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

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 is this sense of the normative, and its consistency with what is evident in Petronius and Seneca, that