The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome

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Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Annual Lectures
Keith Bradley, Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Lectures, Howard University, 'The Bitter Chain of Slavery': Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome, http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online-print-books.ssp/frank-m.-snowden-jr./. Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC. November, 2005

'The Bitter Chain of Slavery': Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome
Keith Bradley

Towards the middle of the fifth century AD the Christian presbyter and moralist Salvian of Marseilles composed a highly polemical tract, On the Governance of God, in which he explained to the decadent Romans around him how it was that the destructive presence in their midst of barbarian invaders was the result not of God's neglect of the world but of their own moral bankruptcy. In their general comportment the Romans, though Christians, were full of moral failings and were far more morally culpable than the slaves they owned. Their slaves committed crimes such as stealing, running away, and lying, but they did so under the comprehensible and forgivable compulsion of hunger or fear of physical chastisement, whereas the Romans were simply wicked and had forfeited all claims to forgiveness because of their terrible behaviour. Among other things the Christian slaveowners had completely desecrated the institution of marriage: regarding their female slaves as natural outlets for their sexual appetites and considering adultery unexceptional, they thought nothing of acting upon their impulses and of satisfying their desires. As a result, Salvian said in an ironic metaphor, they had become the bad slaves of a good Master, which meant that the barbarian invaders, while pagans, were in fact their moral superiors. In Salvian's judgement it was this moral superiority that accounted for the barbarians' stunning invasionary success (On the Governance of God 4.13-29; 6.92; 7.16-20; cf. 3.50; 8.14).
Despite his critical assault on Roman slaveowners, Salvian makes very clear the low esteem in which slaves were held in his society. Slaves were naturally inferior, criminous, and corrupt, they lived only to satisfy their base wishes, and they were expected to show unquestioning obedience to their owners, including sexual obedience. In recognising the motives that drove them to steal, lie, and run away, Salvian was notably sympathetic to them and he maintained that kindly treatment was a useful alternative to physical coercion in rendering slaves submissive. But he never questioned the reality of slavery, and he could proclaim without any sign of discomfort: 'It is generally agreed that slaves are wicked and worthy of our contempt' (4.29).
Such views were hardly new. Images of immoral and criminous slaves, appeals for adopting a carrot-and-stick approach to handling them, and statements that obedience should be expected of them can be found in any number of earlier Greek and Latin writers. The precise form of slavery Salvian knew in fifth-century Gaul is a matter of controversy, but the terms he used to describe it, and the conceptual attitudes underlying them, were those which Greek and Roman slaveowners had used and drawn on for centuries past.
His remarks nonetheless are striking. Salvian was writing at a very late date in classical history, and while directed to Romans in general his audience in the first instance was an entirely local body of men, the wealthy lords of southern Gaul--and both he and his local audience were of course Christian. Despite its conventional aspects, therefore, Salvian's evidence brings into sharp focus two well-known but important facts. The first is that there was no time or place in Greco-Roman antiquity, even on the margins of time and place, that was altogether free from the presence or influence of slavery. Across the vast chronological interval from the Mycenaeans to the Roman Empire of the fifth century and beyond, and in all the regions where Greco-Roman culture took root--Europe, the Near East, North Africa--slavery in one form or other was an integral part of the social order. The second is that across time and space no one, not even Christians, ever seriously thought to question slavery and slaveowning. To moderns living in societies in whose democratic traditions the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century is a landmark event, it may seem problematical that a call to end slavery never arose, especially in view of the appearance in late antiquity of a socially sensitive attitude like Salvian's. But this is a modern not an ancient problem, and it is not the absence of an abolitionist movement in classical antiquity, even Christian antiquity, that is historically peculiar so much as the rise of abolitionism in post-Enlightenment Europe and North America. For most of human history, the enslavement of one group in society by another, or of one people by another, has been a quintessential element of normal social relations. Western liberalism cannot be allowed to obscure this fundamental truth, or to justify the assumption that the absence of slavery is in any sense socially normative, no matter how socially desirable. There is