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

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 side, and it is to this darker side that I now want to