The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 5

had to reconcile themselves to it. Philostratus (VS 516-518) offers another illustration, telling how a scheming cook named Kytheros, the slave of the father of the sophist Scopelian, in league with the old man's concubine, was once able to turn the father against his son, replace the son in the old man's will, inherit his estate, and subsequently achieve public prominence (though his origins were not forgotten). Philostratus was aware that the slave's behaviour resembled something from the plot of an ancient comedy, but he did not doubt it as fact. Similarly Philo had no doubts (Every Good Man is Free 38) that sex was a particularly useful commodity in the relational contest of wills: maidservants with pretty faces and charming words might well take the initiative and seduce their masters--which is to say that slave women could use sex to their advantage and were not always its victims.
From the establishment's point of view, what was at stake in all this was the maintenance of social order and the defusing of threats to the exercise of power inherent in slaveownership. Fear of upheaval was never far away. At the turn of the third century the sophistic writer Aelian (Characteristics of Animals 7.15) wrote of a woman named Laenilla he had known as a boy whose infatuation with a slave had led to the criminal indictment of her completely innocent sons, young men of senatorial descent who were embarrassed by their mother's behaviour and tried to point out its shamefulness to her. The woman had been unwilling to give up her slave lover, and falsely accused the sons before a magistrate. They were subsequently executed. The combination of slavery, sex and shame was a recipe for social disaster, a deeply disturbing prospect to be avoided at all costs.
How might a sense of the never-ending in the master-slave relationship be recovered? I want to suggest at this point that for answering this question the famous section of Petronius' Satyricon known as 'Trimalchio's Dinner-Party' (Cena Trimalchionis) is one literary source that can be very useful. The Cena is of course a piece of fiction, as is the Satyricon as a whole. But no one would question that it reflects social conditions of the first century and for present purposes its value lies, I believe, in the way its narrative nature opens up the possibility of observing continuous interaction between a slaveowner and various members of his domestic entourage over a certain interval of time.
Petronius' great creation Trimalchio, a former slave who has made himself enormously rich in commerce after inheriting and investing money from his former owners, has an elaborate domestic staff with titles just like those found in the epitaphs from elite Roman households. There is a porter (ostiarius), a major-domo (atriensis), an accountant (dispensator), a steward (procurator), a record-keeper (actuarius), a name-announcer (nomenclator); there are cooks and carvers, doctors and masseurs, musicians, acrobats and readers, and any number of attractive boys from Alexandria and Ethiopia to wait at table and catch the eye of guests. As Petronius' heroes Encolpius and Giton suffer through the long ordeal of the dinner-party, they see these members of staff benefiting from their owner's generosity (Trimalchio's 'humanitas' [Satyricon 65.1]: surely ironic!) in any number of ways. Trimalchio orders drinks for the slaves who sit and attend his guests (64.13); he summons a new contingent of waiters so that the previous battery may leave to have their own dinner (74.16); he has his will read out so that his household will know the kindnesses awaiting them on his death--grants of freedom and even the bequest to one dependant of his contubernalis (71); he sets free an acrobat who accidentally falls on him, to avoid the shame of having been injured by a slave (54.4-5). These are all acts of random, one might say quixotic, 'humanity'. They do not have to be taken literally as evidence of what slaveowners did in real life. But they reveal how slaves on a daily basis might reap the rewards of being close to their owners at specific moments in time.
The occasional acts of kindness at the dinner-party catch the eye, but more arresting to my mind is the threatening atmosphere of violence that overhangs and permeates Trimalchio's relationship with his slaves. Physical proximity of slave and master, it needs to be remembered, could expose domestics, even those of superior station, to the punishing consequences of random bouts of temper or irritability as much as to the benefits of random acts of kindness--evidently a common enough problem for moralists like Seneca and Plutarch, and even the medical authority Galen, to be found giving counsel about it from one generation to the next--and there is no shortage of such consequences here. Trimalchio has an over-zealous slave who picks up a fallen dish boxed