The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 2

no matter how socially desirable. There is a world of
difference between Salvian and, say, the nineteenth-century opponent
of slavery Henri Wallon, who in his celebrated Histoire de l'esclavage
dans l'antiquité (1847), wrote in a climate when slavery had come to
be regarded in Christian ethics, in a mode of thought totally alien to
classical antiquity, as a sin.
The forms of servitude known in the classical world varied across time
and place. They included debt-bondage, helotage, temple slavery and
serfdom, but also chattel slavery, an absolute form of unfreedom in
which enslaved persons were assimilated to commodities, akin to
livestock, over whom, or which, owners enjoyed complete mastery.
Chattel slavery was not found in all times and places in antiquity, but it
was especially evident in Italy during the central era of Roman history
and it is with Roman chattel slavery that I am concerned here. I want to
consider the nature of the master-slave relationship and the basic
character of Roman chattel slavery, and to suggest from a cultural point
of view why slavery at Rome, as I understand it, never could present
itself as problematical. For the sake of convenience and because it is
relatively well-attested, I concentrate particularly on Roman domestic
slavery. My account is necessarily generalised, impressionistic, even

superficial and schematic, and at every stage allowance must be made
for the ambiguous and the exceptional.
I take as a starting-point the observation from the Roman Antiquities of
the Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.9.4; cf. 4.23.7), that
when Romans manumitted their slaves they conferred on them not only
freedom but citizenship as well. To Dionysius and the Greeks for
whom in the age of Augustus he was writing this was an unusual and
generous practice. And it has seemed unusual and generous to moderns
as well, so much so that scholars have often concluded that Roman
slavery was a mild institution, milder by implication at least than the
race-based slavery systems of the New World. As an example let me
quote a passage from another celebrated book, Jérôme Carcopino's
Daily Life in Ancient Rome, which was first published in the United
States in 1940, a year after the French original, and which I select
because it has always enjoyed enormous influence and is currently
enjoying a new lease of life in re-edited versions. Carcopino is
speaking of the age of the Antonines:
Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves, who in
the second century raised their standard of living to the level of the
'ingenui'. Legislation had grown more and more humane and had
progressively lightened their chains and favoured their emancipation.
The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental
humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from
showing cruelty towards the 'servi'. They had always treated their
slaves with consideration, as Cato had treated his plough oxen;
however far back we go in history we find the Romans spurring their
slaves to effort by offering them pay and bonuses which accumulated to
form a nest egg that as a rule served ultimately to buy their freedom.
With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it
lasted, intolerable; but never had it been lighter or easier to escape from
than under the Antonines.
More recently and more compellingly, the preeminent historian Susan
Treggiari has shown how a relatively benign picture of Roman slavery
like that of Carcopino might emerge. Exploiting two types of evidence,

commemorative epitaphs and the writings of Roman jurists, Treggiari
has investigated in a remarkable series of studies the personal lives of
slaves and former slaves who worked as domestic servants in the
resplendent households of the Roman elite under the early Principate,
and she has proved that much can be learned about the world these
people created for themselves. What emerges, first, is the vast range of
highly specialised work-roles that helped slaves to establish individual
identities for themselves, and, secondly, the formation of familial
relationships, sometimes of long duration, that restored to slaves
something of the human dignity of which slavery deprived them. The
value found in their work as domestic servants becomes clear, and the
manner in which despite their legal incapacity slaves constructed and
memorialised familial ties is repeatedly made plain. Special attention is
paid, moreover, to the roles played by women and what might be
termed the female contribution to the infrastructure of Roman society is
brought to the fore as evidence is compiled of the spinners and weavers
(quasillariae, textrices), the clothes-makers and menders (uestificae,
sarcinatrices), the dressers (ornatrices), nurses and midwives (nutrices,
opstetrices) who populated the domestic establishments of the Roman
elite. With the perceived development under the Principate of a more
humane attitude to slaves--a view that goes back beyond Carcopino to