Slavery

Slavery is generally considered the greatest impediment to the formulation of a general theory of human rights for Ancient Rome. The slaveвЂ™s identity was ambiguous: he or she was both a human being and a piece of property.¹⁹ This made the question of how to treat a slave something of a problem.

For a long time society gave preference to the proprietary side,²⁰ and it was not until the Principate that the Roman conscience was seriously disturbed. Writers like the elder Pliny began looking at the institution with a critical eye:

In the old days a victorious general returned to his small property and ploughed his field with the same diligence that he had shown on campaign. But nowadays²¹ farmwork is done by feet that have been chained, hands that have been punished, faces that have been branded. Should we be surprised at not getting the same returns from slave dungeons as we once got from the honest toil of generals?

(Plin. NH 18.4.21)

Pliny was, however, still a rare voice. AristotleвЂ™s theory that slavery was a natural institution²² was widely accepted. In the second century AD the lawyers said that вЂ?Slavery is an institution of the ius gentium by which someone is made subject to the ownership of another contrary to nature.'²³ But the ambivalent identity of the slave was reflected in the legal texts, for ius gentium was in fact the body of rules that natural reason had established for all men (Gai. 1.1.1). Therefore the only way out was to argue that by strict Roman law slaves were regarded as nothing, but by natural law all men were equal (Ulpian D. 50.17.32).

The corner into which the lawyers painted themselves had been stirred up by Seneca a hundred years earlier:

It befits a sensible and well-educated man²⁴ to live on family terms with his slaves. вЂ?But they are slaves.' No, they are men, companions and humble friends.

Some people think it below their dignity to dine with a slave; he is there, they say, to attend to his master's needs, and in complete silence at the risk of a flogging. Consequently slaves talk about their master behind his back, unlike the old days when they conversed with him and even risked their necks to save him. Nowadays вЂ?You have as many enemies as you have slaves' is a truism. We treat them cruelly and inhumanely as if they were not men but packВanimals. Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock and breathes, lives and dies under the same skies as you. Treat your slaves as you would be treated by your superiors. Live mercifully and humanely [comiter] with your slave, allow him to talk with you, plan with you, live with you.²⁵

But Seneca could not hope to eliminate the dichotomy. The younger Pliny saw no future in the humane approach: вЂ?No master can feel safe because he is kind and considerate to his slaves, for it is their malice rather than their reason that causes them to murder their masters' (Ep. 3.14).

One aspect of the treatment of slaves, namely torture and punishment, is of special interest to us. It was believed that a slave was incapable of telling the truth except under torture. Moreover, although the evidence of a slave was generally inadmissible against his or her owner, it was allowed in cases of treason, adultery and tax frauds.²⁶ Thus when Nero's sinister praetorian prefect Tigellinus was looking for evidence of adultery against Nero's wife Octavia, he put her slave-maids (ancillae) to the painful question. Some were induced by the pain to make false admissions against their mistress. But the majority persisted in defending Octavia's chastity, and one of them, Pythias, gave the prefect more than he had bargained for.²⁷

There was one situation in which the torture of slaves was a positive instrument of public policy.²⁸ It was when an owner was murdered by one of his slaves.

Under an Augustan decree, the s.c. Silanianum,²⁹ every slave who was under the same roof at the time of the murder was questioned under torture, and was later put to death, failing proof that he or she had done everything possible to help the victim.³⁰ In 61 Nero's urban prefect, L.Pedanius Secundus, was murdered by a domestic slave. Pedanius' household, numbering some 400 men, women and children, was put to the question, and in due course the entire household was tried by the senate.³¹

Tacitus' account of the trial (Ann. 14.42-45) casts important light on attitudes to slavery. The principal speaker was C.Cassius Longinus, the leading lawyer of the day and a hardline Stoic who favoured the strict enforcement of statutory penalties. He declared that the only way to control вЂ?the scum from various nations'³² infesting the city was by terror. The innocent would perish with the guilty, but utilitas publica took precedence over the rights of individuals. Cassius moved that the entire household of slaves be put to death. Some senators protested against the punishment of women and children and of the innocent, but there was no counter-proposal from any senator. There was a hostile demonstration outside the senate-house,³³ but Nero stationed troops along the route leading to the place of execution. The 400 slaves were put to death. Nero did however salvage some clementia from the case by vetoing a proposal to punish Pedanius' freedmen as well as the slaves.

The case raises a problem that sometimes troubled the ancients. How could one allow torture to damage valuable property? Horace protests against crucifying a slave for a minor offence, or throwing stones at slaves for whom one has paid good money.³⁴ Horace is not alone. The adultery law laid down that when a slave accused of adultery was about to be tortured, the accuser had to give the owner security for the value of the slave (D. 48.5.28 pr., 16); and Ulpian observes that torture should not be allowed to destroy a slave, even if guilty (D. 48.18.7).

But the practice was firmly entrenched. An inscription has the funeral director at Puteoli obliged to torture slaves on request; he had to supply crosses, yokes and floggers, and to see to the removal of corpses.³⁵ There is clearly no point in asking why an independent fortune was destroyed in the Pedanius case. The law was strictly applied.³⁶ Not even Seneca was ableвЂ”or perhaps even triedвЂ”to halt it.³⁷

In matters of punishment the governing principle was that the slave was answerable with his body for any infraction, whether serious or trivial. It has been claimed that the purpose was to undermine his humanity, to distinguish him from those human beings who were not property.³⁸ But was there any conscious motivation of this sort? Was it not simply the need to keep large numbers under control by terror, as Cassius Longinus said? The range of punishments inflicted by the owner was certainly brutal: summary execution, branding, flogging, sexual assaults.³⁹ A list of the punishments that Constantine tried to control reflects what had come down from the Republic and Principate:

If a master beats a slave with light rods or lashes, or puts him in chains, and the slave dies, the master incurs no criminal liability. But he is guilty of homicide if he kills a slave intentionally by a blow of a club or stone, or has him hanged by a noose or thrown from a high place, or poisons him, or subjects him to public punishments by cutting through his sides with metal claws, burning him alive, or torturing him to death. But disciplinary correction that is not meant to kill the slave, but to improve his behaviour, is not penalised.

(CTh 9.12.1, 2)

The вЂ?public punishmentsвЂ™ to which Constantine refers were those imposed by the state rather than by owners. They included being thrown to the beasts in the arena, burnt alive, crucified, or forced to fight as gladiators. Constantine excludes crucifixion which by then was absolutely forbidden.

And he lists the updated version of throwing to the beasts, namely cutting through his sides with metal claws, which gave the master a facsimile of what was done at the games.⁴⁰

Torture was not only used against slaves, but also against free persons. When so used it was not necessarily restricted to those of humble status, nor was it restricted to accused persons, since witnesses could also be tortured. The topic is too vast to be discussed in detail here,⁴¹ and all that need be said is that the torture of free persons appears to have been in use throughout the Principate. Periodical attempts to reduce its scopeвЂ”but not to abolish it completelyвЂ”were made, but met with limited success.⁴²

Not everything on the servile scene runs counter to humanitas. Probably the most important reform was a lex Petronia of uncertain date which deprived owners of the unrestricted power to hand over their slaves to fight with wild beasts in the arena.⁴³ The effect of the law was to deprive the owner of his easy access to lucrative contracts with entrepeneurs at the games. Hadrian imposed a general prohibition on killing a slave without a court order; he also forbade the sale of a male slave to a trainer of gladiators or of a female to a procurer, except on showing good cause (SHA Hadr. 18.7-8).

A consolidating ordinance may have been enacted by Antoninus Pius:

By a constitution of Antoninus Pius anyone who kills his own slave without cause earns the same penalty as one who kills another's slave. Even excessive severity is curbed by the same emperor. When consulted about slaves who seek asylum at the emperor's statue, he ruled that if the severity of masters is intolerable they are to sell their slaves on fair terms; it is in the public interest that no one should use his property badly. Pius' rescript reads as follows: вЂ?The power of masters over their slaves is unlimited and unrestricted. But it is in the interests of masters that help against savagery, hunger or unbearable injury be not denied to those who seek it.

If you find that the slaves who fled to the statue were treated more harshly than equity allows, order them to be sold.'

(Just. Inst. 1.8.1)

Finally, as we have seen, Constantine reviewed the whole position.

Other humane measures include Claudius' ruling that sick slaves who were abandoned by their owners because of the expense of treating them were, if they recovered, to be free; killing such a slave instead of abandoning him would be murder.⁴⁴ This ruling had no discernible economic motive; it was prompted by вЂ?pure' humanitas. The same goes for the decree of Domitian's senate forbidding castration and reducing the price of eunuchs who had already come into the hands of slave-dealers.⁴⁵ Hadrian raised the penalty from half-confiscation to that prescribed for homicide (D. 48.8.4.2).

One or two reforms are credited to Augustus. He is said to have done something about ergastula, the notorious dungeons in which slaves were confined. Although Augustus is only said to have inspected them (Suet. Aug. 32.1), he may have called for repairs when necessary. Hadrian abolished the ergastula (SHA Hadr. 18.9). He had an economic motive. Something had to be done about the low returns from the labour of ergastula-incarcerated slaves that worried the elder Pliny.

It has also been claimed that Augustus put limits on torture.⁴⁶ But this is based on an erroneous interpretation of a senatus consultum of AD 8 that in fact dealt with the admissibility of the evidence of slaves against their owners.⁴⁷ The emperor who got the senate to pass the s.c. Silanianum and the popular assembly to restrict the conferment of freedom on slaves did not extend his humanitas beyond the freeborn.

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Source: Baumann Richard A.. Human Rights in Ancient Rome. Routledge,2000. вЂ” 208 p. вЂ” (Routledge Classical Monographs). 2000

Slavery

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