The Bitter Chain of Slavery: Reflections on Slavery in Ancient Rome | Page 9

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 here of the kind that
appears in the laments for the untimely dead, and the slave now is
always anonymous.
Two of Martial's poems recall the story of Marcus Piso and the theme
of the contest of minds, offering further evidence of a master-slave
relationship that was subject to constant negotiation. First, the poem
(6.39) to which I just alluded in which a certain Cinna is derided
because his seven children are the fruits of his wife's liaisons with
seven of the household slaves--a visible truth because the children all

physically resemble their respective fathers. I can scarcely believe that
Martial or anyone else knew of such a situation in real life. But what I
find plausible is that the poem gives expression to a genuine,
double-edged fear on the part of the Roman male slaveowner, first that
despite her social subordination his wife's sexual behaviour was beyond
his control; and secondly that through the exercise of power that
derived from their capacity to make human decisions and take human
actions, his slaves were equally capable of challenging the authority the
slaveowner commanded. Secondly, a poem (11.58) in which the poet
contemplates a scene where a slave barber shaving his master, his razor
at the master's throat, demands his freedom and a small fortune besides.
What is the master to do? In fear for his life he agrees to the slave's
demands and saves himself. But once the razor is safely out of the way
he can immediately take his revenge by having the slave's hands and
legs broken as the 'normal' balance of power is restored. Here again I
know of no real incidents like this. But the poem again plausibly
expresses a slaveowner's perhaps often latent fear that when instructing
his barber to shave him he temporarily exposed himself to serious
danger and literally placed his life in his slave's hands, bestowing on
the slave a power that the slave-commodity was never supposed to have.
The psychology of the situation--could the slave be trusted?--can only
be imagined.
The evidence I have described suggests that the meaning slaves
sometimes found in their work, the family ties that they were
sometimes able to create, and the freedom that they were sometimes
able to win were remarkable successes gained in the teeth of an
unspeakably difficult physical and psychological regime. It also
suggests that there can be no justification for assuming that pride in
their work was a natural and generic response, or that security within
the slave household (familia) was automatically guaranteed, or that
slaves easily and with benign encouragement from their owners always
pursued a straightforward path to freedom. Roman slavery was a
complex institution, full of paradox and contrast, allowing a poet such
as Martial (as I noted) to speak almost simultaneously of certain slaves
by name, as individual persons, but of most indifferently as nameless
instruments. At times, due to contigency and temperament, human

interaction between owner and owned led to favourable results for the
slave. But as far s I can see none of this was predictable or
all-embracing. Moreover, as I indicated at the outset, there was never
any moment in the history of Roman slavery when individual acts of
generosity developed into a society-wide call for ending the institution,
even with the rise in late antiquity of the new ideology espoused by
men like Salvian. The Christian bishop Ambrose of Milan (On the
Duties of Christian Ecclesiastics 2.138-143) saw the redemption of
enslaved prisoners of war as a Christian duty, the bishop Caesarius of
Arles could limit the number of times a slave might be beaten (no more
than thirty-nine lashes a day [Life of Caesarius 1.25]), and a pope like
Leo (Ep. 4.1) might save the priesthood from the contagion of slavery
by forbidding slaves to be priests. But slavery itself never raised any
serious objection. The convert Lactantius believed that everyone was a
fellow-slave of God (Divine Institutions 5.15.3), so a preoccupation
with justice did not involve a problem with slavery.
Why was this so? Peter Garnsey has brought forward two possible
explanatory factors: the absence of any rival social and economic
system to offer competition to slavery, and the structural embeddedness
of slavery within the classical household that made possible pursuit of
the good life by those with the resources to carry it out. A third factor
may have been the absence of any emphatic equation between slavery
and race. To a degree, however, the question of 'Why not?' is specious,
because it involves trying to explain why something did not happen
that you think should have happened when in fact under contemporary
conditions it could not have happened. Slavery was never considered a