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The Past and Present Society 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 Accessed: 19-02-2018 21:03 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press, The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Past & Present This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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) This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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) This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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) This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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. This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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). This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 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) This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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ing on papyri written in Greek in Roman Egypt from the secon . Aesop, the ugly slave, was also presumably an inversion of the ideal, beautiful slave.
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