The Roman Guide to Slave Management
Read The Roman Guide to Slave Management Online
Authors: Jerry Toner
Tags: #History, #Ancient, #Rome, #General, #HIS000000, #HIS002020
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2014 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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New York, NY 10012
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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD
© Text and commentary Jerry Toner, 2014
© Foreword Mary Beard, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1027-6
CHAPTER II
Getting the Best from Your Slaves
CHAPTER IV
What Makes a Good Slave?
CHAPTER V
The Punishment of Slaves
CHAPTER VI
When Only Torture Will Do
CHAPTER VIII
Remember Spartacus!
CHAPTER X
The Problem with Freedmen
CHAPTER XI
Christians and Their Slaves
About the The Roman Guide to Slave Management
I HAVE NEVER COME ACROSS
Marcus Sidonius Falx before, but I know his type. The Roman world had plenty of people just like him who owned huge numbers of slaves and who, for most of the time, did not give slavery a second thought. It was completely normal, a natural part of the social order. But the Romans did think about slaves in their own way: how they could control them, and how best to show them off to their friends. And the smarter ones (and that might include Falx here) could actually be a bit scared. They worried about what the slaves were up to behind their backs, and where the battle lines of ancient Roman culture were drawn. ‘All slaves are enemies’ ran one famous Roman slogan, well known to Falx. And on a notorious occasion in the reign of the emperor Nero, a Roman plutocrat was murdered by one of his 400 household slaves. It didn’t, as you will see, make Falx rest entirely easy in his bed, but the whole household was put to death as punishment.
I am a bit surprised that Falx and Toner got on so well. Falx is an aristocrat whereas Toner’s family – so he assures me – has its roots in those classes oppressed by the British elite (‘from an Irish potato field’
I’m told). But it is to the credit of both of them, I guess, that they seem to have hit it off, despite their political differences. Of course, there were slave owners of a very different sort from Falx, There were thousands of small traders and craftsmen who owned just one or two slaves. And very many of them were freed – and actually married those who had once been there owners, both male and female. Even in Falx’s league, there were a few favored slave secretaries and PA’s who lived better than poor free Romans trying to make a living on day labour at the docks, or selling cheap flowers in the Forum. Interestingly some of the free poor got onto the streets to demonstrate, unsuccessfully, against the (strictly legal) punishment of those 400 slaves. But Falx is talking about the use of mass slave labour.
It is hard for us now to understand all the dimensions of the relations between free, and slave, and ex-slave (and it was hard then). But we do have a few glimpses of what the rich Romans thought of their ordinary slave-workers; and Falx is one of the most reliable guides we have to what Romans would have seen as a proud tradition of ‘slave management’. He is trying to help everyone share the benefits of his wisdom, and he is a good place to learn.
Thankfully the world has moved on. But his text offers an authentic insight – as authentic as you can get – into a fundamental aspect of life in Rome and its empire. If it had been published 2,000 years ago it would have topped the management charts. Modern readers may have trouble mastering their prejudices; but underneath the buoyant rhetoric, they’ll maybe find Falx not a wholly bad man, by the standards of his day at least.
And Falx points the finger at us too. Do some of his insights still help us manage our own ‘staff’. For are we sure that ‘wage-slaves’ are really so much different from ‘slaves’? How different are we from the Romans?
Mary Beard
Cambridge, April 2014
MY NAME IS MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX
, of noble birth, whose great-great-grandfather held a consulship, and whose mother hails from an ancient senatorial lineage. Our family was given the name Falx – ‘the Claw’ – for our stubborn refusal to let anything go. I served with distinction in the Legio VI ‘Ironclad’ for five years, campaigning mostly against troublesome oriental tribes, before returning to Rome to run my affairs and my substantial estates in Campania and the province of Africa. My family has owned countless slaves for countless generations. There is nothing we do not know about the management of them.
In order to write for a non-Roman audience I have been compelled to use the services of a certain Jerry Toner, a teacher in one of our miserable northern provinces, who knows something of our Roman ways but shares few of our virtues. Indeed a man so soft I have never encountered outside the servile class: he has not once fought in battle, can scarce drink a small amphora of watered wine, and even stoops so low that he himself will clean his baby’s backside rather than leave such foul tasks to the slaves and womenfolk. He is, however, most
blessed to be married to a wife of great beauty and intellect (though she is perhaps more forward with her opinions than a woman ought to be), to whom I am most grateful for ensuring that the meaning of my text is clear for you barbarian readers.
Marcus Sidonius Falx
Rome, pridie Idus Martias
MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX’S
existence may be the subject of academic debate, but the reality of his opinions is beyond doubt. They provide a Roman’s-eye view of slavery. Slavery was a core institution of the Roman world for the whole of its existence. It was so central that it never occurred to anyone that it might not exist. Owning slaves was as normal as voting Republican in Texas or Democrat in New York. We have to remember that slavery was seen as acceptable in the USA and Britain until only two centuries ago. Even freedom-loving Founding Fathers, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, owned slaves themselves. Falx’s guide tries to let us understand something of the mentality of that thankfully long-gone world.
Sadly, we don’t know what the Romans’ slaves thought themselves, because their views didn’t matter. But we know plenty about what their Roman masters thought of them. The substance of Marcus’s words survives in a variety of Roman texts on slavery, although he has not followed them slavishly. These sources are often obscure or quite hard to interpret. This single text is his clear
and simple manual for managing slaves the Roman way. Needless to say the fact that I have helped bring it to publication does not mean I approve of it.
Marcus has been a difficult author to work with. He holds many strong and unpalatable views which he refuses to acknowledge may be wrong or immoral. But by Roman standards, Marcus was a decent man. His text shows how the Roman world, for all its apparent familiarity, can be almost casually shocking. It also shows how complex an institution was slavery.
