The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 4

turn, asking especially how slavery might have been fully experienced within the domestic context about which so much seems knowable. My intent is not at all to dispute the views of the contemporary scholars to whom I have just referred, but to point to the complexities of Roman slavery as I understand them. The question raises methodological issues. There are no extended accounts from slaves themselves to allow the historian a direct view of life in slavery, and much simply has to be inferred from sources that represent (and perhaps continually influenced and shaped) the attitudes and ideology of the slaveowning classes. These sources are primarily literary --sometimes imaginative and sometimes anecdotal -- of a sort that historians of modern slavery systems would often dismiss as of minimal value. But there is scarcely any alternative. Epitaphs and legal sources are immensely important, but they are by themselves insufficient; and epitaphs, especially, cannot be expected to reveal much that is critical of slavery when they celebrate for the most part individuals who found ways to achieve some sort of conventional success in life. In what follows, therefore, I offer a set of inferential observations from my reading of certain literary authors of the Principate, who allow, I believe, credible glimpses of life in slavery that stand in strong contrast to what has been seen so far.
The first point to emphasise is one that slavery historians, especially modern slavery historians, have always known, namely that slavery in Roman antiquity was not a soulless legal condition--a point of view common in legal studies of Roman slavery--but a human relationship in which slave and master were always inextricably bound together. The relationship was obviously asymmetrical, comparable according to the third-century Greek author Philostratus (Life of Apollonius of Tyana 7.42) to that between a tyrant and his subjects. But it was not completely one-sided. In theory the slave was powerless: No slave is really happy,' the Hellenized Jew Philo wrote, 'For what greater misery is there than to live with no power over anything, including oneself?' (Every Good Man is Free 41), and the slave was always subject to constraint, so that the medical authority Celsus could write (On Medicine 3.21.2) that a slave habituated to a life of compulsion endured the harsh treatment needed to cure an illness more eaily than the free. Yet because slaves were a human form of property, human agency could and did manifest itself in the relationship from moment to moment. Unlike the animals to which they were often compared, slaves were not easily manipulable, but had to be managed with thought and discretion to make sure that they did what was required of them and to prevent 'criminal' acts of the sort to which Salvian was still sensitive in late antiquity. The relationship therefore was one that on both sides involved constant adjustment, refinement, and negotiation. Some slaves, sure enough, enjoyed a privileged status in their households. Those who were stewards or managers of estates or supervisors of lowlier slaves or chaperons of their masters' wives and orphaned children held positions of authority because they were trustworthy and so resembled the free; and yet, as Philo said in the same work (35), whatever influence these slaves had they remained slaves regardless and to that extent they could never be free from the constricting tie to those who owned them and the struggle for power the tie involved.
My point is well illustrated by an anecdote from Plutarch (Moralia 511D-E) concerning the consul of 61 BC, Marcus Pupius Piso. As follows: The orator Piso, wishing to avoid being unnecessarily disturbed, ordered his slaves to answer his questions but not add anything to their answers. He then wanted to give a welcome to Clodius, who was holding office, and gave instructions that he should be invited to dinner. He set up a splendid feast. The time came, the other guests arrived, Clodius was expected. Piso kept sending the slave who was responsible for invitations to see if he was coming. Evening came; Clodius was despaired of. 'Did you invite him?' Piso asked his slave. 'Yes.' 'Then why didn't he come?' 'Because he declined.' 'Then why didn't you tell me?' 'Because you didn't ask.' Such is the way of the Roman slave! An anecdote like this, as everyone will be aware, cannot be taken at face value, as if literally true. It is what the story symbolises that is important: the fact that at any time any slave at Rome had the potential to challenge the authority the slaveowner commanded, which means accordingly that the relationship between slave and master always implicated the energies of both sides in a never-ending struggle for supremacy, and clearly it was not always the master who won. Owners knew this (as the anecdote shows) and they