Human property

There were also human beings among Cicero’s property. In the letters, he mentions in all just over twenty slaves: a group of six or seven message boys, a few secretaries, clerks and ‘readers’ (who read books or documents aloud for the convenience of their master), as well as an attendant, a workman, a cook, a manservant and an accountant or two. In practice, his household must have been much bigger than this. The servicing of twenty properties suggests an absolute minimum staff of 200, even if some were just small lodges and others were mothballed for months on end: there were gardens to be tended, repairs to be carried out, furnaces to be stoked, security to be arranged, not to mention fields to be tilled on the working farms. It says a lot about the invisibility of slaves to the master that Cicero pays no attention to the vast majority of them. Most of those he does mention in his letters are, like the message boys and secretaries, concerned with the production and delivery of the letters themselves.

At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They shared the single defining characteristic of being human property in someone else’s ownership. But that apart, they were just as varied in background and style of life as free citizens. There was no such thing as a typical slave. Some in Cicero’s possession would have been enslaved abroad after defeat in war. Some would have been the product of a ruthless trade that made its profit by trafficking people from the margins of the empire. Others would have been ‘rescued’ from a rubbish tip or born as slaves, in-house, to slave women. Increasingly over the next centuries, as the scale of the wars of Roman conquest diminished, it was this ‘home breeding’ that became the major source of supply, so consigning slave women to much the same regime of childbearing as their free counterparts. More generally, slaves’ conditions of life and work varied from cruel and cramped to borderline luxury. The fifty poky slave cubicles under the grand house of Scaurus were not the worst a slave would fear. Some, in larger industrial or agricultural operations, would have been more or less kept in captivity. Many would have been beaten. In fact, that vulnerability to corporal punishment was one of the things that made a slave a slave; Whipping Boy was one of their common nicknames. Yet there were also a few, a small minority who bulk largest in the surviving evidence, whose day-to-day lifestyle might have seemed enviable to the poor, free and hungry Roman citizen. By their standards, the slave aides of wealthy men in luxurious mansions, their private doctors or literary advisors, usually educated slaves of Greek origin, lived cosseted lives.

The attitudes of the free population to their slaves and to slavery as an institution were equally varied and ambivalent. For the owners, disdain and sadism sat side by side with a degree of fear and anxiety about their dependence and vulnerability, which numerous popular sayings and anecdotes capture. ‘All slaves are enemies’ was one piece of Roman wisdom. And in the reign of the emperor Nero, when someone had the bright idea to make slaves wear uniforms, it was rejected on the grounds that this would make clear to the slave population just how numerous they were. Yet any attempt to draw clear and consistent lines between slaves and free or to define the inferiority of slaves (were they things rather than people, some ancient theorists rather desperately wondered) was necessarily thwarted by social practice. Slaves and free in many contexts worked closely together. In the ordinary workshop, slaves might be friends and confidants as well as human chattel. And they were part of the Roman family; the Latin word familia always included the non-free and the free members of the household (see plates 16, 17).

For many, slavery was in any case only a temporary status, which added to the conceptual confusion. The Roman habit of freeing so many slaves may have been driven by all kinds of coldly practical considerations: it was certainly cheaper, for example, to give slaves their freedom than to keep them in their unproductive old age. But this was one crucial aspect of the widespread image of Rome as an open culture, and it made the Roman citizen body the most ethnically diverse that there ever was before the modern world – and it was a further cause for cultural anxiety. Were Romans freeing too many slaves? they asked. Were they freeing them for the wrong reasons? And what was the consequence of that for any idea of Romanness?

In most cases when Cicero notices his slaves more than in passing, it is because something has gone wrong, and his reactions reveal some of these ambivalences and tensions in a day-to-day setting. In 46 BCE he wrote to one of his friends, then the governor of the province of Illyricum, on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. He had a problem. His librarian, a slave by the name of Dionysius, had been pilfering his books and then, fearing that he would be exposed, had scarpered. It turned out that Dionysius had been spotted in Illyricum (perhaps near his original home), where he had apparently claimed that Cicero had given him his freedom. ‘It’s not a big thing,’ Cicero admitted, ‘but it’s a weight on my mind.’ He was asking that his friend keep an eye out, to no avail, it seems. A year later he heard from the next governor that ‘your runaway’ had gone to ground among a local people, the Vardaei, but nothing was ever heard of him again, even though Cicero fantasised about seeing him brought back to Rome and led as a captive in a triumphal procession.

He had had the same kind of trouble with an ex-slave a few years earlier, another librarian, he explains in a letter to Atticus. This Chrysippus – with his wonderfully learned Greek name, best known from a third-century BCE philosopher – had been given the job of accompanying Cicero’s son, Marcus, then in his mid teens, and Marcus’ slightly older cousin back to Rome from Cilicia. At some point on the journey Chrysippus abandoned the young men. Never mind all his minor pilferings, Cicero exploded, it was simply absconding that he could not stand, as ex-slaves even after being granted their freedom were still supposed to have obligations to their ex-master. Cicero’s reaction was to use a legal technicality to cancel Chrysippus’ freedom and re-enslave him. Too little, too late, of course: Chrysippus was already off.

It is hard to judge the accuracy of Cicero’s version of these stories. How easy was it to sell on stolen books in Rome? Had Dionysius used them to finance his escape? Did Cicero believe he still had them with him (there was probably even less of a market among the Vardaei)? Or was the theft more a product of Cicero’s paranoia and obsession with his library? Whatever the truth, these stories offer a useful antidote to the ‘Spartacus model’ of slave discontent and resistance. Very few slaves came head to head with Roman authority, still less with the Roman legions. Most resisted their master like this pair did, by just running away, going to ground and, if challenged, saying to their questioner, who almost certainly knew no better, that they had been freed anyway. On Cicero’s side, this offers the image of a man for whom his slave household really could be the enemy within, even if that mostly came down to light fingers, and for whom the difference between those slaves he had freed and those he had not was narrower than many modern historians want to make it. It should be no surprise that, although libertus (freedman) is the standard Latin term for an ex-slave, on numerous occasions the word servus (slave) is used for both.

The one big exception to this picture is found in Cicero’s relationship with his slave secretary Tiro, the man who in the medieval imagination was credited with the invention of a well-known form of shorthand. Tiro’s origins are entirely unknown, unless the far-fetched Roman gossip was right to suspect that Cicero was so fond of him, he could only have been Cicero’s natural son. He was freed with much celebration in 54 or 53 BCE, to become a Roman citizen under the name of Marcus Tullius Tiro. The relationship of Tiro with the whole Cicero family has often been seen as the ‘acceptable face’ of Roman slavery.

Many of the family’s letters to him (no replies survive) brim with affection, chat and often concern about his health. ‘Your health makes us terribly worried,’ Quintus Cicero wrote, typically, in 49 BCE, ‘… and it’s an enormous worry that you are going to be away from us for so long … but really don’t commit yourself to a long journey unless you are good and strong’. And the occasion of Tiro’s grant of freedom was marked by joyous congratulation, and self-congratulation. Quintus again, writing to his brother from Gaul, where he was serving with Julius Caesar, captures something of the significance of the change of status: ‘I am really pleased with what you have done about Tiro and that you decided that his status was below what he deserved and that you would rather have him as a friend than a slave. I jumped for joy when I read your letter. Thank you.’ Tiro appears almost to play the role of a surrogate son around whom the sometimes dysfunctional family could happily unite. But even so, there is a lingering ambivalence, and Tiro’s servitude was never wholly forgotten. Years after his grant of freedom, Quintus wrote to Tiro to complain that, once again, no letter had arrived from him. ‘I’ve given you a good thrashing, or at least a silent ticking off in my head’, as Quintus puts it. A harmless bit of banter? A bad joke? Or a clear hint that in Quintus’ imagination Tiro would always remain someone you could think of thrashing?