When we think of slaves, in America we think of the plantation system in the antebellum South. Slavery in the Roman Empire was somewhat different in that it was a slave society. Slavery was not put in opposition to an already free society as in America; instead it was an integral part of commercial Rome. The roles that slaves occupied were not only at the bottom of the pyramid, but also at the top. This is somewhat difficult to envision. Why would you want a slave managing your company?
An American Analogy
To answer that, we can turn to universities for examples. In graduate school, it is important for the student to have an advisor at either the PhD or master’s level. An advisor guides the student through his dissertation or thesis. I have known quite a few engineering and science professors who refuse to be advisors to American students. They have developed pipelines to universities in foreign countries, and they bring them over here to study.
The foreign student is usually from a poor country such as China. He sees a path to citizenship in the United States. He is willing to work very hard to achieve his goals.
The advisor, on the other hand, sees a very hard-working student that he can control. American students have options that foreign students do not. They cannot be failed and sent back. The advisor gains extra control over the foreign student and does not want to deal with the more equal American student. In other words, he cannot abuse the American student. Some professors are known to work their students abusively. They get away with it because none of the students complain. In essence, the advisor is selling American citizenship.
Roman Society
In Rome there were approximately 1.2 million people divided as follows: 650k on the dole, 150k citizens not on the dole and 400k slaves. The slaves served the oligarchs who ran the Empire.
Oligarchs appointed slaves to run their farms and businesses. The system was slanted against Roman citizens, who contented themselves with bread and circuses. A few middle-class Romans eked out a precarious economic existence. Most slaves were foreigners; Rome at that time was rule by foreigners.
This system worked very well for the rich and powerful. The government was mostly run by slaves. The emperor no longer had to worry about a coup. Formerly there were reigns of terror; emperors purged aristocratic families so that few were left. Now those families had been replaced by slaves and most of the work of running the empire was done by slaves. In the reign of Nerva (96-98 AD) only one-half of the senatorial families remained counted in 65 AD. The reign of terror under the Emperor Domitian had reduced them. By 125 AD, only 1 of the 45 aristocratic families restored by Julius Caesar in 47 BC remained. By replacing aristocrats in positions of power with slaves, the emperor secured his throne.
Similarly, the rich replaced the use of free labor with slaves. They steadily drove men out of business and confiscated their goods. At one time, there were a large number of small farmers in the Roman Republic, but the rich through wars and taxation gradually drove them into poverty. As a result, fewer and fewer people had independent means. Most of the rest landed on the dole. A few middle-class people held out, but they became less and less important.
Another feature of the Roman system was the sexual element. Homosexuality was rampant, which meant that any slave, male or female, could be called upon to satisfy the master or mistress. Since these were slaves, there was no chance of a #metoo movement. Instead the only way to advance was to do the bidding of the master.
The sexual exploitation of slaves by their masters was a given in the ancient world. The satirist Horace was not being satirical when he wrote, “I like my sex easy and ready at hand.” The elder Seneca summed up the situation with this aphorism: ‘Unchastity is a crime in the free-born, a necessity in a slave and a duty in the freedman’. Here Seneca was describing the passive partner in male homosexual relations. The free-born master should penetrate his slaves and freedmen; he should never be penetrated. The slave has no choice in the matter; he must allow himself to be penetrated or face punishment. The freedman is duty-bound to allow himself to be penetrated by the master. This is sex as an expression of power, not love.
For comparison, in Hollywood, 94% of women surveyed felt that they had been sexual abused in some way on the job. One of the most common kinds of sexual abuse was someone else having sex with the boss and getting promoted; this was reported by 65%. It is an interesting question how this could be legally prosecuted, since the sex in this case is presumably consensual. Also, this sex will not necessarily be heterosexual; homosexuals could also indulge in it.
One way to think of Roman society is as a 100% safe (for the rich and powerful) #metoo society. Sex was an expression of personal power, but because it was also the road to advancement for a slave it could be consensual. To advance, the Roman slave had to be the ultimate yes-man.
Everyone in Rome was involved in patronage, either as a patron or a client. Poor, hungry clients begged their rich patrons to invite them to dinner; here they might be treated to a feast or perhaps to something less than a feast. It depended on the whim of the patron, and some clients went home hungry.
The word for these obligations of respect was obsequium. Obsequium technically was the obligation of respect that bound an ex-slave (freedman) to the master who had manumitted him. From the parasitic do-nothing to the greatest aristocrat, each man in Rome had the obligation of respect, or obsequium, to someone more powerful, and in turn had clients lower on the social scale who paid obsequium to him. As Seneca pointed out, obsequium included sexual obligations. If asked, a client allowed himself to be penetrated by his patron.
The slave competed against other slaves. If he was manumitted, he owed obsequium to his former master. Usually freedmen became part of the inner circle of the master and handled some of his business. They also pleasured their former master. This was how one rose in the world. Freedmen and high-level slaves could become rich from business dealings and corruption.
The Romans had the institution of the peculium, which allowed a slave to accumulate money. On business travel, a slave-agent was in no way considered different from any other agent of a large business, except the slave ultimately had no rights. He could be sold at any moment by his master. That was the attraction; he could be controlled, including his sex life. Technically the peculium was owned and controlled by the master, but in practice a slave controlled it and could buy his freedom with it. Slaves were so far advanced in the commercial world that they were allowed to give testimony in courts, especially in commercial law, where the slave might be managing a business. In general, Roman law forbade slaves giving testimony; instead they were tortured.
What infuriated observers like Juvenal was that most of the good jobs and chances for advancement were reserved for slaves. Foreigners, Juvenal writes, ruled Rome. These foreigners were usually either freedmen, slaves or the descendants of freedmen. Without a patron you went nowhere in the Roman Empire, and most patrons preferred their freedmen to free-born Roman citizens.
Christianity ultimately brought down this system. Christian emphasis on family life and its rejection of homosexual brought it many converts, especially women. The Roman population continually shrank. Emperors complained of the low birth rate among the aristocracy, which is easily understood because homosexual relations do not lead to children. The slave birth rate was very low. Columella, the agricultural writer, offered to liberate any of his slave-women who bore 4 children. This seems like a low threshold for manumission, but he probably would not have had takers if it had been higher.
Christians, with their healthier lifestyle and emphasis on home life, continually increased. Women wanted dignity, not the obscene culture of Rome. As the Christian population grew, Christians opposed and discouraged slavery. Slavery shrank into the margins of society. Eventually it was outlawed.
Non-Linear Thinking
Most of you have never studied system theory. In dynamical systems, there is something called an attractor. An attractor ‘attracts’ the system to it. You can think of attractors as planets, pulling a spaceship toward it. A linear system has one attractor, i.e. every system tends to move toward the same point.
A non-linear system has multiple attractors. A system may be stable for a long time, but if pushed enough it might move to a new attractor, much as a space ship can be blasted off the earth and land on the moon. Once on the moon, it stays on the moon. Both the moon and earth are attractors of the space ship.
There is scarcely anything more non-linear than human society, and at the heart of human society are sex, reproduction and family. Studying different civilizations can tell us the different ways in which society can be ordered. One successful way was Roman society, which was very different from medieval Christian society. It was, like medieval Christian society, an attractor. No laws were passed to produce a structure like that of Roman society; it just drifted into it.
We can order society a certain way, we’ll call it the ‘Christian way’, or we can order it differently. Another way to order it is the ‘Roman way’. It is question whether we are drifting into the ‘Roman way’, but the signs aren’t good.
Sources
Roman life
Carcopino, Jerome, Daily Life in ancient Rome, edited by Henry Rowell and translated from the French by E. O. Lorimer, 1940 Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Chapter 3 on Society and Social classes supplied information in population of different classes in Rome and the attrition of the aristocratic classes.
Finley, M. I., Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology,1980, Viking Press, New York, NY.
Chapter 3, Slavery and Humanity, describes the position of the slave, including his sexual obligations to his master.
#metoo
Puenta, Maria and Cara Kelly, How Common is Sexual Misconduct in Hollywood?, USA Today.
Non-linear systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
Attractors are described in this Wikipedia article.
