THE SLAVE POPULATION
In the last age of the Republic the employment of slave labour reached
its high-water mark in ancient history.[306] We have already met with
evidence of this in examining the life of the upper classes; in the
present chapter we must try to sketch, first, the conditions under
which it was possible for such a vast slave system to arise and
flourish, and secondly, the economical and ethical results of it
both in city and country. The subject is indeed far too large and
complicated to be treated in a single short chapter, but our object
throughout this book is only to give such a picture of society in
general as may tempt a student to further and more exact inquiry.
We have seen that the two upper classes of society were engaged in
business of various kinds, and especially in banking and carrying
out public contracts, or in the work of government, and in Italian
agriculture. All this business, public and private, called for a
vast amount of labor, and in part, of skilled labour; the great men
provided the capital, but the details of the work, as it had gradually
developed since the war with Hannibal, created a demand for workmen
of every kind such as had never before been known in the Graeco-Roman
world. Clerks, accountants, messengers, as well as operatives, were
wanted both by the Government and by private capitalists. In the
households of the rich the great increase of wealth and luxury had
led to a constant demand for helps of all kinds, each with a certain
amount of skill in his own particular department; and on the estates
in the country, which were steadily growing bigger, and were tending
to be worked more and more on capitalistic lines, labour, both skilled
and unskilled, was increasingly required. Thus the demand for labour
was abnormally great, and had been created with abnormal rapidity,
and the supply could not possibly be provided by the free population
alone. The lower classes of city and country were not suited to the
work wanted, either by capacity or inclination. It was not for a free
Roman to be at the beck and call of an employer, like the clerks and
underlings of to-day, or to act as servant in a great household; and
for a great part of the necessary work he was not sufficiently well
educated. Far less was it possible for him to work on the great
cattle-runs. And the State wanted the best years of his life for
service in the army, which, as has been well remarked, was the real
industry of the Roman freeman. But luckily in one sense, and in
another unluckily, for Rome, there was an endless supply of labour
to be had, of every quality and capacity, for the very same abnormal
circumstances which had created the demand also provided the supply.
The great wars and the wealth accruing from them in various ways had
produced a capitalist class in need of labour, and also created a
slave-market on a scale such as the world has never known before or
since.
Ever since the time of Alexander and the wars of his successors with
each other and their neighbours, it is probable that the supply of
captives sold as slaves had been increasing; and in the second century
B.C. the little island of Delos had come to be used as a convenient
centre for the slave trade. Strabo tells us in a well-known passage
that 10,000 slaves might be sold there in a single day.[307] But Rome
herself was in the time of Cicero the great emporium for slaves; the
wars which were most productive of prisoners had been for long in the
centre and the west of the Mediterranean basin. All armies sent out
from Rome were accompanied by speculators in this trade, who bought
the captives as they were put up to auction after a battle, and then
undertook the transport to Rome of all who were suited for employment
in Italy or were not bought up in the province which was the seat of
war. The enormous number of slaves thus made available, even if we
make allowance for the uncertainty of the numbers as they have
come down to us, surpasses all belief; we may take a few examples,
sufficient to give some idea of a practice which had lasting and
lamentable results on Roman society.
After the campaign of Pydna and the overthrow of the Macedonian
kingdom, Aemilius Paullus, one of the most humane of Romans, sold into
slavery, under orders from the senate, 150,000 free inhabitants of
communities in Epirus which had sided with Perseus in the war.[308]
After the war with the Cimbri and Teutones, 90,000 of the latter and
60,000 of the former are said to have been sold;[309] and though the
numbers may be open to suspicion, as they amount again to 150,000, the
fact of an enormous capture is beyond question. Caesar, like Aemilius
Paullus one of the most humane of Romans, tells us himself that on a
single occasion, the capture of the Aduatuci, he sold 53,000 prisoners
on the spot.[310] And of course every war, whether great or small,
while it diminished the free population by slaughter, pestilence, or
capture, added to the number of slaves. Cicero himself, after
his campaign in Cilicia and the capture of the hill stronghold
Pindonissus, did of course as all other commanders did; we catch a
glimpse of the process in a letter to Atticus: "mancipia venibant
Saturnalibus tertiis."[311] It is hardly necessary to point out that
we should be getting our historical perspective quite wrong if we
allowed ourselves to expect in these cultured Roman generals any
sign of compassion for their victims; it was a part of their mental
inheritance to look on men who had surrendered as simply booty, the
property of the victors; Roman captives would meet with the same fate,
and even for them little pity was ever felt. When Caesar in 49 within
a few months dismissed two surrendered armies of Roman soldiers, once
at Corfinium and again in Spain, he was doubtless acting from motives
of policy, but the enslavement of Roman citizens by their fellows
would, we may hope, have been repugnant to him, if not to his own
soldiers.[312]
War then was the principal source of the supply of slaves, but it was
not the only one. When a slave-trade is in full swing, it will be
fostered in all possible ways. Brigandage and kidnapping were rife
all over the Empire and in the countries beyond its borders in the
disturbed times with which we are dealing. The pirates of Cilicia,
until they were suppressed by Pompeius in 66, swarmed all over the
Mediterranean, and snapped up victims by raids even on the coasts of
Italy, selling them in the market at Delos without hindrance. Cicero,
in his speech in support of the appointment of Pompey, mentions that
well-born children had been carried off from Misenum under the very
eyes of a Roman praetor.[313] Caesar himself was taken by them when a
young man, and only escaped with difficulty. In Italy itself, where
there was no police protection until Augustus took the matter in hand,
kidnapping was by no means unknown; the _grassatores_, as they were
called, often slaves escaped from the prisons of the great estates,
haunted the public roads, and many a traveller disappeared in this
way and passed the rest of his life in a slave-prison.[314] Varro,
in describing the sort of slaves best suited for work on the great
sheep-runs, says that they should be such as are strong enough to
defend the flocks from wild beasts and brigands--the latter doubtless
quite as ready to seize human beings as sheep and cattle. And
slave-merchants seem to have been constantly carrying on their trade
in regions where no war was going on, and where desirable slaves could
be procured; the kingdoms of Asia Minor were ransacked by them, and
when Marius asked Nicomedes king of Bithynia for soldiers during the
struggle with the Cimbri, the answer he got was that there were none
to send--the slave-dealers had been at work there.[315] Every one will
remember the line of Horace in which he calls one of these wretches a
"king of Cappadocia."[316]
There were two other sources of the slave supply of which however
little need be said here, as the contribution they made was
comparatively small. First, slaves were bred from slaves, and on rural
estates this was frequently done as a matter of business.[317] Varro
recommends the practice in the large sheep-farms,[318] under certain
conditions; and some well-known lines of Horace suggest that on
smaller farms, where a better class of slaves would be required, these
home-bred ones were looked on as the mark of a rich house, "ditis
examen domus."[319] Secondly, a certain number of slaves had become
such under the law of debt. This was a common source of slavery in the
early periods of Roman history, but in Cicero's day we cannot speak of
it with confidence. We have noticed the cry of the distressed freemen
of the city in the conspiracy of Catiline, which looks as though the
old law were still put in force; and in the country there are signs
that small owners who had borrowed from large ones were in Varro's
time in some modified condition of slavery,[320] surrendering their
labour in lieu of payment. But all these internal sources of slavery
are as nothing compared with the supply created by war and the
slave-trade.
This supply being thus practically unlimited, prices ran comparatively
low, and no Roman of any considerable means at all need be, or was,
entirely without slaves. He had only to go, or to send his agent, to
one of the city slave-markets, such as the temple of Castor,[321]
where the slave-agents (mangones) exhibited their "goods" under the
supervision of the aediles; there he could pick out exactly the kind
of slave he wanted at any price from the equivalent of £10 upwards.
The unfortunate human being was exhibited exactly as horses are now,
and could be stripped, handled, trotted about, and treated with every
kind of indignity, and of course the same sort of trickery went on in
these human sales as is familiar to all horse-dealers of the present
day.[322] The buyer, if he wanted a valuable article, a Greek, for
example, who could act as secretary or librarian, like Cicero's
beloved Tiro, or even a household slave with a special character for
skill in cooking or other specialised work of a luxurious family,
would have to give a high price; even as long ago as the time of the
elder Cato a very large sum might be given for a single choice slave,
and Cato as censor in 184 attempted to check such high prices by
increasing the duties payable on the sales.[323] Towards the close
of the Republican period we have little explicit evidence of prices;
Cicero constantly mentions his slaves, but not their values. Doubtless
for fancy articles huge prices might be demanded; Pliny tells us that
Antony when triumvir bought two boys as twins for more than £800
apiece, who were no doubt intended for handsome pages, perhaps to
please Cleopatra.[324] But there can be no doubt that ordinary slaves
capable of performing only menial offices in town or country were to
be had at this time quite cheap, and the number in the city alone must
have been very great.
It is unfortunately quite impossible to make even a probable estimate
of the total number in Rome; the data are not forthcoming. Beloch[325]
remarks aptly that though some families owned hundreds of slaves, the
number of such families was not large, quoting the words of Philippus,
tribune in 104 B.C., to the effect that there were not more than
two thousand persons of any substance in the State.[326] The great
majority of citizens living in Rome had, he thinks, no slaves. He is
forced to take as a basis of calculation the proportion of bond to
free in the only city of the Empire about which we have certain
information on this point; at Pergamum there was one slave to two free
persons.[327] Assuming the whole free population to have been about
half a million in the time of Augustus, or rather more, including
peregrini, he thus arrives at a slave population of something like
280,000; this may not be far off the mark, but it must be remembered
that it is little more than a guess.
What has been said above will have given the reader some idea of the
conditions of life which created a great demand for labour in the
last two centuries B.C., and of the circumstances which produced an
abundant supply of unfree labour to satisfy that demand. I propose
now to treat the whole question of Roman slavery from three points of
view,--the economic, the legal, and the ethical. In other words, we
have to ask: (1) how the abundance of slave labour affected the social
economy of the free population; (2) what was the position of the slave
in the eye of the law, as regards treatment and chance of manumission;
(3) what were the ethical results of this great slave system, both on
the slaves themselves and on their masters.
1. From an economical point of view the most interesting question is
whether slave labour seriously interfered with the development of free
industry; and unfortunately this question is an extremely difficult
one to answer. We can all guess easily that the opportunities of free
labour must have been limited by the presence of enormous numbers of
slaves; but to get at the facts is another matter. In regard to rural
slavery we have some evidence to go upon, as we shall see directly,
and this has of late been collected and utilised; but as regards
labour in the city no such research has as yet been made,[328] and the
material is at once less fruitful and more difficult to handle. A few
words on this last point must suffice here.
We have seen in Chapter II. that there was plenty of employment at
Rome for freemen. Friedländer, than whom no higher authority can be
quoted for the social life of the city, goes so far as to assert that
even under the early Empire a freeman could always obtain work if he
wished for it;[329] and even if we take this as a somewhat exaggerated
statement, it may serve to keep us from rushing to the other extreme
and picturing a population of idle free paupers. In fact we are bound
on general evidence to assume for our own period that he is in the
main right; the poor freeman of Rome had to live somehow, and the
cheap corn which he enjoyed was not given him gratis until a few years
before the Republic came to an end.[330] How did he get the money to
pay even the sum of six asses and a third for a modius of corn, or to
pay for shelter and clothing, which were assuredly not to be had for
nothing? We know again, that the gilds of trades (see above, p. 45)
continued to exist in the last century of the Republic,[331] though
the majority had to be suppressed owing to their misuse as political
clubs. Supposing that the members of these collegia were small
employers of labour, it is reasonable to assume that the labour they
employed was at least largely free; for the capital needed to invest,
at some risk, in a sufficient number of slaves, who would have to be
housed and fed, and whose lives would be uncertain in a crowded and
unhealthy city, could not, we must suppose, be easily found by such
men. Here and there, no doubt, we find traces of slave labour in
factories, e.g. as far back as the time of Plautus, if we can take him
as writing of Rome rather than translating from the Greek:
An te ibi vis inter istas versarier
Prosedas, pistorum amicas, reginas alicarias,
Miseras schoeno delibutas servilicolas sordidas?[332]
_Poenulus_, 265 foll.
But on the whole, we may with all due caution, in default of complete
investigation of the question, assume that the Roman slaves were
confined for the most part to the great and rich families, and were
not used by them to any great extent in productive industry, but
in supplying the luxurious needs of the household[333]. In all
probability research will show that free labour was far more available
than we are apt to think. We hear of no outbreak of feeling against
slave labour, which might suggest a rivalry between the two.
Slave labour, we may think, had filled a gap, created by abnormal
circumstances, and did not oust free labour entirely; but it tended
constantly to cramp it, and doubtless started notions of work in
general which helped to degrade it[334]. Those immense _familiae
urbanae_, of which the historian of slavery has given a detailed
account in his second volume[335], belong rather to the early Empire
than to the last years of the Republic--the evidence for them is
drawn chiefly from Seneca, Juvenal, Tacitus, Martial, etc.; but such
evidence as we have for the age of Cicero seems to suggest that the
vast palaces of the capitalists, which Sallust describes as being
almost like cities[336], were already beginning to be served by a
familia urbana which rendered them almost independent of any aid from
without by labour or purchase. Not only the ordinary domestic helpers
of all kinds, but copyists, librarians, paedagogi as tutors for the
children, and even doctors might all be found in such households in
a servile condition, without reckoning the great numbers who seem
to have been always available as escorts when the great man was
travelling in Italy or in the provinces. Valerius Maximus tells
us[337] that Cato the censor as proconsul of Spain took only three
slaves with him, and that his descendant Cato of Utica during the
Civil Wars had twelve; as both these men were extremely frugal, we can
form an idea from this passage both of the increasing supply of slaves
and of the far larger escorts which accompanied the ordinary wealthy
traveller.
As regards the familia rustica, the working population of the farm,
the evidence is much more definite. The old Roman farm, in which the
paterfamilias lived with his wife, children, and slaves, was, no
doubt, like the old English holding in a manor, for the most part
self-sufficing, doing little in the way of sale or purchase, and
worked by all the members of the familia, bond and free. In the middle
of the second century B.C., when Cato wrote his treatise on husbandry,
we find that a change has taken place; the master can only pay the
farm an occasional visit, to see that it is being properly managed by
the slave steward[338] (vilicus), and the business is being run upon
capitalistic lines, i.e. with a view to realising the utmost possible
profit from it by the sale of its products. Thus Cato is most
particular in urging that a farm should be so placed as to have easy
communication with market towns, where the wine and oil could be sold,
which were the chief products, and where various necessaries could be
bought cheap, such as pottery and metal-work of all kinds.[339] Thus
the farm does not entirely depend on the labour of its own familia;
nevertheless it rests still upon an economic basis of slave labour.
For an olivetum of 240 jugera Cato puts the necessary hands as
thirteen in number, all non-free; for a vineyard of 100 jugera at
sixteen; and these figures are no doubt low, if we remember his
character for parsimony and profit-making.[340] Free labour was to be
had, and was occasionally needed; at the very outset of his work
Cato (ch. 4) insists that the owner should be a good and friendly
neighbour, in order that he may easily obtain, not only voluntary
help, but hired labourers (operarii). These were needed especially at
harvest time, when extra hands were wanted, as in our hop-gardens, for
the gathering of olives and for the vintage. Sometimes the work was
let out to a contractor, and he gives explicit directions (in chs. 144
and 145) for the choice of these and the contracts to be made with
them; whether in this case the contractor (redemptor) used entirely
free or slave labour does not appear distinctly, but it seems clear
that a proportion at least was free.[341] What the free labourers did
at other times of the year, whether or no they were small cultivators
themselves, Cato does not tell us.
For the age with which we are more specially concerned, we have the
evidence of Varro's three books on husbandry, written in his old age,
after the fall of the Republic. Here we find the economic condition of
the farm little changed since the time of Cato. The permanent labour
is non-free, but in spite of the vast increase in the servile labour
available in Italy, there is still a considerable employment of
freemen at certain times, on all farms where the olive and vine were
the chief objects of culture. In the 17th chapter of his first book,
in which he gives interesting advice for the purchase of suitable
slaves, he begins by telling us that all land is cultivated either
by slaves or freemen, or both together, and the free are of three
kinds,--either small holders (pauperculi) with their children; or
labourers who live by wage (conducticii), and are especially needed in
hay harvest or vintage; or debtors who give their labour as payment
for what they owe (obaerati).[342] Varro too, like Cato, recognises
the necessity of purchasing many things which cannot well be
manufactured on a farm of moderate size, and thus the landowner may in
this way also have been indirectly an employer of free labour; but so
far as possible the farm should supply itself with the materials
for its own working,[343] for this gives employment to the slaves
throughout the year,--and they should never be allowed to be
idle.[344]
Thus it is abundantly clear that even in the time of Cicero there was
a certain demand for free labour in the ordinary Italian oliveyard and
vineyard, and that the necessary supply was forthcoming, though the
permanent industrial basis was non-free, and the tendency was to use
slave-labour more exclusively. The rule that the slave cannot be
allowed to be unemployed was a most important factor in the economical
development, and drove the landowner, who never seems to have had any
doubt about the comparative cheapness of slave-labour,[345] gradually
to make his farm more and more independent of all aid from outside. In
the work of Columella, written towards the end of the first century
A.D., it is plain that the work of the farm is carried on more
exclusively by slave-labour than was the case in the last two
centuries B.C.[346]
To this not unpleasant picture of the conditions of Italian
agricultural slavery a few words must be added about the great
pastoral farms of Southern Italy. If a man invested his capital in a
comparatively small estate of olives and vineyards, such as that which
Cato treats of, and which seems to have been his own; or even in a
latifundium of the kind which Varro more vaguely pictures, containing
also parks and game and a moderate amount of pasture, he would need
slaves mainly of a certain degree of skill. But on the largest areas
of pasture, chiefly in the hill districts of Southern Italy, where
there was little cultivation except what was necessary for the
consumption of the slaves themselves, these were the roughest and
wildest type of bondsmen. The work was that of the American ranche,
the life harsh, and the workmen dangerous. It was in these districts
and from these men that Spartacus drew the material with which he made
his last stand against Roman armies in 72-71 B.C.; and it was in
this direction that Caelius and Milo turned in 48 B.C. in quest of
revolutionary and warlike bands. These roughs could even be used as
galley-slaves; more than once in the Commentaries on the Civil War
Caesar tells us that his opponents drafted them into the vessels which
were sent to relieve the siege of Massilia[347]. It was here too, in
the neighbourhood of Thurii, that a bloody fight took place between
the slaves of two adjoining estates, strong men of courage, as Cicero
describes them, of which we learn from the fragments of his lost
speech _pro Tullio_. They were of course armed, and as we may
guess from Varro's remarks on the kind of slaves suitable for
shepherding,[348] this was usually the practice, in order to defend
the flocks from wild beasts and robbers, particularly when they were
driven up to summer pasture (as they still are) in the saltus of
the Apennines. The needs of these shepherds would be small, and the
latifundia of this kind were probably almost self-sufficing, no free
labour being required. After their day's work the slaves were fed and
locked up for the night, and kept in fetters if necessary;[349] they
were in fact simply living tools, to use the expression of Aristotle,
and the economy of such estates was as simple as that of a workshop.
The exclusion of free labour is here complete: on the agricultural
estates it was approaching a completion which it fortunately never
reached. Had it reached that completion, the economic influence of
slavery would have been altogether bad; as it was, the introduction
of slave-labour on a large scale did valuable service to Italian
agriculture in the last century B.C. by contributing the material for
its revival at a time when the necessary free labour could not have
been found. However lamentable its results may have been in other
ways, especially on the great pastures, the economic history of Italy,
when it comes to be written, will have to give it credit for an
appreciable amount of benefit.
2. The legal and political aspect of slavery. A slave was in the eye
of the law not a _persona_, but a _res_, i.e. he had no rights as a
human being, could not marry or hold property, but was himself simply
a piece of property which could be conveyed (res mancipi)[350]. During
the Republican period the law left him absolutely at the disposal of
his master, who had the power of life and death (jus vitae necisque)
over him, and could punish him with chastisement and bonds, and use
him for any purpose he pleased, without reference to any higher
authority than his own. This was the legal position of all slaves; but
it naturally often happened that those who were men of knowledge or
skill, as secretaries, for example, librarians, doctors, or even
as body-servants, were in intimate and happy relations with their
owners[351], and in the household of a humane man no well-conducted
slave need fear bodily degradation. Cicero and his friend Atticus both
had slaves whom they valued, not only for their useful service, but
as friends. Tiro, who edited Cicero's letters after his death, and to
whom we therefore owe an eternal debt of gratitude, was the object
of the tenderest affection on the part of his owner, and the letters
addressed to him by the latter when he was taken ill at Patrae in 50
B.C. are among the most touching writings that have come down to us
from antiquity. "I miss you," he writes in one of them[352], "yes, but
I also love you. Love prompts the wish to see you in good health: the
other motive would make me wish to see you as soon as possible,--and
the former one is the best." Atticus, too, had his Tiro, Alexis,
"imago Tironis," as Cicero calls him in a letter to his friend,[353]
and many others who were engaged in the work of copying and
transcribing books, which was one of Atticus' many pursuits. All such
slaves would sooner or later be manumitted, i.e. transmuted from a
_res_ to a _persona_; and in the ease with which this process of
transmutation could be effected we have the one redeeming point of the
whole system of bondage. According to the oldest and most efficient
form (vindicta), a legal ceremony had to be gone through in the
presence of a praetor; but the praetor could easily be found, and
there was no other difficulty. This was the form usually adopted by an
owner wishing to free a slave in his own lifetime; but great numbers
were constantly manumitted more irregularly, or by the will of the
master after his death.[354]
Thus the leading facts in the legal position of the Roman slave were
two: (1) he was absolutely at the disposal of his owner, the law never
interfering to protect him; (2) he had a fair prospect of manumission
if valuable and well-behaved, and if manumitted he of course became a
Roman citizen (libertus or libertinus) with full civil rights,[355]
remaining, however, according to ancient custom, in a certain position
of moral subordination to his late master, owing him respect, and aid
if necessary. Let us apply these two leading facts to the conditions
of Roman life as we have already sketched them. We shall find that
they have political results of no small importance.
First, we must try to realise that the city of Rome contained at
least 200,000 human beings over whom the State had no direct control
whatever. All such crimes, serious or petty, as are now tried and
disposed of in our criminal courts, were then, if committed by a
slave, punishable only by the master; and in the majority of cases, if
the familia were a large one, they probably never reached his ears.
The jurisdiction to which the slave was responsible was a private one,
like that of the great feudal lord of the Middle Ages, who had his own
prison and his own gallows. The political result was much the same in
each case. Just as the feudal lord, with his private jurisdiction and
his hosts of retainers, became a peril to good government and national
unity until he was brought to order by a strong king like our Henry
II. or Henry VII., so the owner of a large familia of many hundreds
of slaves may almost be said to have been outside of the State;
undoubtedly he became a serious peril to the good order of the
capital. The part played by the slaves in the political disturbances
of Cicero's time was no mean one. One or two instances will show this.
Saturninus, in the year 100, when attacked by Marius under orders
from the senate, had hoisted a pilleus, or cap of liberty which the
emancipated slave wore, as a signal to the slaves of the city that
they might expect their liberty if they supported him;[356] and Marius
a few years later took the same step when himself attacked by Sulla.
Catiline, in 63, Sallust assures us, believed it possible to raise the
slaves of the city in aid of his revolutionary plans, and they flocked
to him in great numbers; but he afterwards abandoned his intention,
thinking that to mix up the cause of citizens with that of slaves
would not be judicious.[357] It is here too that the gladiator slaves
first meet us as a political arm; Cicero had the next spring to defend
P. Sulla on the charge, among others, of having bought gladiators
during the conspiracy with seditious views, and the senate had to
direct that the bands of these dangerous men should be dispersed to
Capua and other municipal towns at a distance. Later on we frequently
hear of their being used as private soldiery, and the government in
the last years of the Republic ceased to be able to control them.[358]
Again, in defending Sestius, Cicero asserts that Clodius in his
tribunate had organised a levy of slaves under the name of collegia,
for purposes of violence, slaughter, and rapine; and even if this
is an exaggeration, it shows that such proceedings were not deemed
impossible.[359] And apart from the actual use of slaves for
revolutionary objects, or as private body-guards, it is clear from
Cicero's correspondence that as an important part of a great man's
retinue they might indirectly have influence in elections and on
other political occasions. Quintus Cicero, in his little treatise on
electioneering,[360] urges his brother to make himself agreeable to
his tribesmen, neighbours, clients, freedmen, and even slaves, "for
nearly all the talk which affects one's public reputation emanates
from domestic sources." And Marcus himself, in the last letter he
wrote before he fled into exile in 58, declares that all his friends
are promising him not only their own aid, but that of their clients,
freedmen, and slaves,--promises which doubtless might have been kept
had he stayed to take advantage of them.[361]
The mention of the freedmen in this letter may serve to remind us of
the political results of manumission, the second fact in the legal
aspect of Roman slavery. The most important of these is the rapid
importation of foreign blood into the Roman citizen body, which long
before the time of Cicero largely consisted of enfranchised slaves or
their descendants; it was to this that Scipio Aemilianus alluded in
his famous words to the contio he was addressing after his return from
Numantia, "Silence, ye to whom Italy is but a stepmother" (Val.
Max. 6. 2. 3). Had manumission been held in check or in some way
superintended by the State, there would have been more good than harm
in it. Many men of note, who had an influence on Roman culture, were
libertini, such as Livius Andronicus and Caecilius the poets; Terence,
Publilius Syrus, whose acquaintance we made in the last chapter; Tiro
and Alexis, and rather later Verrius Flaccus, one of the most learned
men who ever wrote in Latin. But the great increase in the number of
slaves, and the absence of any real difficulty in effecting their
manumission, led to the enfranchisement of crowds of rascals as
compared with the few valuable men. The most striking example is the
enfranchisement of 10,000 by Sulla, who according to custom took
his name Cornelius, and, though destined to be a kind of military
guarantee for the permanence of the Sullan institutions, only became
a source of serious peril to the State at the time of Catiline's
conspiracy. Caesar, who was probably more alive to this kind of
social danger than his contemporaries, sent out a great number of
libertini,--the majority, says Strabo, of his colonists,--to his new
foundation at Corinth[362]. But Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing
in the time of Augustus, when he stayed some time in Rome, draws a
terrible picture of the evil effects of indiscriminate manumission,
unchecked by the law[363].
"Many," he says, "are indignant when they see unworthy men manumitted,
and condemn a usage which gives such men the citizenship of a
sovereign state whose destiny is to govern the world. As for me, I
doubt if the practice should be stopped altogether, lest greater evil
should be the result; I would rather that it should be checked as far
as possible, so that the state may no longer be invaded by men of such
villainous character. The censors, or at least the consuls, should
examine all whom it is proposed to manumit, inquiring into their
origin and the reasons and mode of their enfranchisement, as in their
examination of the equites. Those whom they find worthy of citizenship
should have their names inscribed on tables, distributed among the
tribes, with leave to reside in the city. As to the crowd of villains
and criminals, they should be sent far away, under pretext of founding
some colony."
These judicious remarks of a foreigner only expressed what was
probably a common feeling among the best men of that time. Augustus
made some attempt to limit the enfranchising power of the owner; but
the Leges Aelia Sentia and Furia Caninia do not lie within the compass
of this book. No great success could attend these efforts; the
abnormal circumstances which had brought to Rome the great familiae
of slaves reacted inevitably upon the citizen body itself through the
process of manumission. Rome had to pay heavily in this, as in so many
other ways, for her advancement to the sovereignty of the civilised
world. I may be allowed to translate the eloquent words in which
the French historian of slavery, in whose great work the history of
ancient slavery is treated as only a scholar-statesman can treat it,
sums up this aspect of the subject:
"Emancipation, prevalent as it might appear to be towards the
beginning of the Empire, was not a step towards the suppression of
slavery, but a natural and inevitable sequence of the institution
itself,--an outlet for excess in an epoch overabundant in slaves: a
means of renewing the mass, corrupted by the deleterious influence
of its own condition, before it should be totally ruined. As water,
diverted from its free course, becomes impure in the basin which
imprisons it, and when released, will still retain its impurity; so
it is not to be thought that instincts perverted by slavery, habits
depraved from childhood, could be reformed and redressed in the slave
by a tardy liberation. Thrust into the midst of a society itself
vitiated by the admixture of slavery, he only became more
unrestrainedly, more dangerously bad. Manumission was thus no remedy
for the deterioration of the citizens: it was powerless even to better
the condition of the slave."[364]
3. The ethical aspect of Roman slavery. What were the moral effects of
the system (1) on the slaves themselves; (2) on the freemen who owned
them?
First, as regards the slaves themselves, there are two facts to be
fully realised; when this is done, the inferences will be sufficiently
obvious. Let us remember that by far the greater number of the
slaves, both in the city and on the land, were brought from countries
bordering on the Mediterranean, where they had been living in some
kind of elementary civilisation, in which the germs of further
development were present in the form of the natural ties of race and
kinship and locality, of tribe or family or village community, and
with their own religion, customs, and government. Permanent captivity
in a foreign land and in a servile condition snapped these ties once
and for all. To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human
beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna,
or as many of them as were transported out of their own country--and
these were probably the vast majority,--were thereby deprived for the
rest of their lives of all social and family life, of their ancestral
worship, in fact of everything that could act as a moral tie, as a
restraining influence upon vicious instincts. With the lamentable
effect of this on the regions thus depopulated we are not here
concerned, but it was beyond doubt most serious, and must be taken
into account in reckoning up the various causes which later on brought
about the enfeeblement of the whole Roman Empire.[365] The point for
us is that a large proportion of the population of Rome and of Italy
was now composed of human beings destitute of all natural means of
moral and social development. The ties that had been once broken
could never be replaced. There is no need to dwell on the inevitable
result,--the introduction into the Roman State of a poisonous element
of terrible volume and power.
The second fact that we have to grasp is this. In the old days, when
such slaves as there then were came from Italy itself, and worked
under the master's own eye upon the farm, they might and did share
to some extent in the social life of the family, and even in its
religious rites, and so might under favourable circumstances come
within the range of its moral influences[366]. But towards the close
of the Republican period those moral influences, as we have seen,
were fast vanishing in the majority of families which possessed large
numbers of slaves. The common kind of slave in the city, who was not
attached to his owner as was a man of culture like Tiro, had no moral
standard except implicit obedience; the highest virtue was to obey
orders diligently, and fear of punishment was the only sanction of his
conduct. The typical city slave, as he appears in Plautus, though by
no means a miserable being without any enjoyment of life, is a liar
and a thief, bent on overreaching, and destitute of a conscience[367].
We need but reflect that the slave must often have had to do vile
things in the name of his one virtue, obedience, to realise that
the poison was present, and ready to become active, in every Roman
household. "Nec turpe est quod dominus iubet."[368]
On the latifundia in the country the master was himself seldom
resident, and the slaves were under the control of one or more of
their own kind, promoted for good conduct and capacity. The slaves of
the great sheep and cattle farms were, as we saw, of the wildest
sort, and we may judge of their morality by the story of the
Sicilian slave-owner who, when his slaves complained that they were
insufficiently clothed, told them that the remedy was to rob the
travellers they fell in with.[369] The _ergastula_, where slaves were
habitually chained and treated like beasts, were sowing the seeds
of permanent moral contamination in Italy.[370] But on the smaller
estates of olive-yard and vineyard their condition was better, and
a humane owner who chose his overseers carefully might possibly
reproduce something of the old feeling of participation in the life as
well as the industry of the economic unit. In an interesting chapter
Varro advises that the vilicus should be carefully selected, and
should be conciliated by being allowed a wife and the means of
accumulating a property (_peculium_); he even urges that he should
enforce obedience rather by words than blows.[371] But of the
condition of the ordinary slave on the farm this is the only hint he
gives us, and it never seems to have occurred to him, or to any other
Roman of his day, that the work to be done would be better performed
by men not deprived by their condition of a moral sense; that slave
labour is unwillingly and unintelligently rendered, because the
labourer has no hope, no sense of dutiful conduct leading him to
rejoice in the work of his hands. Nor did any writer recognise the
fact that slaves were potentially moral beings, until Christianity
gave its sanction to dutiful submission as an act of morality that
might be consecrated by a Divine authority.[372]
Lastly, it is not difficult to realise the mischievous effects of such
a slave system as the Roman upon the slave-owning class itself. Even
those who themselves had no slaves would be affected by it; for
though, as we have seen, free labour was by no means ousted by it,
it must have helped to create an idle class of freemen, with all its
moral worthlessness. Long ago, in his remarkable book on _The Slave
Power_ in America before the Civil War, Professor Cairnes drew a
striking comparison between the "mean whites" of the Southern States,
the result of slave labour on the plantations, and the idle population
of the Roman capital, fed on cheap corn and ready for any kind of
rowdyism.[373] But in the case of the great slave-owners the mischief
was much more serious, though perhaps more difficult to detect. The
master of a horde of slaves had half his moral sense paralysed,
because he had no feeling of responsibility for so many of those with
whom he came in contact every day and hour. When most members of a
man's household or estate are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no
feeling of any contractual relation with them, his sense of duty and
obligation is inevitably deadened, even towards others who are not
thus in his power. Can we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice
and right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but also
towards a man's fellow-citizens, which we have noticed in the two
upper sections of society, was due in great part to the constant
exercise of arbitrary power at home, to the habit of looking upon the
men who ministered to his luxurious ease as absolutely without claim
upon his respect or his benevolence? or that the recklessness of human
life which was shown in the growing popularity of bloody gladiatorial
shows, and in the incredible cruelty of the victors in the Civil
Wars, was the result of this unconscious cultivation, from childhood
onwards, of the despotic temper?[374] Even the best men of the age,
such as Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, show hardly a sign of any sympathy
with, or interest in, that vast mass of suffering humanity, both bond
and free with which the Roman dominion was populated; to disregard
misery, except when they found it among the privileged classes, had
become second nature to them. We can better realise this if we reflect
that even at the present day, in spite of the absence of slavery and
the presence of philanthropical societies, the average man of wealth
gives hardly more than a passing thought to the discomfort and
distress of the crowded population of our great cities. The ordinary
callousness of human nature had, under the baleful influence of
slavery, become absolute blindness, nor were men's eyes to be opened
until Christianity began to leaven the world with the doctrine of
universal love.