The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 3

at least Gibbon's belief that a certain 'progress of manners' alleviated
the hardships of slavery in the imperial age--a confident picture of life
in slavery is presented. Here are three representative statements:
The Monumentum Liviae gives us the first full and vivid evidence both
for the staff of a Roman woman and for the middle class of domestic
servants, a class which enjoyed scope for a variety of talents and which
displays esprit de corps and considerable satisfaction in being
employed by the wife and mother of a 'princeps' and the daughter of a
god.
In the large, hierarchical but closely-knit society of the rich household,
with its records of births, deaths, manumissions, and 'contubernia',
slave family life could often attain comparative security and dignity.
Scraps of evidence, the commemoration of parents, brothers, sisters,
and sometimes other relatives, friendships close enough to be honoured

after death, 'contubernia' which lasted a lifetime, help to illustrate this.
We can see in the inscriptions evidence for a tightly-knit and
supportive community, creating its own goals and work ethic and
organizing its own social life, under the supervision of freed
administrators and largely without the interference of the upper class
masters whom the staff was bred or bought to serve.
There are other avenues of investigation which lead in the same
incontestable direction. In an absorbing recent book, Art in the Lives of
Ordinary Romans, John Clarke suggests that the response of slaves to
certain works of Roman art was to encourage hopes of manumission
among them that presuppose while they were waiting an unquestioning
willingness to accept and conform to the values of established free
society. The grain measurers (mensores) who can be seen in a mosaic
from the Piazza delle Corporazione at Ostia will have communicated to
slave viewers how they had to work hard to win their freedom ('and
perhaps an easier life'). A tomb such as that of the freedman C. Julius
Apella at Ostia would allow slaves from the familia who waited at table
at the dinners held there to delight in its decorations and to imagine
eventually coming to rest there themselves as liberti. The household
shrine (lararium) from the House of the Sarno in Pompeii, which
apparently depicts a master and his slaves at work on the river, would
foster among the viewing slaves in the garden where the shrine was
located, as Clarke puts it, 'a certain pride in seeing themselves with
their owner every day as they stood behind him to sacrifice to his
Genius and the Lares.' The assumptions are clear that that the slavery
system was benign, that within it the boundary between slavery and
freedom was easily permeable, and that Roman slaves, always
acquiescent to their masters' demands, wanted nothing more than to
cross the boundary and strove in every way to do so.
There is much of course to show that many Roman slaves did adopt the
enticements of the free to conform to the dominant ideology, and also
that they successfully make the transition from slavery to freedom and
fully integrated themselves into the life of established society. One
impressive illustration is the way in which slaves and former slaves

willingly responded to the emperor Augustus' division of Rome in 7
BC into 265 administrative districts (uici) and agreed to become
officiants (magistri and ministri) in the renovated cult of the Lares
Compitales, now the cult of the Lares Augusti, which was in effect a
not so subtle form of emperor worship. Felix, slave of L. Crautanius,
Florus, slave of Sex. Avienus, Eudoxsus, slave of C. Caesius,
Polyclitus, slave of Sex. Ancharius (ILS 9250)--these names typify the
many men who participated in the cult. Another illustration is the
willingness of wealthy freedmen to enter the new status-category of
Augustales created by Augustus and to use their wealth, much like free
men higher in the social hierarchy, to provide games and shows and
other public benefits in the towns and cities of Italy, as though they
were citizens of longstanding devoted to the promotion of the
established civic and social order. The freedman C. Lusius Storax, who
died about AD 40, was acclaimed for his provision of gladiatorial
games at Teate Marrucinorum and built a monument commemorating
himself and his generosity in the enclosure of the burial society
(collegium) to which he belonged. There can be no doubt that over time
there were many like him, slaves who were set free and subsequently
made vital contributions to the well-being of Roman society; and it can
readily be granted that as slaves they aspired to achieving manumission
and worked diligently to this end. The 'optimistic' view of Roman
slavery has much to commend it.
In my view, however, this is only one, partial, aspect of the picture.
Roman slavery also had a much darker