The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 5

the master who won.
Owners knew this (as the anecdote shows) and they had to reconcile
themselves to it. Philostratus (VS 516-518) offers another illustration,
telling how a scheming cook named Kytheros, the slave of the father of
the sophist Scopelian, in league with the old man's concubine, was once
able to turn the father against his son, replace the son in the old man's
will, inherit his estate, and subsequently achieve public prominence
(though his origins were not forgotten). Philostratus was aware that the
slave's behaviour resembled something from the plot of an ancient
comedy, but he did not doubt it as fact. Similarly Philo had no doubts
(Every Good Man is Free 38) that sex was a particularly useful
commodity in the relational contest of wills: maidservants with pretty
faces and charming words might well take the initiative and seduce

their masters--which is to say that slave women could use sex to their
advantage and were not always its victims.
From the establishment's point of view, what was at stake in all this
was the maintenance of social order and the defusing of threats to the
exercise of power inherent in slaveownership. Fear of upheaval was
never far away. At the turn of the third century the sophistic writer
Aelian (Characteristics of Animals 7.15) wrote of a woman named
Laenilla he had known as a boy whose infatuation with a slave had led
to the criminal indictment of her completely innocent sons, young men
of senatorial descent who were embarrassed by their mother's
behaviour and tried to point out its shamefulness to her. The woman
had been unwilling to give up her slave lover, and falsely accused the
sons before a magistrate. They were subsequently executed. The
combination of slavery, sex and shame was a recipe for social disaster,
a deeply disturbing prospect to be avoided at all costs.
How might a sense of the never-ending in the master-slave relationship
be recovered? I want to suggest at this point that for answering this
question the famous section of Petronius' Satyricon known as
'Trimalchio's Dinner-Party' (Cena Trimalchionis) is one literary source
that can be very useful. The Cena is of course a piece of fiction, as is
the Satyricon as a whole. But no one would question that it reflects
social conditions of the first century and for present purposes its value
lies, I believe, in the way its narrative nature opens up the possibility of
observing continuous interaction between a slaveowner and various
members of his domestic entourage over a certain interval of time.
Petronius' great creation Trimalchio, a former slave who has made
himself enormously rich in commerce after inheriting and investing
money from his former owners, has an elaborate domestic staff with
titles just like those found in the epitaphs from elite Roman households.
There is a porter (ostiarius), a major-domo (atriensis), an accountant
(dispensator), a steward (procurator), a record-keeper (actuarius), a
name-announcer (nomenclator); there are cooks and carvers, doctors
and masseurs, musicians, acrobats and readers, and any number of
attractive boys from Alexandria and Ethiopia to wait at table and catch

the eye of guests. As Petronius' heroes Encolpius and Giton suffer
through the long ordeal of the dinner-party, they see these members of
staff benefiting from their owner's generosity (Trimalchio's 'humanitas'
[Satyricon 65.1]: surely ironic!) in any number of ways. Trimalchio
orders drinks for the slaves who sit and attend his guests (64.13); he
summons a new contingent of waiters so that the previous battery may
leave to have their own dinner (74.16); he has his will read out so that
his household will know the kindnesses awaiting them on his
death--grants of freedom and even the bequest to one dependant of his
contubernalis (71); he sets free an acrobat who accidentally falls on
him, to avoid the shame of having been injured by a slave (54.4-5).
These are all acts of random, one might say quixotic, 'humanity'. They
do not have to be taken literally as evidence of what slaveowners did in
real life. But they reveal how slaves on a daily basis might reap the
rewards of being close to their owners at specific moments in time.
The occasional acts of kindness at the dinner-party catch the eye, but
more arresting to my mind is the threatening atmosphere of violence
that overhangs and permeates Trimalchio's relationship with his slaves.
Physical proximity of slave and master, it needs to be remembered,
could expose domestics, even those of superior station, to the punishing
consequences of random bouts of temper or irritability as much as to
the benefits of random acts of kindness--evidently a common enough
problem for moralists like Seneca and Plutarch, and even the medical
authority Galen, to be found giving counsel about it from one
generation to the next--and there is no shortage of