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

is this sense of
the normative, and its consistency with what is evident in Petronius and
Seneca, that 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