dio Chrysostom,
Oration
15.2). Evidently, sometimes whether legally or not, a free person voluntarily became a slave. Finally, ordinary people condemned for especially heinous crimes could be punished with slavery. The relative numbers from these sources cannot be known, but each would have its own effect on the psychology of the slave. A child raised as a slave could easily have a different outlook than an adult captured and enslaved later in life, after having lived as a free person for years. A kidnapped person must have felt the injustice of it all even more, while a self-enslaved person presumably knew what he was getting into.

Life enslaved: subjection

Despite the range of reactions to slavery it is possible to imagine arising from the various origins of individual slaves, the central fact of servitude was the total subjection of the slave to the master; they were available at all times and had to labor at the master’s will. Surely it is highly probable that Augustine got it right: ‘All slavery is filled with bitterness: everyone locked in slavery at once does what he has to, but does it grumbling’ (
Commentary on Psalm
99.7). Lucius in his asinine form describes the hard lives of slaves in a bakery:

Great gods! What miserable, pitiable creatures! Their entire bodies were a welter of inflamed bruises; their backs scarred by the rod were shaded more than covered by their sorry, ragged garments; some had a slight covering over their private parts; all wore such wretched tunics that their bodies showed through the tatters; their heads were half-shaved; they bore letters branded into their foreheads and their feet were in shackles. Eyelids scorched by the steamy dank of the dusty darkness, they were half blind in all their sallow ugliness. Just like boxers who fight sprinkled with dust, these men were white with a dirty flour ash. (Apuleius,
The Golden Ass
9.12)

And, Apuleius tells us, the owner of these slaves was ‘a decent and very sober person’! Harsh treatment was synonymous with slavery. In a letter from Egypt, one brother chides another for treating their mother ‘harshly, as if she were a slave.’ And in another a woman complains to the authorities that her husband has treated her and their children ‘as if she were his bought slave,’ abusing them and locking them away.

Of course, it was always possible that fate found a particular slave in the possession of a thoughtful master. An example may be Servandus:

Valerius Servandus, freedman of Lucius, Gaius, and Sextus Valerius, age 20, lies in this grave. His patrons set up the monument in recognition of his many merits. ‘Servitude, you were never hateful to me. Unjust Death, you took freedom from this wretched man.’ (
CIL
13.7119, Mainz, Germany)

As it was part of the master’s ideology to suppose that slaves could be content to serve, one must wonder if it was Servandus himself who thought his slavery happy, or only his patrons. And ‘kind’ or ‘good’ would perhaps be too generous a term for these owners; their motivation was purely practical – but some actions did make their slaves’ lives better than they might otherwise have been. The agricultural writer Columella offers his practical approach to managing slaves well. He saw and tried to avoid at least some of the pitfalls of slave ownership, especially by setting reasonable goals for work and sufficient levels of outfitting and feeding, by controlling cruel overseers, and by having venues for slaves to bring problems to him to be resolved (
On Rural
Matters
1.8.17–19; 11.1.13–28). One can wonder if many estates or households were run on these principles of enlightened self-interest, but at the very least it is possible that some slaves found themselves in situations that while still grossly exploitative, were at least mitigated with regard to the worst of the many possible abuses.

And abuses abounded. Physical abuse was the most frequent and violent form of degradation. The legal material in the
Digest
repeatedly makes allusion to all sorts of violence against slaves, with very few notices that repercussions might follow for the masters. Slaves could be and were beaten in the normal course of things either to encourage good behavior or punish bad, or both at once – or simply out of anger, frustration, or sadism. There was in practice no control over the master’s powers to physically abuse out of all proportion to any act: ‘Is not a penalty of many years’ confinement imposed on the slave who has provoked his master with a word, or has struck him a blow that is quickly over?’ (Augustine,
City of God
11) The old standbys were flogging (perhaps the favorite routine punishment) and confinement in chains to a cell (
ergastulum);
Aesop’s master, for example, refers to these (
Life,
p. 123). But there were an unlimited number of specific abusive behaviors, often accompanied by long-term marks of degradation such as branding: ‘Eumolpus covered both our foreheads with huge letters and wrote with a rough hand the stigmatic mark of runaway slaves all over our faces’ (Petronius,
Satyricon
103). This sort of abuse was a constant theme in fiction involving slaves, as is easily seen from the many examples in the plays of Plautus or the novels of Apuleius and Petronius. There is no indication that Christian slave holders engaged in such behavior any less than polytheists; indeed, the defenselessness against physical abuse was everywhere the preeminent marker of slavery. The evidence of early modern Brazil and North America paints a similar picture:

At the beck and call of his master day and night, the domestic servant had no regular hours. Added to the long hours was the discomfiture of constantly being under the watchful eyes of the whites and being subject to their every capricious, vengeful, or sadistic whim. Domestic servants frequently had their ears boxed or were flogged for trifling mistakes, ignorance, delinquent work, ‘insolent’ behavior, or simply for being within striking distance when the master was disgruntled (W. Blassingame,
The Slave Community)

Apuleius tells the story of a cook who feared death as punishment for allowing a deer’s haunch to be stolen (
The Golden Ass
8.31); Martial notes another cook who was whipped because a rabbit was not prepared correctly (
Epigrams
3.94). And beyond the beatings and brandings, the general physical living conditions of most slaves were abysmal, although these varied especially between rural and urban household slaves. They were dependent for food and clothing on the master; despite repetitious advice from agricultural writers and philosophers, denial of adequate supplies in all likelihood was rife.

As for living conditions, there is very little evidence for slave quarters in houses, although such have been identified at a few rural estates in Italy; it seems probable that, as occurred in the slave society of Brazil, slaves must often have lived in the hallways and under the stairs of great houses, pulling their cots out at night and putting them away during the day. There is an example of this when Lucius, not yet in his donkey-form, waits for his love, Photis, in his bedroom. He notes that ‘the slaves had their floor-space arranged as far as possible away from the door; I imagine that this was so that they would not be near enough to overhear our chat during the night’ (
The Golden Ass
2.15). So not only the beatings, but the general living conditions could be abusive. One of the most desired privileges would be to have one’s own living space, however humble. Small cells have been identified in some great houses as probably slave quarters; even a makeshift shack on the grounds must have been welcome.