STUDYING THE ROMAN SLAVE SUPPLY

The definition of slavery in Roman law and ideology blended the imaginary order in which slavery was the rightful outcome of Roman conquest and the mundane, material fact of the slave trade. It is important, analytically, not to conflate the two. The Roman slave system was not in any simple sense the product of wars of conquest, and the slave supply was not a direct function of military expansion. Over the last generation, there has been a new recognition that it is necessary to account for the extraordinary movement of human bodies that was the Roman slave trade, without the easy, ideological explanation of mass warfare. In retrospect, the theory of conquest has never been able to offer a very detailed story of how millions of captives could be filtered through an infrastructure of trade, or how a massive sudden influx of slaves would be absorbed in society – consumed, managed, and exploited. More importantly, if war was instrumental in the generation of Roman slavery, it does not perforce follow that the end of conquest reversed the trajectory of the slave system, leading inevitably to a reduction in supply, a rise in prices, and overall decline.

THE MASTER–SLAVE RELATIONSHIP

Seeking a metaphor to describe the mysterious compound of love and wrath which God was capable of showing towards mankind, Lactantius found in the figure of the slave-owner an evocative parallel. “The master calls the good slave a friend and decorates him and puts him in charge of the domus and the familia and all the master's affairs, but the bad slave he punishes with cursing, lashes, nudity, hunger, thirst, chains. The one is an example to the others not to sin, and the other is an example to good behavior, so that some are coerced by fear, others driven by honor.” The use of the most horrifying terrors and the promise of such conspicuous rewards belonged on the same spectrum. The spectrum described by Lactantius was not merely conjured to serve his rhetorical purpose, for as we will see the Roman master was vested with an exceptionally broad range of powers to reward and to punish. This chapter is an exploration of that spectrum. It is an attempt to understand the techniques of domination in Roman society and to uncover the systemic forces promoting the use of particular techniques. We cannot accept, with Lactantius, that some slaves were simply “good,” others “bad.” Instead we want to discover the choices made by masters and slaves as they tried to maneuver towards their desired ends.

THE PROBLEM OF ROMAN AGRICULTURAL SLAVERY

In a sermon on the Gospel of Matthew, John Chrysostom asked his audience to imagine a man who wished to become wealthy. The path to riches lay in farming the land and plying the sea. The priest simply assumed that lucrative, commercial agriculture entailed “buying fields and slaves.” In another sermon, Chrysostom thundered against the greed of his flock, whose members were endlessly scheming “how to buy land, how to buy slaves, and how to make money.” These sermons are part of a broad body of evidence that testifies to the importance of agricultural slavery in the late empire. Chrysostom's contemporaries, too, frequently noticed the prevalence of slavery in agricultural production. The imperial constitutions preserved in the Theodosian Code repeatedly confirm the existence of rural slaves, not only in theoretical terms, but in actual land transactions. The papyri of fourth-century Egypt document the presence of slaves on rural estates. The inscriptions of late antiquity provide incomparable testimony for large, slave-based properties, not least in the form of the remarkable stones uncovered on Thera. The evidence for agricultural slavery in the fourth century is abundant and credible – arguably as rich as for any period of classical antiquity.

The word οἰκέτης is, along with δοῦλος, one of the two most common terms for slave in late antique Greek (for the early history of the word, see Gschnitzer 1976, 20–1, 71). It is effectively synonymous with δοῦλος, and authors regularly use the two as exact equivalents. The primary distinction is that δοῦλος lends itself more readily to abstract usages, whereas οἰκέτης is a highly concrete, situational term. So, for instance, δουλεία is the primary word for the abstract quality of slavery, whereas the equivalent οἰκετεία is virtually never used (for a rare example, see Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae, 8.6.3). When Libanius, for example, wants to claim that slavery is a peaceful condition that allows the slave to sleep at night without the worries of a free man, he uses δουλεία for the condition, οἰκέτης for the slave who is sleeping (Progymnasmata 9.6.16: Οὐδὲν τοσοῦτον ἡ δουλεία. ὁ μέν γε οἰκέτης καθεύδει ῥᾳθύμως ταῖς τοῦ δεσπότου φροντίσι τρεφόμενος…). In the discussion that follows, I will try to support four claims about the word οἰκέτης in the social idiom of late antique Greek. First, the term οἰκέτης is an equivalent of δοῦλος and  ἀνδράποδον. Second, οἰκέτης implies unfree legal status. Third, the οἰκέτης was a chattel slave, not a servant. Fourth, the word οἰκέτης is not equivalent to “domestic slave.” After this discussion I will consider objections to the view that οἰκέτης should be exclusively indicative of slave status.

FROM THE SLAVE'S PERSPECTIVE

The only extant comedy from late antiquity is a Latin play composed in early fifth-century Gaul. Called the Querolus (“The Grumpy Old Man”), the work is a creative pastiche of traditional comic elements. In the play we find the figure of the clever slave duly resurrected. In an atmosphere heavy with literary allusion, we are presented a litany of stereotypes about miserly masters and wily slaves. The slave – named Pantomalus, Every-evil – does not play a primary role in the plot, but he does deliver a lengthy monologue, on the vice of masters and the cunning intelligence of slaves. The speech is in the spirit of Plautus and, as a statement of the clever slave, lives up to its heritage. Although much neglected, this speech belongs to the handful of literary creations that reflect, through the dark and distorted prism of humor, the anxieties of those who sought to dominate slaves.

“That all masters are wicked is a true and undeniably obvious fact. Yet I know – and all too well – that my master is the very worst. Oh, he isn't such a dangerous fellow, but he sure is a nasty ingrate.” So Pantomalus launches into his part. His monologue oscillates between ranting against masters and praising the cleverness of slaves.

IN SEARCH OF MASTERS AND SLAVES

The people of fourth-century Antioch were famously devoted to their theater. Built under the patronage of Julius Caesar, the theater of Antioch stood, there in the sloping foothills of Mount Silpius, as a monument of the city's deep Roman past. But it was not, in the late empire, a fossilized remain from an extinct culture. The theater was a vital institution, and the mainstream of theatrical culture in late antiquity was the comic mime. Mime was a form of dramatic comedy played by unmasked actors. Travesties of myth, lampoons of public figures, and ethnic mockery were common themes of this inherently irreverent genre. But the natural subject of the mime was the portrayal of everyday, domestic life. One description called mime “an imitation of life, encompassing the permissible and the shameful.” Peopled with a familiar array of stock characters, the mime act was a medium where the dramatic possibilities of the faithless wife, the clever slave, the harsh father, the fool, the parasite, and the miser were reconfigured in endless permutations. Masters and slaves were foremost among the stock characters of the genre. The basic symbols and character types of late Roman mime were enmeshed in the webs of significance produced by a violent and rigidly hierarchical social order. The mime – part slapstick, part sitcom, part minstrel show – was an organic cultural expression of a slave society.