The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx

The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Nobleman Marcus Sidonius Falx

Author:Jerry Toner [Toner, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS002020
ISBN: 9781468310276
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2014-09-10T20:00:00+00:00


COMMENTARY

Falx’s tougher side re-emerges in this chapter. But the physical punishment of slaves by their Roman masters was normal, acceptable and routine. In Roman comedies by Plautus, for example, the typical slave is portrayed as being obsessed with avoiding the master’s whip. That doesn’t mean that all slaves were harshly and brutally treated. No doubt the individual slave’s treatment will have varied considerably depending on the attitude of the master. The Romans themselves were critical of owners who treated their slaves with excessive severity and it is possible that this kind of communal policing by means of reputation served to restrain some masters from getting too carried away when punishing their slaves.

This public concern was eventually expressed in imperial legislation that limited the degree to which a master could punish a slave with impunity. The famous story of Vedius Pollio trying to throw one of his slave boys to his lampreys as punishment for breaking a crystal cup is recorded precisely because it was seen as an unacceptable and overly harsh form of action. The emperor Augustus’s intervention in this story emphasises that imperial involvement was not primarily motivated by a desire to improve the living conditions of the slaves, but by the fact that emperors were involved in all aspects of their subjects’ lives and so were expected to set and enforce acceptable standards of social behaviour.

Slaves were subject to the arbitrary whims and moods of their owner. The story of Hadrian poking his slave’s eye out with his pen was probably remarkable, and so worth recording for posterity, precisely because this kind of behaviour was out of character for him. But he still did it. Yet if even a thoughtful emperor could act so callously when in a bad mood then how much more often did assaults of this kind occur among normal slave owners? What made the story even more notable for a Roman audience was that the slave grew bold when asked what he would like as recompense. It was unthinkable for a slave to be so disrespectful to his master, especially when he had taken the trouble to seek to offer some redress for the injury he had caused. The impression is given that what Hadrian is sorry for is that he lost his temper, not for what that loss of control meant for the slave. The focus was on the character of the owner not the fate of the slave.

Criminal slaves who were condemned to the mines, to work in the galleys of ships, or to be thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre were seen as completely deserving of their fate. It is tempting to think that the Romans will have felt some pity for poor men and women being thrown to the lions, but there is little evidence for this. They seem to have regarded such punishment as just deserts for slaves who were so worthless that they could not even be good at being slaves.

Runaways were a recurrent problem for masters. The loss of capital this represented was something they sought hard to avoid.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.