The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 9

here of the kind that appears in the laments for the untimely dead, and the slave now is always anonymous.
Two of Martial's poems recall the story of Marcus Piso and the theme of the contest of minds, offering further evidence of a master-slave relationship that was subject to constant negotiation. First, the poem (6.39) to which I just alluded in which a certain Cinna is derided because his seven children are the fruits of his wife's liaisons with seven of the household slaves--a visible truth because the children all physically resemble their respective fathers. I can scarcely believe that Martial or anyone else knew of such a situation in real life. But what I find plausible is that the poem gives expression to a genuine, double-edged fear on the part of the Roman male slaveowner, first that despite her social subordination his wife's sexual behaviour was beyond his control; and secondly that through the exercise of power that derived from their capacity to make human decisions and take human actions, his slaves were equally capable of challenging the authority the slaveowner commanded. Secondly, a poem (11.58) in which the poet contemplates a scene where a slave barber shaving his master, his razor at the master's throat, demands his freedom and a small fortune besides. What is the master to do? In fear for his life he agrees to the slave's demands and saves himself. But once the razor is safely out of the way he can immediately take his revenge by having the slave's hands and legs broken as the 'normal' balance of power is restored. Here again I know of no real incidents like this. But the poem again plausibly expresses a slaveowner's perhaps often latent fear that when instructing his barber to shave him he temporarily exposed himself to serious danger and literally placed his life in his slave's hands, bestowing on the slave a power that the slave-commodity was never supposed to have. The psychology of the situation--could the slave be trusted?--can only be imagined.
The evidence I have described suggests that the meaning slaves sometimes found in their work, the family ties that they were sometimes able to create, and the freedom that they were sometimes able to win were remarkable successes gained in the teeth of an unspeakably difficult physical and psychological regime. It also suggests that there can be no justification for assuming that pride in their work was a natural and generic response, or that security within the slave household (familia) was automatically guaranteed, or that slaves easily and with benign encouragement from their owners always pursued a straightforward path to freedom. Roman slavery was a complex institution, full of paradox and contrast, allowing a poet such as Martial (as I noted) to speak almost simultaneously of certain slaves by name, as individual persons, but of most indifferently as nameless instruments. At times, due to contigency and temperament, human interaction between owner and owned led to favourable results for the slave. But as far s I can see none of this was predictable or all-embracing. Moreover, as I indicated at the outset, there was never any moment in the history of Roman slavery when individual acts of generosity developed into a society-wide call for ending the institution, even with the rise in late antiquity of the new ideology espoused by men like Salvian. The Christian bishop Ambrose of Milan (On the Duties of Christian Ecclesiastics 2.138-143) saw the redemption of enslaved prisoners of war as a Christian duty, the bishop Caesarius of Arles could limit the number of times a slave might be beaten (no more than thirty-nine lashes a day [Life of Caesarius 1.25]), and a pope like Leo (Ep. 4.1) might save the priesthood from the contagion of slavery by forbidding slaves to be priests. But slavery itself never raised any serious objection. The convert Lactantius believed that everyone was a fellow-slave of God (Divine Institutions 5.15.3), so a preoccupation with justice did not involve a problem with slavery.
Why was this so? Peter Garnsey has brought forward two possible explanatory factors: the absence of any rival social and economic system to offer competition to slavery, and the structural embeddedness of slavery within the classical household that made possible pursuit of the good life by those with the resources to carry it out. A third factor may have been the absence of any emphatic equation between slavery and race. To a degree, however, the question of 'Why not?' is specious, because it involves trying to explain why something did not happen that you think should have happened when in fact under contemporary conditions it could not have happened. Slavery was never considered a moral evil at Rome, and without that precondition there could be no moral impulse to eradicate it. A society without