The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 6

on the ears (34.2). He threatens with demotion to the ranks of the uiatores a cook, left to him by will and unrecognised, if a pig is not properly served, making the slave well aware of the master's naked authority, his potentia (47.3). When another pig is brought in, another cook is threatened with flogging because he seems to have forgotten to gut the animal. This is a charade of course. Trimalchio is playing a trick on his guests because he wants to impress them with the sausages and black puddings he knows will appear once the pig is cut open. But the significant point is that the charade is credible: Trimalchio has the cook stripped and handed over to torturers (tortores) he keeps on his staff, as slaveowners could, expressly for the purpose of physically punishing members of his household (49.1-50.1). Later he threatens with decapitation a slave who drops a cup, relenting only when his guests intercede on the unfortunate man's behalf (52.4-6). He also threatens to burn alive a certain Stichus (a good slave name) if the slave fails to take proper care of his burial clothes (78.2). Violence, physical, psychological, or both, figures everywhere in the relationship between owner and owned, and the extended dinner narrative expresses this dynamic reality in a way, I think, that inscriptions and passages from the law cannot.
That slavery was an institution based on brute force and terror hardly needs to be demonstrated. Plutarch's observation (Moralia 462A) that the first thing newly purchased slaves wanted to know about their owner was whether he was ill-tempered is just one indication of the psychological truth, the Christian Lactantius' exhortation (Divine Institutions 4.4.1) that his readers should fear God like slaves another. But the degree to which violence might at any time appear in the slave's life cannot to my mind be overstated. In the Satyricon it is normative for the master to resort to the whip when angered by slaves he regards as 'delinquent', as a new slave, a nouicius, makes clear (139.5). And it was not the slaveowner alone the slave had to fear. It made sense to Petronius to imagine that a slave accountant could have a slave underling beaten for having lost his clothes at the baths (30.7-11), and that a freedman guest could verbally abuse one of Trimalchio's slaves and physically threaten him for being impudent (58.5). It even made sense that slaves themselves could be called upon to commit acts of violence: in a later episode of the Satyricon (132ff) an upper-class woman calls on her slave spinning-maid to spit on an enemy, and on her slave chamberlain to beat him. Violence, or the threat of violence, was everywhere.
The violence of sale was a variation on this theme. It may have been a testament to Trimalchio's bad taste that he had a mural of a slave-market in his house, complete with price tags on the merchandise (29.3); but this too was a statement of how power was distributed between master and slave, reminding the slave viewer of the violent disruption that could enter life at any time. So what, I wonder, would a real-life character such as the freedman L. Volusius Heracla, who was commemorated as both capsarius and a cubiculo (ILS 7413), have thought when looking at a picture like this before he was set free? Did he think only of his own good fortune, as the optimistic view might have it, or did he think of those sections of Rome where beautiful slaves, of both sexes, were, as Plutarch (Moralia 520C) notes, always to be found for sale along with the freaks of the 'monster market'? Had he once been in the slave-market? Might he be there again? Was he once a slave whose face a slave-dealer had plastered with bean-flour to remove his freckles and moles to make him more attractive to buyers--a trick of which Galen knew (6.530K)?
But this is not real life, you will say. It all comes from a work of the literary imagination, and a work which by definition demands outrageous comic exaggeration, so that a strictly literal reading of the text cannot be justified. Yet this does not mean that the text lacks all sense of realism: Trimalchio's specialised domestics are proof enough of that--and this means, I think, that the arbitrariness of the masterslave relationship that the Satyricon conveys must also be taken as authentic and the conclusion reached that Roman domestic slaves lived under a tense psychological regime which guaranteed them nothing as far as security or stability in life were concerned. Incidents such as that witnessed by Galen (5.18-19K) in which a travelling companion in Greece, enraged over the whereabouts of a certain item of baggage, struck two of his attendants on their heads with a large