Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery

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Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery
Author(s): Keith Hopkins
Source: Past & Present, No. 138 (Feb., 1993), pp. 3-27
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/651186
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NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN
SLAVERY*
This is an article about Roman slavery, and an experiment with
method. Substantively my objective is to sketch the slave's experi-
ence of slavery, and the fears and anxieties which slavery evoked
in Roman masters. I am interested here in thoughts and feelings.
Methodologically I am trying a new tack by experimenting at
length with lies, whereas most Roman history is purportedly
aimed at the discovery of truths, through establishing facts or
describing events which are known to have occurred.'
This article is built around a single source, which is an inventive
fiction, a pack of lies, an anonymous accretive novella, composed
and revised, as I suspect, over centuries, as a vehicle for comedy
and manners. It is the biography of a slave, the only full-length
biography of a slave surviving from classical antiquity; a text
which as far as I know has never yet been used as the basis of
historical reconstruction, probably because it is so obviously a
fiction.2 But before I get down to discussing this biography in
* I should like to thank Mary Beard, Simon Goldhill, John Henderson and Richard
Sailer for conversations and criticisms, and audiences at Berkeley, Cambridge, Copen-
hagen, Eton, Los Angeles, Oxford, Princeton and Victoria for indicating where I
failed to be persuasive. In some, the text produced the same reactions as its hero,
Aesop; out of respect, I have changed it little.
1 The dominant convention that history is primarily concerned with "truth" about
events which have occurred hardly needs authentication. See, for example, Paul
Veyne, Writing History, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Manchester, 1971), pp. 10-11:
"history is a body of facts . . . History is the relating of true events". The tactic of
experimenting with conscious fictions as a source of socio-cultural history is not
unknown, but still rare in ancient history. It is well known, even fashionable, in early
modern history. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations
(Oxford, 1988).
2 The text is edited with all its known variants in Aesopica, ed. Ben E. Perry
(Urbana, 1952). The main manuscripts are very well translated by Lloyd W. Daly,
Aesop without Morals (New York, 1961). I owe a huge amount to Daly's translation,
though the translations in this article are my own, except where noted. The Life of
Aesop is not dealt with, as far as I know, in any modern discussion of ancient slavery;
it is not even mentioned, for example by W. L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of
Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia, 1955); I. Biezunska-Malowist, L'esclavage
dans l'Egypte greco-romaine, 2 vols. (Wroclaw, 1974-7); Keith Hopkins, Conquerors
and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978); or by M. I. Finley in, for example, Ancient Slavery
and Modern Ideology (London, 1980), Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London,
1981), or Classical Slavery (London, 1987). Keith R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in
(cont. on p. 4)
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4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 138
detail, I want to dwell a little on a small number of anecdotes,
more or less familiar to modern historians of the Roman world,
drawn from formal histories and from a medical doctor's observa-
tions. My objective here is to illustrate my underlying contention
that the social history which can be squeezed from "real histories"
and from fiction may be broadly similar, and that, for the inter-
pretation of culture, there is little justification for privileging one
above the other.3
First, a historian - Tacitus. In A.D. 61, the senatorial mayor
(praefectus urbi) of Rome was murdered in his own home by one
of his slaves. According to Tacitus, the motive was disputed: was
it because the master had promised his slave freedom, and had
even agreed the price, only to welch on the deal? Or was it
because of some homosexual rivalry between master and slave
over a shared lover? Whatever the cause, under strict Roman
law, if a slave killed a master in his own house, then all of his
slaves living in the household were to be crucified. The murdered
mayor was a rich noble, a former consul; in his town house alone,
he had four hundred slaves. Their imminent execution caused a
huge stir. There was a heated debate in the Roman senate. Some
senators were for softening the traditional harshness of the law;
they pleaded for mercy for the large number of slaves, including
women and children, who were undeniably innocent of any com-
plicity in the crime.
But a majority of senators voted to uphold the law as it stood.
How else, the traditionalists argued, could a solitary master sleep
soundly among a whole gang of slaves, unless it was in the interest
of each to protect him against any murderous conspirator? Foreign
slaves, worshipping foreign gods or none, could be controlled
only by fear. After all the traditional custom of punishing a
cowardly legion by choosing by lot one soldier in ten, and then
having him cudgelled to death by his former companions, some-
times involved murdering the bravest men. Making an example
(n. 2 cont.)
the Roman Empire (Brussels, 1984), pp. 150-3, discusses the fables of Phaedrus, but
not Aesop or his Life. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness
(New York, 1977), esp. pp. 81 if., discusses the meaning of slaves' stories - but in
an intellectual style quite different from that deployed here.
3 In calling fiction "lies", I am colluding with conventional dichotomies: facts/fic-
tions, truth/lies, evidence/discardable opinions, even though the basic argument of
this article is that fiction provides a usable and trustworthy representation of Roman
culture. My intention here is not to squeeze fiction for facts, but to interpret fiction
as a mirror of Roman thinking and feelings.
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NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN SLAVERY 5
benefited the whole community, even if it sacrificed some indi-
viduals unjustly. This was the gist of a speech by the triumphant
conservative lawyer. The Roman senate was persuaded. The
populace was less impressed. A crowd wielding firebrands and
stones tried to stop the mass executions, but the emperor Nero
stood firm, had the route lined with soldiers, and all four hundred
slaves were crucified.4
Slavery was a cruel and repressive institution, enforced by
hatred and fear. "All slaves are enemies", stated a Roman pro-
verb. The hostility of Roman slave-owners to their slaves, and of
slaves to their owners, lay just below the surface of Roman
civilization like an unexploded volcano. To be sure, some slave-
owners were probably kind and considerate to some of their
slaves, whether out of affection, generosity or the self-interest
which was prompted by a desire to safeguard valuable assets.
Sometimes owners' kindliness was projected into an idealized
image of the grateful and loyal slave, who in an emergency even
sacrificed his or her life to save the slave-owner.5 That favourable
image was one side of the coin. The other, and dirtier side of
slavery rested in slaves' legal powerlessness and in their more or
less complete dependence on their owner's favour, which, as far
as the slave knew, could turn at any moment from love to hate.
It is not my concern here to describe the varied behaviour of
Roman slaves and of their owners, nor to draw up a tentative
balance-sheet of what was typical. Given the fragmentary state
of surviving evidence, that would be impracticable. But the realit-
ies of Roman slavery, its scale and pervasiveness throughout the
Mediterranean basin, its legal basis and its economic implications,
necessarily frame any modern analysis, as they framed all ancient
experiences, of slavery.6 Roman slavery was in significant respects
4 Tacitus, Annals, xiv.42 ff. His account of the senatorial debate may not be accurate,
and may reflect later political concerns. This is the argument of Joseph G. Wolf, "Das
Senatusconsultum Silanianum und die Senatsrede des C. Cassius Longinus aus dem
Jahre 61 n. Chr.", Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil-
hist. Klasse (Heidelberg, 1988).
5 For the proverb, see Seneca, Moral Letters, xlvii.5; Macrobius, Saturnalia, i. 11.13.
On the loyal slave, see Joseph Vogt, "Sklaverei und Humanitat", Historia Einzelschrift,
viii (1972), pp. 83-96; Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (Oxford,
1974), pp. 129 ff.; for sharp criticism, see Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology,
pp. 93 ff. For an equally idealized, but more nuanced view of slave/owner relations
within complex households, see Paul Veyne, La societe romaine (Paris, 1991), pp. 16 ff.
6 See Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 99 ff., for a
quasi-objective account of Roman slavery, complementary in intellectual style to this
subjective study of relations between masters and slaves, or the other works on slavery
(cont. on p. 6)
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6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 138
distinct from slavery in the American South. For example, Roman
slaves were not distinguished by the colour of their skin. Some
Roman slaves were educated, sometimes better educated than
their masters. Some slaves occupied positions of trust and respons-
ibility, for example, as secretaries, clerks, teachers, physicians
and architects, or as administrative agents in business or the
management of agricultural estates. Many of these skilled slaves
could save up out of profits or pocket money in the hope of
buying their freedom. Many thousands of Roman slaves achieved
freedom either through purchase or by the master's generosity
(or both - the master "generously" granting the slave the right
to buy his freedom). And any male slave, freed in due legal form
by a Roman citizen master, himself became a Roman citizen; and
a similarly freed female slave could bear free citizen children by
a citizen father. The Roman slave system therefore faced a recur-
rent problem on a scale unknown in the American South: the
problem of the clever, talented, educated slave occupying a posi-
tion of responsibility, who had a realistic prospect of freedom and
the constant image before his or her eyes of other slaves who had
themselves achieved freedom. At the same time, such slaves were
in their owners' power, and at the mercy of their whims. The
visibility and social prospects of powerful and clever slaves, whose
ability owners wanted and needed to harness, intensified the
implicit struggle between masters and slaves and the oppressive
cruelty of the Roman slave system.
One objective of this essay is to investigate the seamier side of
slavery, by analysing some of the stories which slave-owners (and
perhaps even slaves) told, at least partly to help themselves
delineate and negotiate the boundaries of appropriate behaviour
between masters and slaves. These ancient stories are not about
normal behaviour, any more than a modern popular newspaper
typically reports news of normal conformist behaviour. Stories
and news, and perhaps social history, concentrate on the boundar-
ies of morality, or what one can call the penumbra of moral
(n. 6 cont.)
cited in n. 2. We have only very sketchy knowledge about how the practice and
experience of slavery varied by period and subculture in the diverse and vast Roman
empire. I use the term "Roman slavery" rather crudely to refer to slavery in the
Roman empire, without implying either uniformity or consistency - just as one
might use the term "bread" to cover bread in France, England, Russia and the U.S.A,
in spite of the known variations.
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NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN SLAVERY 7
ambiguity, about which even the same reader, let alone different
readers, will have had ambivalent feelings and reactions. In some
respects what I am doing in this article is like trying to understand
conditions in British factories during the depression in the 1930s
from an English intellectual's eclectic library, the one surviving
copy of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and a few fragments from
British parliamentary papers and The Times. The interpretation
of comic caricature is necessarily individualistic and error-prone,
but it would be dangerous to assume that serious newspapers or
the minutes of the Roman senate are more secure guides to the
partial recovery of a lost reality than creative fiction.
Roman literature abounds with stories of incidental cruelty to
individual domestic slaves, who in the owner's opinion had
betrayed a trust, done something wrong, or simply had not done
it fast enough. Slaves were there to be impatient with. Domestic
slaves stood in the front line. They were more privileged and pam-
pered than the tens of thousands of slaves who laboured without
realistic hope of freedom in the fields or in the mines. Some
domestic slaves, as I have said, could save up in the hope of buying
liberty.7 But domestic slaves also had more contact with their
owners, and were more often subjected to their despotic whimsy.
Even "good" masters could be brutish. The emperor Augustus,
for example, who by and large has had a favourable press in
history books both ancient and modern, is said to have had the
legs of a trusted slave broken because he had taken a bribe and
revealed the contents of a letter; and Augustus is also said to have
had a middle-ranking palace official, a freed slave, nailed to a
ship's mast because he had eaten a prize fighting-quail. The court
physician Galen records that the emperor Hadrian once in anger
stabbed a slave in the eye with a pen. He later felt remorse, and
asked the slave to choose a gift in recompense. The slave did not
reply. The emperor pressed him for a response. The slave said
that all he wanted was his eye back.8
7 In the one area of Roman Greece for which testimony is available, a high propor-
tion (63 per cent) of freed slaves were female; the price of bought freedom was
significantly high (on average about 3 tonnes of wheat equivalent for an adult slave,
enough to provide minimum subsistence for a family of four persons for three years);
and the conditions imposed on the newly freed slaves were often onerous, including
(in a nearby area) the provision of replacement slave children: ibid., pp. 133 ff. For
insubstantial quibbles about one of these conclusions, see Richard P. Duncan-Jones,
"Problems of the Delphic Manumission Payments", Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und
Epigraphik, lvii (1984), pp. 202-9.
8 Suetonius, Augustus, 67; Plutarch, 207B; Galen, v.17. References to Galen are to
the old and still the fullest edition, Claudii Galeni opera omnia, ed. C. G. Kiihn, 20
(cont. on p. 8)
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8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 138
Individual stories are difficult to interpret. Some were recorded
incidentally, almost casually; or so it appears. Others, perhaps
the majority, were told because they marked the frontiers of
acceptability. We have to be wary of constructing an image of
Roman normality out of what even Romans regarded as excep-
tional. And yet these individual stories do help us map out Roman
attitudes to morality, just as they helped Romans themselves to
sort out what was allowable, legitimate and praiseworthy. Indi-
vidual stories do not tell us directly what was normal, but they
do indicate which abnormalities met with overt disapproval, and
for these purposes, I should stress, it does not matter so much
whether these stories were true. It matters more that they were
told and retold.
One striking story dramatized the confrontation of cruel rich
man and emperor. An extremely rich man, called Vedius Pollio,
himself an ex-slave, but now risen to the status of a knight, had
a fish-pond stocked with huge lampreys which he fattened on the
flesh of slaves who offended him in any way. Once, when Aug-
ustus was dining with him, a young slave dropped a precious
crystal bowl. His master immediately ordered him to be seized
and thrown alive to the lampreys. The boy slipped from his
captors' grasp and threw himself at the emperor's feet "to ask
only that he be allowed to die in some other way, not as human
bait". Augustus was so shocked at Vedius' cruelty that he par-
doned the boy, and ordered that all Vedius' crystal bowls be
smashed there and then, and that the fish-pond be filled in. Again
it does not matter here whether the story is true, or how much
it has been embroidered in the telling. It matters that it was told
by Romans to each other as a moral story overtly celebrating the
evil corruption of non-hereditary riches and the benefits of a
benevolent monarch reasserting antique values. At least, that is
one interpretation, although ancient readers of the story, or
listeners, probably had their own divergent interpretations and
sympathies. Such stories circulate, I imagine, partly because their
moral messages are problematic and ambiguous (for example, did
all slave-owners think that the emperor was right?). However
(n. 8 cont.)
vols. (Leipzig, 1821-3). The use of anecdotes here is not to be confused with attempts
to use them as authentication of particular actions by individual Romans, a practice
rightly criticized by Richard P. Saller, "Anecdotes as Historical Evidence", Greece
and Rome, cxxvii (1980), pp. 169-84. He shows how stories did the rounds and were
amended and then successively attributed to various actors.
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NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN SLAVERY 9
that may be, this moral story has a further twist. When Vedius
died, he left most of his property to the emperor, and Augustus
had his huge palazzo destroyed, converting the site into a public
pleasure garden in honour of his mother.9 Out of vice came virtue
and pleasure.
Emperors set the tone, or reflected broadly held values. Galen,
for example, also tells us that his mother used to bite her slave
maids in fits of rage. He hated her for it. By contrast, he admired
and tried to imitate his father's self-control. Neither father nor
son, he claimed, had ever whipped one of their slaves with their
own hands. But many of his father's friends used to hit their
slaves in the face; Galen's father calmly said that these friends
deserved to get a dose of boils and seizures and die (rather as
fervent early Christians preaching a gospel of peace wished on all
heretics and sinners the torments of Hell). After all, Galen's father
went on, they could have waited a while, and then inflicted as
many blows as they wanted with cane or whip, after due consid-
eration.10 It was not the physical punishment of slaves to which
Galen objected, but impulsive, irrational behaviour.
Galen recounts another story, which he tells us he often told."1
He was travelling from Rome to Athens with a friend, who was
a simple and friendly fellow, good-natured and open-handed in
sharing their daily expenses, but irascible and inclined to strike
his slaves with his hands, sometimes even kick them, and quite
often hit them with a whip or whatever piece of wood came to
hand. When they landed at Corinth, they had sent most of the
baggage and slaves on by ship and themselves took the shorter
overland route with a carriage they had hired. On the way,
Galen's friend asked the slaves who were walking behind for a
particular small bag; they replied that they had not brought it
with them. "He was enraged, and because he did not have any-
thing else to beat the young lads with, took his sword in its
sheath, and hit each of them on the head, not with the flat of the
sword, which would not have been serious [!], but with its cutting
edge". The friend hit each of the slaves twice, and the sword
burst its scabbard, so inflicting serious head wounds. When he
9 Dio, liv.23; elaborated by Seneca, On Anger, iii.40. See Ronald Syme, "Who was
Vedius Pollio?", in his Roman Papers, ii (Oxford, 1979), pp. 518 ff.; Paul Zanker,
The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988), p. 137.
10 See Galen, v.41.
I See ibid., v.17.
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10 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 138
saw the huge streams of blood, the friend fled in the direction of
Athens, because he did not want to be on the spot when one of
the slaves died. Killing a slave under Roman law could count as
murder unless death occurred in the course of reasonable punish-
ment.12 But the excellent doctor Galen looked after the slaves,
ensured their recuperation (that, doubtless, was one of the main
points of the story), and got them safely to Athens.
Galen's friend was overcome with remorse. One day soon
afterwards, he took Galen into a house, stripped off his clothes,
handed Galen a whip, went down on his knees and asked to be
flogged. The more Galen tried to laugh it off, the more persistent
his friend became. Eventually Galen consented, but only if the
friend would submit to certain conditions. Willingly the penitent
friend agreed. So Galen made him promise to listen to what he
had to say, and then lectured him on the virtues of self-control,
and on the possibility of controlling slaves by methods other than
the whip. This story would probably evoke different responses
in different readers, ancient and modern. In my view, four points
emerge: first, beating a slave on the head with the flat of a sword
was considered regrettable, but not serious; secondly, even
remorse took the form of violence; thirdly, violence and self-
control represented an axis of moral strain within polite Roman
society - the controlling elite was expected to be self-controlled;
and finally, telling stories constituted an instrument of social
control, outlining to listeners and subjects the limits and penalties
of transgression.13
* * *
I too want to tell a story, derived from the only biography of a
slave to survive from the ancient world. This slave biography is
a satirical fiction, the so-called Life of Aesop, written in its finished
12 Digest, i.6; Gaius, Institutes, i.53; Theodosian Code, ix.12; W. W. Buckland, The
Roman Law of Slavery (Cambridge, 1970 edn.), pp. 36-8.
13 Iwant to stress again that ancient interpretations of such stories were probably
pluralistic and conflicting. Even the same person reacts to symbolic messages with a
whole range of sometimes conflicting emotions. The story is told again and again,
partly just because it strikes a transgressive nerve, and precisely because the outcome
of a struggle in the imagination between right and wrong is not assured. For an
exciting discussion of these issues, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics
and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986).
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NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN SLAVERY 11
form in the first century A.D. in Roman Egypt.14 It exists in
several slightly different versions and in several copies. Most of
the surviving copies are in Greek, but a Latin version also sur-
vives. The work has no known author; it is a composite text,
which was probably frequently revised, anonymously, in order
to incorporate the various popular stories circulating in the
Graeco-Roman world about masters and slaves. The multiple
versions and surviving copies of the Life of Aesop (several surviv-
ing on papyri written in Greek in Roman Egypt from the second
to the fifth century A.D.) indicate its forgotten popularity, and
dramatically increase its utility for us; what we have is not a
single author's idiosyncratic vision, but a collective, composite
work incorporating many different stories told about slaves, and
attached here to Aesop. But we can have little or no idea about
the audience at whom it was aimed, or by whom it was read or
heard. Its survival in Egypt and the occasional adaptation of the
text to Egyptian conditions should not mislead us into thinking
that it relates primarily to Egypt, any more than its being written
first in Greek should make us think that it related primarily to
Greek slavery. In my view, the Life of Aesop is a generic work,
related generally, but not specifically, to slavery in the whole
Roman world. To be sure, the Life makes jokes about academic
pedantry and the respect due from children to their professors,
which may indicate its origins or circulation among students.15
14 For the best edition and translation of the Life of Aesop, see above, n. 2. The
two principal manuscripts are denoted by the letters G and W; I mostly follow G,
occasionally W, and sometimes amalgamate both (for the texts, see Aesopica, ed.
Perry). Four papyri fragments of the Life found in Egypt and dating from the second
to the fifth century A.D. are listed by Roger A. Pack, The Greek and Latin Literary
Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt, 2nd edn. (Ann Arbor, 1967), nos. 2072-5. In the
opinion of F. R. Andrados, "The Life of Aesop", Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica,
xxx (1979), pp. 93 if., the Life reached its surviving form by the first century A.D.
This seems plausible, but I suspect it involves simply working back from the earliest
known papyrus fragment. Several passages in the surviving text firmly suggest an
Egyptian context for the tale (see below, n. 20), but then the mention of Roman
money, denarii (Aesop, G 24, 27), the death scene at Delphi (G 125 ff.), and Aesop's
visit to the emperor at Babylon (G 101), often equated in apocalyptic literature with
Rome, and to the legendary king of Egypt at Memphis, whom he also outwits (G 112
ff.) suggest multiple sites, origins and fantasies. There seems mercifully little written
in modern times about the Life of Aesop, but see Ben E. Perry, Studies in the Text
History of the Life and Fables of Aesop (Haverford, 1936); A. Wiechers, Aesop in Delphi
(Meisenheim, 1961); Heinrich Zeitz, "Der Aesoproman und seine Geschichte",
Aegyptus, xvi (1936), pp. 225 ff.
15 Perry, Studies, p. 1, thought the Life of Aesop to be "a naive, popular and
anonymous book, composed for the entertainment and edification of the common
people rather than for educated men". I think his assumptions about the sophisticated
(cont. on p. 12)
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