The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 8

I think is valuable. The evidence of different literary authors, I believe, cannot all be dismissed as simply 'literary' when consensus about the normative is so clear. And Martial, keep in mind, notably claimed that there was a direct correspondence between what he wrote and the life he knew around him: 'let life recognize and read of her ways' (8.3).
Martial's poems contain any number of references to the occupations of domestic slaves, but if anything it is the humbler levels of the household hierarchy that predominate. There are stewards, pedagogues and nurses, musicians, cooks and bakers, and the freak (morio) who was kept as an object of amusement (e,g. 1.49; 8.44; 10.62; 11.39; 12.49; 11.78; 9.77; 3.94; 8.23; 16.39; 11.31; 8.13). But doorkeepers and litter-bearers are equally in evidence, and personal or body-servants seem to be everywhere: the woman's hairdresser, the man's barber, the bath-assistant, the personal trainer, the slaves who attended their masters at dinner--including those who took off their shoes and those who carried the lantern when they returned home in the dark--and the slaves who at the snap of a finger came running with the chamber-pot (e.g. 9.2; 6.52; 8.52; 11.58; 12.70; 3.23; 12.87; 14.65; 8.75; 6.89, 14.119).
Some of the most affecting of Martial's poems commemorate the untimely deaths of young or former slaves: the boy Alcimus, who died as a teenager; the secretary (amanuensis) Demetrius, dead from disease at a similar age; the personal favourite (deliciae) Erotion, dead at only five and fondly remembered in three poems; the ex-slave Glaucias, dead at twelve and the subject of two poems; and the skilled barber, the completely good Pantagathus, who was taken while a boy (1.8; 1.101; 5.34; 5.37; 10.61; 6.28; 6.29; 6.52). Both the grief caused by death and the sense of intimacy in life between master and slave conveyed by these poems seem to me genuine, and it is difficult not to take them as evidence of the close personal bond between the two that might develop despite the enormous differences of status involved. Demetrius the secretary was even set free so that he might avoid the stigma of dying in slavery, a remarkable testament to the gulf between slave and free that existed in Roman society and also of a slaveowner's sensitivity to it. In this context, a reference (9.87) to how at any moment a man might be called to witness an act of manumission suggests a slave world of relative ease in which once more the prospects of crossing the permeable boundary were rather good. The slave who was once in shackles, Martial says, might one day find himself wearing the ring of elite privilege.
Other poems, however, offer a starker set of images. First there is the commodity that can be loaned by a slaveowner to a friend, a transaction which might cause the owner difficulties of recovery but which hardly takes any account of the object of the loan (2.32). Secondly there is the commodity that can be bought and sold--sold on a whim to raise the price of a fancy dinner, or, with more calculation, as a result of a cash-flow problem--and bought especially, if you have the money, for sex, of any kind, boy-commodities in the Saepta and girl-commodities in the Subura (10.31; 9.59; 6.66). For Martial (and presumably his audience) the commodity's sexual availability is simply taken for granted: slaveowning men and women are free to indulge any appetites they have, and slaves are to submit and to accommodate them (e.g. 1.84; 3.71; 3.73; 4.66; 6.39; 9.25; 12.58). The results might be literarily amusing--one man is utterly unaware that his apparent 'children' have all been fathered by different members of his household staff (6.39), and another is lampooned because he sells but then buys back a slave girl with whom he is infatuated (6.71): what a disgrace! But the assumption that the slaveowner is sexually sovereign is unmistakable. (The inference might be drawn that the slave, as seen earlier from Philo, was sometimes a willing sexual partner [a male slave on the run for instance who was shacking up with a discharged soldier (3.91)], but the servile perspective on sexual access is obviously hopelessly beyond reach.) Then, thirdly, there is the object (once more) of random violence, the object whose body is taken as a natural site on which to inflict physical pain and suffering. A woman distressed that one ringlet of her elaborate coiffure has not been properly pinned strikes her dresser with a mirror; a man annoyed that his dinner is not properly prepared flogs his cook; another punishes an errant slave by hitting him in the mouth (2.66; 3.94; 8.23). Martial repeatedly associates the slave with the whip, the cross, the shackle and the brand (e.g. 14.79; 2.82; 10.82; 3.29, 9.57; 3.21; 10.56). So no tenderness