The Past and Present Society Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery Author(s): Keith Hopkins Source: Past & Present, No. 138 (Feb., 1993), pp. 3-27 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/651186 Accessed: 19-02-2018 21:03 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press, The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Past & Present This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN SLAVERY* This is an article about Roman slavery, and an experiment with method. Substantively my objective is to sketch the slave's experi- ence of slavery, and the fears and anxieties which slavery evoked in Roman masters. I am interested here in thoughts and feelings. Methodologically I am trying a new tack by experimenting at length with lies, whereas most Roman history is purportedly aimed at the discovery of truths, through establishing facts or describing events which are known to have occurred.' This article is built around a single source, which is an inventive fiction, a pack of lies, an anonymous accretive novella, composed and revised, as I suspect, over centuries, as a vehicle for comedy and manners. It is the biography of a slave, the only full-length biography of a slave surviving from classical antiquity; a text which as far as I know has never yet been used as the basis of historical reconstruction, probably because it is so obviously a fiction.2 But before I get down to discussing this biography in * I should like to thank Mary Beard, Simon Goldhill, John Henderson and Richard Sailer for conversations and criticisms, and audiences at Berkeley, Cambridge, Copen- hagen, Eton, Los Angeles, Oxford, Princeton and Victoria for indicating where I failed to be persuasive. In some, the text produced the same reactions as its hero, Aesop; out of respect, I have changed it little. 1 The dominant convention that history is primarily concerned with "truth" about events which have occurred hardly needs authentication. See, for example, Paul Veyne, Writing History, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Manchester, 1971), pp. 10-11: "history is a body of facts . History is the relating of true events". The tactic of experimenting with conscious fictions as a source of socio-cultural history is not unknown, but still rare in ancient history. It is well known, even fashionable, in early modern history. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations (Oxford, 1988). 2 The text is edited with all its known variants in Aesopica, ed. Ben E. Perry (Urbana, 1952). The main manuscripts are very well translated by Lloyd W. Daly, Aesop without Morals (New York, 1961). I owe a huge amount to Daly's translation, though the translations in this article are my own, except where noted. The Life of Aesop is not dealt with, as far as I know, in any modern discussion of ancient slavery; it is not even mentioned, for example by W. L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia, 1955); I. Biezunska-Malowist, L'esclavage dans l'Egypte greco-romaine, 2 vols. (Wroclaw, 1974-7); Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978); or by M. I. Finley in, for example, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1980), Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (London, 1981), or Classical Slavery (London, 1987). Keith R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in (cont. on p. 4) This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 138 detail, I want to dwell a little on a small number of anecdotes, more or less familiar to modern historians of the Roman world, drawn from formal histories and from a medical doctor's observa- tions. My objective here is to illustrate my underlying contention that the social history which can be squeezed from "real histories" and from fiction may be broadly similar, and that, for the inter- pretation of culture, there is little justification for privileging one above the other.3 First, a historian - Tacitus. In A.D. 61, the senatorial mayor (praefectus urbi) of Rome was murdered in his own home by one of his slaves. According to Tacitus, the motive was disputed: was it because the master had promised his slave freedom, and had even agreed the price, only to welch on the deal? Or was it because of some homosexual rivalry between master and slave over a shared lover? Whatever the cause, under strict Roman law, if a slave killed a master in his own house, then all of his slaves living in the household were to be crucified. The murdered mayor was a rich noble, a former consul; in his town house alone, he had four hundred slaves. Their imminent execution caused a huge stir. There was a heated debate in the Roman senate. Some senators were for softening the traditional harshness of the law; they pleaded for mercy for the large number of slaves, including women and children, who were undeniably innocent of any com- plicity in the crime. But a majority of senators voted to uphold the law as it stood. How else, the traditionalists argued, could a solitary master sleep soundly among a whole gang of slaves, unless it was in the interest of each to protect him against any murderous conspirator? Foreign slaves, worshipping foreign gods or none, could be controlled only by fear. After all the traditional custom of punishing a cowardly legion by choosing by lot one soldier in ten, and then having him cudgelled to death by his former companions, some- times involved murdering the bravest men. Making an example (n. 2 cont.) the Roman Empire (Brussels, 1984), pp. 150-3, discusses the fables of Phaedrus, but not Aesop or his Life. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York, 1977), esp. pp. 81 if., discusses the meaning of slaves' stories - but in an intellectual style quite different from that deployed here. 3 In calling fiction "lies", I am colluding with conventional dichotomies: facts/fic- tions, truth/lies, evidence/discardable opinions, even though the basic argument of this article is that fiction provides a usable and trustworthy representation of Roman culture. My intention here is not to squeeze fiction for facts, but to interpret fiction as a mirror of Roman thinking and feelings. This content downloaded from 205.175.118.209 on Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:03:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms NOVEL EVIDENCE FOR ROMAN SLAVERY 5 benefited the whole community, even if it sacrificed some indi- viduals unjustly. This was the gist of a speech by the triumphant conservative lawyer. The Roman senate was persuaded. The populace was less impressed. A crowd wielding firebrands and stones tried to stop the mass executions, but the emperor Nero stood firm, had the route lined with soldiers, and all four hundred slaves were crucified.4 Slavery was a cruel and repressive institution, enforced by hatred and fear. "All slaves are enemies", stated a Roman pro- verb. The hostility of Roman slave-owners to their slaves, and of slaves to their owners, lay just below the surface of Roman civilization like an unexploded volcano. To be sure, some slave- owners were probably kind and considerate to some of their slaves, whether out of affection, generosity or the self-interest which was prompted by a desire to safeguard valuable assets. Sometimes owners' kindliness was projected into an idealized image of the grateful and loyal slave, who in an emergency even sacrificed his or her life to save the slave-owner.5 That favourable image was one side of the coin. The other, and dirtier side of slavery rested in slaves' legal powerlessness and in their more or less complete dependence on their owner's favour, which, as far as the slave knew, could turn at any moment from love to hate. It is not my concern here to describe the varied behaviour of Roman slaves and of their owners, nor to draw up a tentative balance-sheet of what was typical. Given the fragmentary state of surviving evidence, that would be impracticable. But the realit- ies of Roman slavery, its scale and pervasiveness throughout the Mediterranean basin, its legal basis and its economic implications, necessarily frame any modern analysis, as they framed all ancient experiences, of slavery.6 Roman slavery was in significant respects 4 Tacitus, Annals, xiv.42 ff. His account of the senatorial debate may not be accurate, and may reflect later political concerns. This is the argument of Joseph G. Wolf, "Das Senatusconsultum Silanianum und die Senatsrede des C. Cassius Longinus aus dem Jahre 61 n. Chr.", Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil- hist. Klasse (Heidelberg, 1988). 5 For the proverb, see Seneca, Moral Letters, xlvii.5; Macrobius, Saturnalia, i. 11.13. On the loyal slave, see Joseph Vogt, "Sklaverei und Humanitat", Historia Einzelschrift, viii (1972), pp. 83-96; Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (Oxford, 1974), pp.