The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 7

a certain item of baggage,
struck two of his attendants on their heads with a large knife and
seriously injured them--Galen later saved them, not surprisingly--have
to be taken seriously as evidence of what slaves always had to contend
with, not as isolated instances of aberrant behaviour. To dismiss
Trimalchio's actions therefore simply as 'bluster' and to describe him as
'a perfectly kind master' is to fail completely to my mind to probe how
an atmosphere of intimidation, no matter how comically drawn,
affected those against whom it was directed. Trimalchio had an
inscription written on the door of his house: 'Any slave who leaves the
house without the master's permission will receive a hundred lashes'
(28.7). I wonder again whether slaves in the well-documented
household of Augustus' wife Livia, those such as Antiochus the

atriensis, Calamus the dispensator, and Dorcas the ornatrix, ever saw
anything like this, and how would they have responded to it (CIL
6.3942; 6.3965b; 6.8958=ILS 1784).
As a control on Petronius some evidence from the Moral Epistles of his
contemporary Seneca might be considered. You will think immediately
of the famous forty-seventh epistle, which has often been held up as an
example of Seneca's humanitarian attitude and as a sign of an
increasing compassion towards slaves under the Principate, a view I do
not myself share. But I am more interested in the Moral Epistles' casual
allusions to slaves and slavery, which I think are especially revealing of
Roman elite views because of their offhandedness and which
consequently form a priceless guide to the conditions under which
domestic slaves lived. Seneca himself was a slaveowner, on the
evidence of the Moral Epistles alone (83.4; 123.1-2, 4) used to having
around him a cook, a baker, masseurs, a bath attendant, a personal
trainer, a major-domo--the constituents of what he terms the aristocrat's
formonsa familia (41.7). It is what he takes as normal or
uncontroversial about slaveowning that is surely significant.
In the ordinary course of events Seneca expects elite Romans to have a
mass of slaves attending upon them, litter-bearers to transport them,
door-keepers to control access to their houses, masseurs to take care of
their bodies (17.3; 31.10; 43.4). But contact with the slave is essentially
degrading if, for instance, you have to take orders from the man who
works as your trainer and so invert the 'natural' hierarchy of power
(15.3). And slaves are a burden to the owner: they have to be fed and
maintained, and they have a tendency to run away (17.3; 107.7). Seneca
values the edifying story of the Spartan boy who killed himself rather
than submit to slavery for what the story says about the need to secure
freedom of the spirit; but when he tells it to his interlocutor Lucilius he
shows no sympathy for or interest in the slave as a slave (77.14). It
causes him no distress that a slave criminal should be burned alive
(86.10). A master's right to beat his slave when going over his accounts
is not questioned (122.15). No problem that a slave might jump from a
roof and kill himself to avoid the taunts of a dyspeptic owner or fall on
the sword in order to avoid capture after running away (4.4). Slaves are

essentially enemies, always involved in plots to kill their owners,
creatures who, quite simply, like animals, have to be ruled (18.14; 4.8;
77.6; 80.9; 94.1).
Slavery itself Seneca regards as a state characterised principally by
subjection to compulsion--this indeed is what he calls the bitterest part
of slavery (61.3)--a condition in which the slave might be forced for
ever to eat no more than meagre rations of poor food, ordered to tiptoe
around the house in silence to avoid disturbing an insomniac master,
required even to help a master kill himself (18.8; 56.7; 77.7). Or else it
is a kind of living death, from which the slave will do anything to
escape, saving money by going hungry so that freedom can eventually
be purchased and slavery set aside (77.18; 80.4). When Seneca makes
his grand Stoic statements about the brotherhood of man, claiming for
example that the labels of elite Roman, freedman, and slave are no
more than inconsequential words (31.11), it is difficult not to recoil in
horror.
The poet Martial opens another window into the world of the
master-slave relationship, and he is the last author I want to consider.
Martial's poetry belongs of course to a completely different genre from
the genres represented by Petronius' novel and Seneca's sermonettes,
and again as works of the literary imagination I stress that Martial's
Epigrams are not to be read as statements of literal fact. Once more,
however, the poems can be read as statements that make assumptions
about social norms in Rome of the first century, and it