The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 6

such consequences
here. Trimalchio has an over-zealous slave who picks up a fallen dish
boxed on the ears (34.2). He threatens with demotion to the ranks of the
uiatores a cook, left to him by will and unrecognised, if a pig is not
properly served, making the slave well aware of the master's naked
authority, his potentia (47.3). When another pig is brought in, another
cook is threatened with flogging because he seems to have forgotten to
gut the animal. This is a charade of course. Trimalchio is playing a
trick on his guests because he wants to impress them with the sausages
and black puddings he knows will appear once the pig is cut open. But
the significant point is that the charade is credible: Trimalchio has the
cook stripped and handed over to torturers (tortores) he keeps on his

staff, as slaveowners could, expressly for the purpose of physically
punishing members of his household (49.1-50.1). Later he threatens
with decapitation a slave who drops a cup, relenting only when his
guests intercede on the unfortunate man's behalf (52.4-6). He also
threatens to burn alive a certain Stichus (a good slave name) if the slave
fails to take proper care of his burial clothes (78.2). Violence, physical,
psychological, or both, figures everywhere in the relationship between
owner and owned, and the extended dinner narrative expresses this
dynamic reality in a way, I think, that inscriptions and passages from
the law cannot.
That slavery was an institution based on brute force and terror hardly
needs to be demonstrated. Plutarch's observation (Moralia 462A) that
the first thing newly purchased slaves wanted to know about their
owner was whether he was ill-tempered is just one indication of the
psychological truth, the Christian Lactantius' exhortation (Divine
Institutions 4.4.1) that his readers should fear God like slaves another.
But the degree to which violence might at any time appear in the slave's
life cannot to my mind be overstated. In the Satyricon it is normative
for the master to resort to the whip when angered by slaves he regards
as 'delinquent', as a new slave, a nouicius, makes clear (139.5). And it
was not the slaveowner alone the slave had to fear. It made sense to
Petronius to imagine that a slave accountant could have a slave
underling beaten for having lost his clothes at the baths (30.7-11), and
that a freedman guest could verbally abuse one of Trimalchio's slaves
and physically threaten him for being impudent (58.5). It even made
sense that slaves themselves could be called upon to commit acts of
violence: in a later episode of the Satyricon (132ff) an upper-class
woman calls on her slave spinning-maid to spit on an enemy, and on
her slave chamberlain to beat him. Violence, or the threat of violence,
was everywhere.
The violence of sale was a variation on this theme. It may have been a
testament to Trimalchio's bad taste that he had a mural of a
slave-market in his house, complete with price tags on the merchandise
(29.3); but this too was a statement of how power was distributed
between master and slave, reminding the slave viewer of the violent

disruption that could enter life at any time. So what, I wonder, would a
real-life character such as the freedman L. Volusius Heracla, who was
commemorated as both capsarius and a cubiculo (ILS 7413), have
thought when looking at a picture like this before he was set free? Did
he think only of his own good fortune, as the optimistic view might
have it, or did he think of those sections of Rome where beautiful
slaves, of both sexes, were, as Plutarch (Moralia 520C) notes, always
to be found for sale along with the freaks of the 'monster market'? Had
he once been in the slave-market? Might he be there again? Was he
once a slave whose face a slave-dealer had plastered with bean-flour to
remove his freckles and moles to make him more attractive to buyers--a
trick of which Galen knew (6.530K)?
But this is not real life, you will say. It all comes from a work of the
literary imagination, and a work which by definition demands
outrageous comic exaggeration, so that a strictly literal reading of the
text cannot be justified. Yet this does not mean that the text lacks all
sense of realism: Trimalchio's specialised domestics are proof enough
of that--and this means, I think, that the arbitrariness of the masterslave
relationship that the Satyricon conveys must also be taken as authentic
and the conclusion reached that Roman domestic slaves lived under a
tense psychological regime which guaranteed them nothing as far as
security or stability in life were concerned. Incidents such as that
witnessed by Galen (5.18-19K) in which a travelling companion in
Greece, enraged over the whereabouts of