The Roman Guide to Slave Management (24 page)

By the time of the empire the slave system was too well oiled to face serious, large-scale threats. Slave resistance coalesced around small acts of lying, cheating, pretending to be ill, and going slow. Such small-scale defiance took many forms and was not always confrontational, involving passive tactics such as evasion and pretending to be stupid. We must be careful not to dramatise social relations into a model that sees Roman society as involved in a constant class conflict between owners and their human capital.

Characters like Bulla Felix can easily be read today as
Robin Hood figures: social bandits who turn the injustice of the normal world on its head and form an egalitarian community to resist the corruption of the regime. However these are texts written for an upper-class audience and it is more likely that the characters within them are a literary convention used to highlight the poor governance of certain corrupt officials and emperors. Nonetheless, the bandit stories do use popular themes of injustice, poverty and corruption to exert pressure on poor-quality rulers. Such stories threw the government’s own standards back in its face when it fell short.

Some acts of slave resistance can be seen as negotiating techniques between slaves and their masters. By probing to see what they could get away with, they tried to chip away at the boundaries that enslaved them. Being a coward could be a useful tactic for a slave because it might prevent him from being placed in any position of danger. Another was to appeal to the master’s soft side, if he had one. Seneca mentions that one of the irritations of owning slaves was that it meant relying on people who were always breaking down in tears (
On Tranquillity of the Mind
8.8). Such crying could have been an actual expression of distress or it could have been a tactic to try to avoid an unpleasant task or punishment. Owners often denied the humanity of their slaves, seeing them as little more than animals. By breaking down in tears, the slaves could try to reverse this process and assert their humanity, showing masters the effects of their brutal treatment. This was probably a tactic that was only likely to benefit some domestic slaves, who were in a position to have some kind of direct relationship with their master.

Gossip was also a way for slaves to try to actively alter their master’s behaviour. Gossip advertised a master’s maltreatment to a wider audience. It suggested that the master was not a good man and reduced his standing in the community. Advice given to Cicero on electioneering warns that gossip often emanates from households. It says that even slaves should be treated with great consideration in the run-up to an election. Trickster tales, like those of the
Aesop Romance
, allowed the downtrodden to enjoy situations where the little man won, albeit temporarily. The trickster hero was a clever mischief-maker, who overturned the normal world where the master was in charge. Such a symbolic levelling provided a kind of psychic revenge against the rich, which was in itself a kind of empowerment. Whether any of this kind of small-scale or passive resistance ever really amounted to much is impossible to say.

The account of the First Slave War in Sicily of
c
.135–132
BC
is in Diodorus Siculus 34.2. The accounts of Spartacus’s rebellion are in Plutarch’s
Life of Crassus
and Appian
Civil Wars
1.14. The story of terrorist attacks in Rome in support of Hannibal is at Livy 26.27. The murder of Larcius Macedo is described in Pliny the Younger
Letters
3.14. Bulla Felix is to be found in Dio Cassius 77.10.

   
CHAPTER IX
   

M
ANY SLAVES LONG
for freedom. Despite the fact that they have no social value they feel humiliated and degraded by their treatment. And even though they are, as a rule, morally worthless they think they deserve to be free. Many of them even seem to feel that it is somehow unjust that they are slaves, even in cases when the moral and legal arguments against them are watertight.

That slaves know they may be freed is actually of great benefit to the owner. It is a carrot with which to incentivise the slave to work diligently and honestly. It is also a stick with which to punish him if he disappoints you in some way. Hope can help men endure all kinds of suffering. Hopelessness can cause them to take desperate measures.

In fact not all slaves want to be freed. Some are so contented within their household, enjoying a close relationship with their master, that there seems to be little to be gained by becoming free and taking on all the cares and responsibilities of that status. There is the famous
case of Gaius Melissus, who was born free at Spoleto, but abandoned as a baby because his parents could not agree what to do with him. A local man rescued him and brought him up as a slave, but educated him to a high standard. Eventually he presented the slave as a gift to the emperor Augustus’s close friend Maecenas to use as a letter-writer. Melissus soon realised that Maecenas treated him as an equal on account of his fine intellect, even accepting him as he would a friend. At this point, his mother suddenly appeared and tried to claim back his freedom, hoping no doubt to get some financial advantage from having a son who was close to the centre of power. But Melissus decided that he would prefer to remain as a slave, since, as Maecenas’s friend, his status could not be improved. Maecenas soon afterwards set him free anyway because of these noble sentiments and Melissus even became friendly with Augustus himself. Indeed the emperor appointed him to build up the library in the Portico of Octavia.

Bequeathing freedom in a will is the most common form of setting slaves free. But if you choose to do it while you are still alive there is the ancient rod ceremony. In this, you as the master appear before a magistrate who publicly affirms the slave’s new freedom. You then give the slave a slap as a final insult for them to suffer at your hands. There are also more informal methods should you not want to go through such a ritual. The old-fashioned way is to hold the slave’s hand, say, ‘I want this man to be free,’ and then let go of him. This is where we get our word for freeing slaves from, to ‘manumit’, meaning literally to let him go from your hand.

Often I have simply written a letter to the slave, or I have invited him to sit at table and join me and my friends for dinner, thereby announcing it to them as witnesses. I rather like such relaxed arrangements within the household. The best slaves are those who become part of the family and so it is nice to carry out the procedure among other members of the household. I like it best if I can surprise them – it is a delight to see the mix of shock, joy and gratitude on their faces. The only disadvantage with this is that the rod ceremony is required for the slave to get full legal citizenship, but this can always be done at a later date as a formality.

Sadly, such acts of manumission are not free. The government taxes them at 5 per cent of the value of the slave. So many slaves are set free that it is a good source of revenue. As an owner you also have to be aware of the limits to manumission that were laid down by Augustus. The emperor was concerned that mass manumission would dilute the strong citizen body of Romans with too many weaklings and foreigners. He therefore decreed that only a certain maximum percentage of a master’s slaves could be set free in a will. The percentage varied according to how many slaves the master owned. A master who owned between two and ten slaves, which is probably by far the most common number, could manumit half of them; if he had between ten and thirty he could free a third, but only a quarter if he possessed between thirty and a hundred. The largest owners, with between one hundred and five hundred slaves, could release only one-fifth of them. Augustus also imposed a variety of other conditions designed to prevent the worst kind of
slaves from becoming citizens. So slaves who had ever been tortured or branded were banned from becoming citizens no matter how they had been manumitted.

When to free is a difficult decision. The main distinction to draw is whether you are setting the slave free because of emotional bonds you have developed with him or because he has paid you money. When it comes to faithful domestic slaves who have given you years of loyal service, then my view, one shared with most others I know, is that it is right and proper for them to be rewarded with their freedom. I once freed a highly intelligent secretary of mine called Tiro, because he had always proved completely trustworthy and diligent, and he was such a civilised character that his former condition was below his real station in life. I preferred to have him as a friend than as a slave, a view that my whole family shared. My wife jumped for joy at the decision. That reminds me that I haven’t heard back from him yet. I heard he was ill and wrote to him more than once but he hasn’t replied. These freedmen! He deserves a good beating!

Many a master has released a female slave because he has grown affectionate towards her, and wants that relationship to become a legitimate marriage. While this is perhaps reprehensible in some ways, it is hardly surprising that a master who is single sometimes grows close to an attractive young slave girl who is eager to please him. If you find yourself in that position make sure that you release the girl on condition of marriage. I know of several old fools who have fallen for a slave girl, released them in the expectation of marriage, only for them to
run off with some younger man. Or it is frequently the case that some freedman of yours will offer to pay you to release a slave you still own, with whom he had been having a relationship when he was still a slave. On such occasions it seems churlish to deny a loyal servant his opportunity for marital bliss. It once even happened that a freedwoman of mine came back to buy her man from me. Again, I could hardly say no given her long years of loyal service and the fact that she had delivered me three healthy sons.

With slave women I would not normally consider freeing them until they are past childbearing age or have been productive in this regard. The household has too great a need for home-bred slaves to permit such an indulgence on the part of the master.

What length of service deserves to be rewarded with liberty? There is an argument for setting a maximum limit on the number of years’ service required to achieve manumission. A total of twenty or thirty years of servitude seems too harsh for anyone to bear. I generally feel that thirty is a good age at which to free a slave, giving them time to establish themselves in society and continue to deliver you good service as a loyal freedman. There are some who feel that only five or six years of servitude are enough. If a Roman soldier fell into slavery as the result of being captured in war and had to be ransomed by the state, he paid back the cost of his ransom with five years’ service as a slave of the state. In the republic, the orator Cicero said that the first six years of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship was equivalent to a full term of slavery for the Roman people.