The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 2

a world of difference between Salvian and, say, the nineteenth-century opponent of slavery Henri Wallon, who in his celebrated Histoire de l'esclavage dans l'antiquit?? (1847), wrote in a climate when slavery had come to be regarded in Christian ethics, in a mode of thought totally alien to classical antiquity, as a sin.
The forms of servitude known in the classical world varied across time and place. They included debt-bondage, helotage, temple slavery and serfdom, but also chattel slavery, an absolute form of unfreedom in which enslaved persons were assimilated to commodities, akin to livestock, over whom, or which, owners enjoyed complete mastery. Chattel slavery was not found in all times and places in antiquity, but it was especially evident in Italy during the central era of Roman history and it is with Roman chattel slavery that I am concerned here. I want to consider the nature of the master-slave relationship and the basic character of Roman chattel slavery, and to suggest from a cultural point of view why slavery at Rome, as I understand it, never could present itself as problematical. For the sake of convenience and because it is relatively well-attested, I concentrate particularly on Roman domestic slavery. My account is necessarily generalised, impressionistic, even superficial and schematic, and at every stage allowance must be made for the ambiguous and the exceptional.
I take as a starting-point the observation from the Roman Antiquities of the Greek author Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.9.4; cf. 4.23.7), that when Romans manumitted their slaves they conferred on them not only freedom but citizenship as well. To Dionysius and the Greeks for whom in the age of Augustus he was writing this was an unusual and generous practice. And it has seemed unusual and generous to moderns as well, so much so that scholars have often concluded that Roman slavery was a mild institution, milder by implication at least than the race-based slavery systems of the New World. As an example let me quote a passage from another celebrated book, J??r?′me Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome, which was first published in the United States in 1940, a year after the French original, and which I select because it has always enjoyed enormous influence and is currently enjoying a new lease of life in re-edited versions. Carcopino is speaking of the age of the Antonines:
Everyone learned to speak and think in Latin, even the slaves, who in the second century raised their standard of living to the level of the 'ingenui'. Legislation had grown more and more humane and had progressively lightened their chains and favoured their emancipation. The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from showing cruelty towards the 'servi'. They had always treated their slaves with consideration, as Cato had treated his plough oxen; however far back we go in history we find the Romans spurring their slaves to effort by offering them pay and bonuses which accumulated to form a nest egg that as a rule served ultimately to buy their freedom. With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable; but never had it been lighter or easier to escape from than under the Antonines.
More recently and more compellingly, the preeminent historian Susan Treggiari has shown how a relatively benign picture of Roman slavery like that of Carcopino might emerge. Exploiting two types of evidence, commemorative epitaphs and the writings of Roman jurists, Treggiari has investigated in a remarkable series of studies the personal lives of slaves and former slaves who worked as domestic servants in the resplendent households of the Roman elite under the early Principate, and she has proved that much can be learned about the world these people created for themselves. What emerges, first, is the vast range of highly specialised work-roles that helped slaves to establish individual identities for themselves, and, secondly, the formation of familial relationships, sometimes of long duration, that restored to slaves something of the human dignity of which slavery deprived them. The value found in their work as domestic servants becomes clear, and the manner in which despite their legal incapacity slaves constructed and memorialised familial ties is repeatedly made plain. Special attention is paid, moreover, to the roles played by women and what might be termed the female contribution to the infrastructure of Roman society is brought to the fore as evidence is compiled of the spinners and weavers (quasillariae, textrices), the clothes-makers and menders (uestificae, sarcinatrices), the dressers (ornatrices), nurses and midwives (nutrices, opstetrices) who populated the domestic establishments of the Roman elite. With the perceived development under the Principate of a more humane attitude to slaves--a view that goes back beyond Carcopino to at least Gibbon's belief that a certain 'progress of