15
Rome stands built upon the ancient ways of life and upon her men.
Ennius
Free Romans
As Virgil makes clear in the Aeneid, the enormous, mighty, cosmopolitan city of Rome grew out of a small farming village on the banks of the Tiber. The people who initially made Rome so powerful were highly conservative, with a great respect for the traditions of their ancestors, which they called the mos maiorum, an ethos that is eloquently expressed by Horace, whose father told him:
I will have achieved my aim if I can train you in the ways of the worthy folk of the days of old, and keep your name and life unspoiled.1
The preservation of the mos maiorum was important to the stability, cohesiveness and continuity of Roman society. Because Rome was originally an agricultural community that often had to defend itself, the qualities of successful farmers and soldiers became transformed into virtues, most notably gravitas (a sense of responsibility end earnestness), frugalitas (frugality of taste) and pietas (a sense of duty towards family, state and gods). Soldiering, too, was laudable because it represented patriotism. Recall Horace’s famous line: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori2 It is sweet and honourable to die for your fatherland. Even when the rustic village had metamorphosed into an imperial metropolis, these gritty values remained at the heart of the Roman self-image.
Obviously the reality did not always match the ideal: there were plenty of frivolous, lazy, scrounging Romans, and nowadays the word ‘Roman’ is more likely to be associated with orgies, mad emperors and crowds baying for blood in an amphitheatre. Nevertheless, throughout their history, the Romans had a clearly defined notion of how they were expected to behave, and a classic example of this is the legendary Horatius Cocles, a farmer-soldier who, in 508 BCE, single-handedly repelled the attacking Etruscans from the one bridge over the River Tiber while the other Romans chopped it down. He saved Rome because he was tough, persistent and, above all, had the pietas to put his own life on the line. His courage and pietas were rewarded with glory (a statue was erected in his honour) and farmland (as much as he could plough in one day), and it is interesting to contrast him with the Greek heroes Achilles, who put himself before the communal safety of his comrades, and Odysseus, who prevailed because he wasquick-witted.
The Romans lived in an extremely class-conscious society, in which the older and nobler your family, the higher you stood on the social ladder. A Roman’s status was determined by the possession (or lack) of wealth, freedom and Roman citizenship, and the division between those who had Roman citizenship and those who did not was fundamental. Until 212 CE three groups of men (not women) qualified for Roman citizenship:
1. Free-born men whose parents were from a Roman citizen background;
2. Freedmen: men freed from slavery. Ex-slaves became citizens and could vote, and, although they could not stand for high office, become a Senator or be one of the Equites, their sons could;
3. Individuals or communities who were granted citizenship by the Roman government, e.g. ex-soldiers from the provinces received Roman citizenship on retirement.
In the early Republic citizenship conferred a number of public and private rights. In the public arena citizens could vote on legislation and at elections, and hold office as magistrates. This brought an obligation to pay taxes, serve in the legions and be subject to the magistrates. In private, the right of conubium recognized the validity of a marriage, the bequests in a will and the right to hold inherited property; commercium conferred the right to buy land and to get a fair price for what was sold; and provocatio granted the right of appeal to an Assembly against the act of a Roman magistrate. The statement, ‘I am a Roman citizen,’ was a crucial one, and an especially famous example of someone asserting this was Saint Paul:
And as they bound him with thongs, Paul said unto the centurion that stood by, Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is Roman, and uncondenmed? When the centurion heard that, he went and told the chief captain, saying, Take heed what thou doest; for this man is a Roman. Then the chief captain came, and said unto him. Tell me, art thou a Roman? He said, Yea.3
However, not everyone was as fortunate as Paul. Cicero described how Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily in the 70s BCE committed heinous atrocities against Gavius of Consa, a Roman citizen. Gavius was:
dragged into the middle of the forum, stripped, tied, and whipped. The poor man shouted out that he was a Roman citizen, a resident of Consa, that he had served in the army. [Verres ignored this and] the whole time, while he [Gavius] suffered, while the whip cracked, no groan, no cry of any kind was heard from the tortured man except ‘I am a Roman citizen.’4
Eventually Verres crucified him.
Citizens’ rights were held to be so important that in 90 BCE the Italians went to war with Rome to win them. Full Roman citizenship was ultimately extended to all free people in Italy, and the process of granting citizenship to the inhabitants of the Empire outside Italy continued – for instance, in 49 BCE Julius Caesar gave the franchise to Transalpine Gaul, a Gallic legion and several provincial towns. Roman citizenship was ultimately granted to all free people (women included) within the borders of the Empire by Caracalla in 212 CE under the constitutio Antoniniana (Antonine constitution). This can be seen either as a liberal move to eradicate the distinctions between Roman citizens and non-citizens within the Empire or as a cynical ploy to increase the numbers liable to taxes on citizens by around 300 per cent. Any free person born in Britain, Spain, Greece, Egypt or Syria could therefore assert ‘I am a Roman citizen’, although by that time the most important privileges of citizenship only applied to the higher of the two citizen classes: thehonestiores (Senators, Equites, army officers, etc.) and the humiliores (everyone else). In law the honestiores were subject to less severe punishments – rarely death, and never crucifixion, being thrown to the beasts or forced labour in the mines – which again emphasizes how extremely class-conscious was Roman society.
One possible safety-net for Rome’s poor population was the patron–client relationship. The fundamental unit of Roman society was the familia, at whose head was the paterfamilias. Although it gives us our word ‘family’, familia included dependants and property as well as blood relatives – ‘household’ is a better translation. The paterfamilias had responsibility for the welfare of his wife, children, relatives by blood or adoption, freedmen and slaves, and they owed total obedience to him. A similar situation applied at State level, since the Romans regarded membership of the State (the res publica, ‘public matter’) as analogous to membership of a familia. The Senators (not called patres, ‘fathers’, entirely by coincidence) were expected to look after the welfare of those inferior to them, in return for respect. In practice, of course, the arrangement did not always work like this, but it led to a crucial paternalistic relationship at the heart of Roman society: that between cliens (‘client’) and patronus (‘patron’).
The way the system was intended to work is outlined in the Leges Regiae (‘Royal Laws’) attributed to Romulus. He allowed every plebeian to choose any patrician that he wanted as his patron. It was the duty of the patricians to explain the laws to their clients; to do everything for them that fathers do for their sons with regard to money; to go to court on their behalf when they were wronged; and to defend them against anyone who brought charges against them. As time went on, some plebeian families also rose to a position where they might become patrons, but in the early days patrons tended to come from the Senatorial class, and they expected their clients to work on behalf of their political careers, vote for them and to appear with them as retainers in public. The more clients you had, the greater your status.
The entire patron/client system was, in theory, a mutually beneficial arrangement, but as time went on there was a shift in the way it operated. Manumitted slaves automatically became clientes of their ex-masters, and because they tended not to be native Romans, they had a different take on the relationship. Furthermore, in the Imperial period, when opportunities for political campaigning were severely curtailed, both parties needed to find new ways of maintaining the relationship. As a consequence of thesalutatio(‘morning salute’), which publicly acknowledged the patron’s superiority, the role of cliens frequently came to be that of a cringing, sycophantic parasite. Clients would turn up at a patron’s house in the morning wearing togas (it was considered indecent to dress in anything else) and queue in order of their social status before greeting their patron as dominus (‘master’). The client might be hoping for distributed food (sportula), gifts, cash, dinner invitations or even inheritances. In the first century CE writers such as Seneca and Martial were very disparaging about both the degeneration of the clientes and the corresponding arrogance of the patrons.
There was even a hierarchy of patrons: Martial indicates that if you went to see your patron, there was a chance that he might not be there because he was visiting his patron. Most frustrating, particularly if your patron lived on the other side of Rome. Yet, as Seneca tells us in his Essay About the Brevity of Life, even if your patron was at home, there was no guarantee of a successful outcome. He might be still in bed, ignore you or rush off on a pretence of urgent business after keeping you waiting for ages. He might not even be able to remember your name,5 and the poet Juvenal adds that even a ‘successful’ meeting might not be worth all the degradation, if all you got was a bimonthly invitation to a dinner with appalling wine and ghastly food.6
Rome’s emperors tended to treat the urban population of Rome as their own clientes. Under the Republic this often volatile and dangerous group of people had frequently been manipulated by ambitious politicians, but when Augustus finally established himself as Princeps, he remained acutely aware of the practical aspects of keeping the plebs docile. No one could outbid him:
To every man of the common people of Rome I paid 300 sestertii in accordance with my father’s will; and in my own name I gave 400 sestertii from the spoils of war in my 5th consulship … These gratuities of mine reached never fewer than 250,000 persons … I gave 60 denarii to each of the common people then in receipt of the corn-dole, namely slightly over 200,000 persons.7
The 200,000 people sufficiently poor to qualify for the corn dole is not the same as the number of those ‘out of work and claiming benefit’, because they would need to supplement this with income from a variety of jobs. But the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the upper classes towards them is illuminated by Cicero, who said that the ‘vulgar’ livelihoods are those of hired workmen who are paid for manual labour rather than for artistic skill; those buying from wholesale merchants to retail immediately; mechanics; and trades that cater for sensual pleasures, such as fishmongers, butchers, cooks, perfumers and dancers. On the other hand, professions requiring a high degree of intelligence, or from which significant benefit to society is derived – medicine, architecture, teaching, etc. – are proper for those whose social position they become. But, of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture.8
The Roman plebs often appear as a rather faceless mass ignored by Roman writers: the vast majority of our literary sources do not come from the ‘man-or-woman-in-the-street’. That cliché, ‘woman-in-the-street’, is more relevant to Rome than it is to Athens. In comparison to their Athenian counterparts, Roman women enjoyed relative freedom both inside and outside the home, and the history of Rome resonates with women who left their mark in a way that those of Athens could never do. The emphasis of many ancient historians, and the salacious interests of some of the poets, can leave a distorted picture of intrigue, immorality and high-level political chicanery, but even so they provide fascinating insights. If we are aware of who is being referred to, what stratum of society she belonged to, what her age and marital status was, and what the context and purpose of the source were, we can get a long way into the everyday workings of Roman society.
Roman law said that women had infirmitas sexus (‘the weakness of their sex’) and levitas animi (‘light-mindedness’). In childhood a woman was under the authority (manus) of the paterfamilias, who had absolute power, extending (theoretically) to taking her life. Because there was a choice between types of marriage, he also decided whether his daughter would ultimately live under the manus of her husband after she got married or remain under his. There were three forms of marriage in which the woman was subject to the manus of her husband: confarreatio (formal marriage); coemptio (marriage consisting of a mutual ‘mock sale’ by which the wife was released from her own family); and usus (cohabitation for one year). Quite how much authority the husband had over his wife in these types of marriage is debatable: Cato tells us that husbands had the right to kill their wives for adultery or drinking (because drinking leads to adultery), but Dionysius of Halicarnassus states that the husband had at least to confer with the woman’s relatives first. The marriage without the manus of the husband (sine manu) is well attested also. The advantage is that the property of the woman’s family does not transfer to the husband’s, and it was a common form of marriage in the Republic, although it was a cause of instability because it was easy for the woman to return to her family.
Roman marriages were often political in nature, designed to cement links between influential families: Julius Caesar married off his daughter Julia to Pompey; Octavian married off his sister Octavia to Mark Antony; and in legend Aeneas loved Dido, but ultimately made a dynastic marriage with Lavinia. This is nothing new in the ancient world, although in Rome we do hear of women initiating the marriage, as Valeria did when she won over the dictator Sulla.
According to the definition of Herrenius Modestinus, Roman marriage was ‘a joining together of a man and a woman, and a partnership (for life) in all areas of life, a sharing in divine and human law’.9 It usually took place when the girl was around fourteen years of age, and would be preceded by a formal betrothal and usually accompanied by a dowry, which was transferred to the husband for the duration of the marriage. Although childbirth was dangerous and infant mortality high, the man essentially took a wife for the procreation of children, and in early Rome he had the right to decide whether or not a pregnancy should continue and whether or not to keep any children that were born. Under the Principate, although there was still some disapproval, contraception and abortion were practised by women who were unwilling to bear children. A doctor in Trajan’s reign advised that it was better to prevent conception taking place and only to resort to abortion to prevent later danger in childbirth if the uterus is too small, has swellings or cracks at the entrance, or some such difficulty.10 He goes on to give a number of methods of contraception using herbs and medicines. In about 200 CE abortion was criminalized, although exposure was not outlawed until 374 CE.
Divorce was relatively easy and by the first century BCE could be initiated by either party through the withdrawal of affectio maritalis (the reciprocal attitude of regarding one another as husband and wife), but, if the woman was still in the manus of her father, it was also possible for him to dissolve the marriage. The dowry was a major concern and, unless the woman was divorced for immoral conduct, it would be returned to her family. Julius Caesar divorced Pompeia after the Bona Dea scandal; Pompey divorced Mucia Tertia who had been unfaithful to him during his absence from Rome in the 60s BCE; yet we hear very little of divorce on the ground of an adulterous husband, largely due to the double standard that saw relationships with slaves and/or prostitutes as healthy and acceptable, or at least preferable to those with other men’s wives:
The sight of a famous aristocrat leaving a brothel drew
a famous remark from Cato: ‘Keep up the good work!’ he said.
‘Whenever a young man’s veins are swollen by accursed lust
he’s right to go down to that sort of place instead of grinding
other men’s wives 11
An adulterous husband is only punished if he consorts with another man’s wife. Getting caught in the act could involve extremely painful and humiliating retribution if the wronged husband was able to overpower his rival – Catullus speaks of the adulterer having a horse-radish (considerably bigger than the English variety) or a mullet shoved up his backside.12
Childlessness might also be a reason for the dissolution of a marriage. An inscription called the Laudatio Turiae shows that Turia ‘did the right thing’ and offered her husband a divorce on these grounds, although he rejected the idea. The children of divorced parents remained with their father.
Widows were encouraged to remarry yet also to remain faithful to the memory of their dead husband in accordance with the very Roman ideal of the univira (= a woman that has only had one husband). This serves to illustrate the considerable, and oftenconflicting, demands that were made on Roman women. The ancient sources are full of exempla (role models) whose behaviour reinforces an ideal of virtue, with a great stress on chastity, although these particular women tend to be mythical, upper-class and either heroines or villains, so the tales don’t tell us what life was really like. The tombstone of A my mone indicates that the qualities admired in a Roman matrona and materfamilias included being beautiful, a maker of wool, dutiful, respectable, a good housewife, chaste and a stay-at-home,13 although this too should perhaps be treated with caution because funerary monuments tend to idealize the deceased.
The growth of Rome’s empire, the influx of wealth and slaves that went with it, marriages sine manu, and the repeal of various austerity laws, were all instrumental in giving new independence and assertiveness to some Roman women. Certain women also came to be better educated under Greek influence, and artistic and literary accomplishments could enhance a woman’s reputation: Pompey’s cultured wife Cornelia was praised for her lyre-playing, geometry and philosophy. Occasionally, however, it went too far for Roman taste, as in the case of Sempronia, who, says Sallust, was well educated in Greek and Latin literature, but had greater skill in lyre-playing and dancing than any respectable woman really needed. Seemliness and chastity were not her greatest assets, yet he acknowledges that she could write poetry, crack jokes and converse with decorum, tenderness or wantonness, and that she was truly ‘a woman of ready wit and considerable charm’.14 It was women like this that Roman poets often wrote about: Catullus’ Lesbia, Tibullus’ Delia, and Ovid’s Corinna are all well-educated, intelligent, independent, high-maintenance girlfriends.
Unlike Athenian women, Roman women spent a large amount of time in public. They were permitted to attend the circus, theatre and amphitheatre, subject to certain rules (e.g. in the theatre they had to sit behind the men, though this was not the case in thecircus), and could accompany their husbands to dinner parties. In fact, even Rome’s first Emperor could not control the women of his own household, despite his high-profile public concern with morality, married life and families. His daughter Julia was married to his stepson Tiberius, who spent a lot of his time away from Rome, and things went badly awry. She was thirty-eight, ‘a time of life approaching old age’,15 but obviously didn’t regard herself as an old maid (she had her grey hairs removed by a slave girl), and she became the leader of a smart, extravagant, pleasure-loving set. But in 2 BCE Augustus banished her:
She had been accessible to scores of paramours; in nocturnal revels she had roamed about the city; the very forum and the rostrum, from which her father had proposed a law against adultery, had been chosen by the daughter for her debaucheries; she had daily resorted to the statue of Marsyas, and, laying aside the role of adulteress, there sold her favours.16
Despite the trends towards greater emancipation of women, certain ingrained male attitudes remained pretty unreconstructed. In a proposal of 21 CE that makes Roman military wives sound like modern footballers’ ‘Wags’, Caecina Severus argued that Romans going abroad as governors should not be allowed to take their wives along, on the grounds that a company of women makes a Roman march more like a barbarian invasion. Women might be weak and not up to the physical exertion, but they are ferocious, meddlesome and soon have the centurions under their thumb.17 His proposal was defeated, however, on the grounds that ‘if a woman does wrong, it is her husband’s fault’.
Children and Education
Like other members of the familia, children were totally under the control of the paterfamilias. The Leges Regiae gave the father the power to imprison his son, scourge him, put him in chains, keep him at work in the fields or put him to death.18
In Rome’s early days, education placed great emphasis on the mos maiorum, the family and one’s seniors. A child’s initial upbringing was entrusted to the mother until, at the age of seven, a boy came under his father’s supervision. An upper-classpaterfamiliaswould teach his son reading, writing, PE, how to use weapons and, using the legends of Rome and its heroes, moral and social conduct, plus a knowledge of Roman law as enshrined in the Twelve Tables. The boy would accompany his father as he went about his business, and learn the art of public speaking by listening to the speeches of the great orators.
The importance of role models was paramount. At sixteen the boy assumed the toga virilis (gown of manhood) and might well be placed under the charge of an older person of distinction to be educated in public affairs. Such a period was called tirocinium fori. The youth would then do a similar apprenticeship as an aide to a military officer.
The values inculcated in the young Roman emphasized patriotism and the greater good of the community. Luxury and softness initially had no place in an education programme that was less about developing the individual than about preparing the citizen for practical life. However, in the third and second centuries BCE Greek culture began to impinge on Roman life and some Romans started to adopt elements of Greek educational practice. A system of schools developed, although some upper-class students were educated at home by a private tutor, usually a Greek slave or freedman, in which case their education was bilingual in Greek and Latin. In fact, the vast majority of teachers were Greek. From the ages of seven to eleven, both boys and girls might go to a primary school where they were chaperoned by a paedagogus, a slave who might act as a personal tutor, and who accompanied them to, at and from their lessons, which were taught by a Litterator or Ludi Magister. The curriculum would be centred on learning to read, write and do basic arithmetic.
From age twelve upwards, the children – now more boys than girls (who would be getting married at around fourteen) – attended a secondary school under the tutelage of a Grammaticus. They studied grammar, literature and general subjects such as history and philosophy. Both Greek and Latin authors were studied, often with quite detailed analysis of the original language.
The student’s tertiary education mainly revolved around the study of rhetoric conducted by a Rhetor. If the boys (hardly any girls by this stage) wanted an advanced education, they might go abroad to a Greek ‘university town’ such as Athens or Rhodes. Theultimate goal of this educational track was facility in rhetoric, although there was also a strong emphasis on morality.
Not everyone approved of this system, however, and by the early second century BCE there were two clearly discernible trends in Roman education: the traditional one espoused by conservatives such as M. Porcius Cato, who was hostile to pretty much all things Greek; and a Greek-influenced one embraced by the likes of the ‘Scipionic Circle’ and epitomized by the education of Scipio Aemilianus, the son of Aemilius Paullus, who was surrounded by Greek teachers, scholars, rhetoricians, sculptors, painters, overseers of horses and hounds, and instructors in hunting (Terence’s The Brothers may be a topical reflection of the issues of the day).
Strongly developed skills in public persuasion were a ticket to high office, authority within the Senate and influence with the plebs. So suspicious of this art were the traditionalists that in 161 BCE teachers of rhetoric were banned from living in Rome, and an edict passed in 92 BCE outlined the conservatives’ specific objections to rhetoricians: they were undermining the mos maiorum. Nevertheless, they remained in demand. The Rhetores were a close approximation of the Greek Sophists, and there were certain fixed conventions or rules for orators, which were assimilated by their students through various preparatory exercises. Then the pupils had to compose imaginary speeches and deliver them to their fellow students. An important part of this exercise (declamatio) was using the appropriate facial gestures and hand movements.
There were two different kinds of declamatio. One, called suasoria, was rather like an undergraduate essay assignment, since it involved producing a speech justifying some historical or fictional course of action: ‘Should Sulla have resigned his dictatorship?’, ‘Should Cato have committed suicide?’, etc. The second type was the controversia, which involved arguing for or against particular legal cases, such as: Suppose that the law states that if a woman has been raped she can choose either to have the rapist condemned to death or to marry him without giving him any dowry. A man rapes two women on the same night. One asks for him to be put to death, the other chooses to marry him. Defend either proposal.
In a culture that was predominantly oral, there was considerable relevance in cultivating an art that would be useful in the law courts and politics, where aspiring young Romans often sought to make their mark. However, with the demise of the Republic it became far too dangerous for wannabe politicians to speak their minds, so the art of declamatio metamorphosed into a rather artificial exercise practised for its own sake. Its themes became totally improbable, and the whole thing became a triumph of style over content. In first century CE Petronius opened his Satyricon with a tirade against the ‘ludicrous amalgamation of honeyed words and delicate phrases that fit ill with the bloody subject-matter’;19 and the Younger Pliny summarized the decline beautifully:
Has the news reached you? Valerius Licinianus has taken up teaching rhetoric in Sicily. What a fall. What a drop. Only yesterday he was a senator and an orator – now an exile and a rhetor. At his first lecture he came in dressed in a Greek cloak and announced that he would dilate on this theme: ‘how the mighty are fallen’.20
Slaves
A Roman would be unlikely to include slaves in a chapter on Roman society, since slaves were not regarded as a social group. They were property. But they were nevertheless an integral part of Rome’s social fabric. Rome was a slave-owning society for its entire history – so was everywhere else at the time – and the institution went unquestioned, even if a few intellectuals began to explore the morality of the actual treatment of slaves. Yet it is extremely difficult to generalize about things like the lifestyle, position, treatment, opportunities and life-expectancy of slaves, since this was entirely dependent on issues such as: where they came from; how they had been sourced (captured in war, kidnapped by pirates, born into slavery?); how well educated they were; whom they belonged to; what tasks they carried out; and so on.
Although the Romans always took for granted the existence of slaves, they also lived in perpetual fear of them, neatly expressed in the proverbial phrase tot servi quot hostes ( = ‘as many enemies as you have slaves’). In some ways their fear was entirely justified, and it certainly dictated legislation and public attitudes. In 135 BCE some slaves on a large farm in Sicily started a revolt that went on for nearly four years and ultimately involved more than 70,000 slaves before the Roman army crushed it; another revolt occurred in Sicily in 104–101 BCE; and the most famous revolt was that of Spartacus (73–71 BCE). The memory of Spartacus’ rebellion may well be behind the story of the Senate rejecting a proposal to distinguish slaves from freedmen by their dress, on the grounds that it would be extremely dangerous if the slaves became aware of their numbers.21
The Romans had a number of sources of supply for slaves, including: anyone captured in war; people seized by pirates or kidnappers; unsuccessful rebellious provincials; people enslaved for debt (prior to 326 BCE); criminals convicted of capital crimes; exposed children ‘rescued’ into slavery; children sold by families who could no longer feed them; and the offspring of slaves. Like any other form of property, you could buy them, give them to someone, inherit them, and acquire them by sequestration (i.e. as part of a debt from someone else’s property), but you could also breed them. From the mid-second century BCE the island of Delos became the greatest slave-market yet known, allegedly capable of both admitting and sending away 10,000 slaves on the same day.22 From sources like this slaves were then sold in the Forum at Rome.
It was common to stereotype the tasks of a slave by nationality: Gauls or Spaniards would make good herdsmen; Greeks would make good doctors; and so on. In a large household a slave might do a specialized job, perhaps as a shorthand writer (notarius), clerk or accountant. An ex-slave of Augustus’ time left more than 4,000 slaves in his legacy, and the fictional Trimalchio, a nouveau-riche ex-slave with taste inversely proportional to his staggering wealth, also owned a vast number of slaves, including one boy with a carefully grown mop of hair on which he would wipe his hands. In a reasonably affluent home there might be a specialist tutor or a nurse, plus any number of litter-bearers, cooks, gardeners, hairdressers, laundrywomen and the like. In a smaller household there might be just one or two slaves whose duties would be spread more widely. Many of the slave characters in Roman comedy are of this type, helping their masters in the fields, doing odd jobs and generally enjoying a reasonably affable relationship with them. They might also receive a peculium, a grant of property (usually a business), which the slave was permitted to manage (but not own) and which might in time provide the financial wherewithal for buying his freedom.
Domestic service was infinitely preferable to work on a farm, in amine or factory, or as a public slave. City-owned slaves worked on things like construction projects, while other slaves were used by factory owners or large landowners, for whom they would literally slave away at one dreary lifelong job. Among the most unfortunate were those purchased to serve as gladiators or prostitutes.
Varro gives advice on the purchase of slaves; reads like a visit to a cattle market, and the similarity is not just fortuitous. A reputable slave dealer, in a process that, in terms of attitudes and prices, resembles a second-hand car dealership would certify that the slave was in good health, not a runaway (i.e. someone else’s property), and was not guilty of any crime. A second-century CE papyrus document from Roman Egypt shows us how Julius Germanus took possession of a female slave, about twenty-five years old, from Agathos Daemon: she was non-returnable (except if she was epileptic), cost a whopping 1,200 dr. and came with a warranty.23
Many family slaves were also born in the household. The Roman term for such a slave was verna, and, while these tended to experience better conditions, the master, too, might benefit from the fact that they would be able to speak (and probably read) Latin, and would (hopefully) be attached to his family, work better and not revolt. Cicero’s friend Atticus had a household consisting entirely of vernae.
If you did not want to invest your capital in buying slaves, you could rent them. A rental agreement made in 186 CE by the slave-owner Glaukios shows just how dismal the plight of a rental slave could be – rental customers tended to be less concerned about the welfare of the property they had hired, and in this case the slave was allowed eight days holiday a year, and if her master needed her during the night to bake bread, he could summon her without anything being deducted from the rental fee.24
There are a number of works, such as the Elder Cato’s On Agriculture, which give slave-owners the hard-nosed advice to sell aged or unhealthy slaves in the way that you would offload old work oxen or blemished sheep. Varro’s De Re Rustica also containsinteresting material on the management of slaves, advocating the use of slaves who are neither cowed nor high-spirited, not controlling them with whips if they can achieve the same result with words, avoiding having too many slaves of the same nationality, and granting overseers a bit of property of their own, as well as mates from among their fellow slaves to bear them children.25 Columella, who wrote a treatise that provides guidance to owners of fairly large agricultural estates, recommends being pretty circumspect about what types of slave you should appoint as overseers: it is not a good idea, he says, to appoint a physically attractive overseer, or one who has been ‘engaged in the voluptuous occupations of the city’.26 This lazy and sleepy-headed class of slaves, he says, are accustomed to idling, the circus, the theatres, gambling, taverns and bawdy houses, and carry that ethos into their farming, to the detriment of their master.
Columella’s comments about lazy, sleepy-headed slaves should not deflect us from the stark fact that slaves were still chattels with hardly any rights. The master could inflict punishment or even kill the slave without sanction, as well as to use him or her sexually (as a favourable alternative to adultery). Even if the slave was to perform this ‘service’ unwillingly, the man’s wife might still be jealous of the slave who had aroused her husband’s interest, as is a suspicious wife in Juvenal’s Satire 6. Her husband has ignored her in bed, so she has most of her household punished:
The wool-maid’s had it, cosmeticians are stripped and flogged,
The litter-bearer’s accused of coming late. One victim
Has rods broken over his back, another bears bloody stripes
From the whip, a third is lashed with a cat-o’-nine-tails:
Some women pay their floggers an annual salary.27
Worse forms of sadism are also well documented, notably in the person of Vedius Pollio, who used to throw slaves into ponds of lamprey eels so that he could enjoy watching them being eaten alive. So, not surprisingly, some slaves tried to run away. Some masters would brand their slaves, or make them wear identification collars giving specific instructions about how to return the slave, and professional slave-hunters made a living by tracking down fugitives, whose crime was interesting: as the property of their masters, they had technically stolen themselves.
There were times when slaves were driven to murdering their master, but Roman slave-owners had zero tolerance for such a crime. In these cases the entire household of the slaves would be executed. In 61 CE a slave murdered the Prefect of the City of Rome, so all 400 of his household slaves were sentenced to death. On this occasion the Roman populace tried to get the Senate to show leniency, but C. Cassius stated the case for execution – ‘you will not restrain such a motley rabble except by fear’28. The punishment was carried out.
Despite this undeniably harsh treatment of the slave population, there is also solid evidence for more liberal attitudes. Masters generally had a vested interest in being good to their slaves, since it benefitted them financially, but there is also widespread proof of genuine affection: Cicero for one was on very friendly terms with his slave Tiro, eventually manumitting him (to the heartfelt approval of his brother), and the slaves in the comedies of Plautus and Terence often have warm relationships with their masters. Indeed, with a good master in an affluent household, a slave might be materially better off than a poor free person – clothed, fed, housed, provided with all the basic needs and possibly allowed to have a concubine. As a Stoic, Seneca the Younger believed that all men were equal insofar as they were all citizens of the universe, and also that an angry and cruel slave-owner damaged himself by becoming dominated by negative emotions. The Stoics did not advocate the abolition of slavery (nobody did, and Seneca owned a lot of slaves), but they did recommend humane treatment.
A certain amount of protective legislation came in during the Imperial era, including under Claudius a prohibition on the abandonment of sick slaves, with Hadrian imposing restrictions on taking a slaves’ evidence while under torture, forbidding masters to kill their slaves, and defining more closely which slaves could be sold to a pimp, a gladiator trainer or sent to fight wild beasts in the amphitheatre. The late Roman Empire is often popularly portrayed as an age of decline and depravity, but it was a period when some genuinely humane legislation was passed, and certain liberal attitudes emerged, particularly a feeling that slaves’ lowly status was not valid under natural law because, according to the law of nature, all men are equal.29
The ultimate goal for any slave, of course, was freedom. The process of becoming a freedman or freedwoman (libertus/liberta in relation to your ex-master; libertinus/libertina in relation to the state) was called ‘manumission’, literally ‘releasing from manus (the hand of authority)’. This could take a number of forms: in the master’s will; at a special hearing before a magistrate (the vindicta: this was initially the rod with which a slave was touched in the ceremony, and then came to mean the ceremony itself); by letter; making a special announcement among witnesses (inter amicos); and, since in a slave economy every human being has their price, buying your freedom from your savings. The motives of the master might vary: pure cynicism (liberating a slave who was ill or weak and so shirking any duty of care, or trying to defraud creditors); financial (benefitting from the income generated); a desire to gain social status by increasing the number of clientes; sheer practicality (it gave other slaves a powerful incentive to work); or basichumanitas (‘humanity’/‘kindness’).
The Roman willingness to liberate slaves was fairly liberal in comparison with many other ancient societies, especially since the ex-slave usually became a citizen. As the Roman Republic expanded, slaves were initially of Italian, and then of Greek, Semitic and Asiatic origins, and frequently had as good an education as their masters, if not better. As many of them became freedmen, the ethnic and cultural make-up of the Roman citizen population shifted. The concern about the effects of this is illustrated by a measure to restrict all freedmen to the four urban tribes (which had less political influence than the older ‘rustic’ ones) in around 220 BCE, and by a series of measures implemented by Augustus aimed at making it extremely difficult for slaves to be freed, and still more difficult for them to attain full independence.30 However, if Augustus’ intention was to maintain the ‘purity of the Roman race’, the satirist Juvenal, writing a century or so later, would undoubtedly have said he had failed:
I cannot, citizens, stomach
A Greek-struck Rome. Yet what fraction of these sweepings
Derives, in fact, from Greece? For years now Syrian
Orontes has poured its sewerage into our native Tiber –
Its lingo and manners, its flutes, its outlandish harps1
With their transverse strings, its native tambourines,
And the whores who hang out round the race-course.31
Some (vague) estimates have 90 per cent of the population of Rome being of slave origin in Juvenal’s day. Whether this is accurate or not, the Romans of the Principate were a more ethnically diverse people than those of the Republic. In between Augustus and Juvenal, Emperor Claudius had employed talented eastern freedmen such as Pallas (finance), Narcissus (secretary of state) and Callistus (petitions) as ministers and political advisers. However, Vespasian, Trajan and their successors reversed the trend, and recruited their State-Secretaries from the Equestrian Order, for which freedmen were ineligible. Neither could freedmen be members of the Senatorial Order, hold the highest Roman and municipal magistracies and priesthoods, or serve in the legions.
Freedmen were obliged to give obsequium et officium (‘service and duty’) to their ex-masters. This entailed services (onera) for a certain number of days each year, and, although it was not supposed to be so excessive as to prevent the ex-slave making a living, neglect of the duty was punishable by beating, exile, forced labour and so on. However, in return the patron was bound to do all he could to assist the freedman’s welfare, and the relationship was generally regarded as a win–win situation.
Sons born to a freedman after manumission suffered none of the restrictions that their parents did, although they sometimes had to contend with social discrimination. They were always identifiable by their servile cognomen – Marcus Tullius Cicero’s freedman Tiro came to be called Marcus Tullius Tiro – and on certain formal occasions they had to wear their ‘cap of liberty’. That said, many of them were highly aspirational in a way perfectly exemplified by the poet Horace, the son of a freedman, who became friends with Maecenas and Augustus, even if he did have to face a certain degree of prejudice:
I revert now to myself – only a freedman’s son,
run down by everyone as only a freedman’s son,
now because I’m a friend of yours, Maecenas.32
The stigma of slavery might become fainter in the second generation, but it never went away entirely, even for one of Rome’s greatest poets.
Notes – Chapter 15
1. Horace, Satires 1.4.115 ff., trans. N. Rudd, in Horace: Satires and Epistles; Persius: Satires, Harmondsworth: Penguin, rev. edn, 1979.
2. Horace, Odes 3.2.13, trans. S. Kershaw.
3. Acts 22.25–27.
4. Cicero, In Verrem 2.5.169, trans. J.A. Shelton, in As The Romans Did: A Source Book in Roman History, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 287.
5. See Seneca the Younger, On the Brevity of Human Life 14.4.
6. Juvenal, Satires 5. 12 ff.
7. Augustus, Res Gestae 15, trans. A. Lentin, in K. Chisholm and J. Ferguson (eds), Rome: The Augustan Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981.
8. See Cicero, De Officiis 1. 150–1.
9. Herrenius Modestinus, Digest 23.2.1
10. Soranus, Gynaecologica 1.60.
11. Horace, Satires 1.2.31ff., trans. Rudd, in Horace: Satires and Epistles, Persius: Satires.
12. Catullus, 15.17ff. Juvenal speaks of similar humiliation in Satire 10.314 ff.
13. Dessau, 8402.
14. Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 25
15. Macrobius, Saturnalia 115
16. Seneca, On Benefits 6.32.1, trans. J.W. Basore, in Seneca: Moral Essays, London and New York, 1935.
17. Tacitus, Annals 3.33
18. Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.9
19. Petronios, Satyricon 1 ff.
20. Pliny, Letters 4.11, trans. R. Barrow, Greek and Roman Education, Basingstoke and London, 1976, p. 84.
21. Seneca, On Clemency 1.24.
22. Strabo, 14.5.2. NB: he says that Delos ‘could’ (dynamene) do this, not that it actually did.
23. P.Oxy 95. The monthly food allowance for a young apprentice at this time was 5 dr.
24. P.Wisc. 16.5.
25. Varro, On Landed Estates 1.17.1. The children become the property of the master.
26. Columella, On Agriculture 1.6–9.
27. Juvenal, Satires 6.476 ff., trans. P. Green, Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires, Harmondsworth: Penguin, rev. edn, 1974.
28. Tacitus, Annals 14.42 f.
29. The Digest of Laws 50.17.32 (Ulpian).
30. Suetonius, Augustus 40.3.
31. Juvenal, Satire 3.63ff., trans. Green, Juvenal: The Sixteen Satires.
32. Horace, Satires 1.6.45 ff., trans. Rudd, in Horace: Satires and Epistles; Persius: Satires.