The Slavery that Was Rome, in Plautus, Terence, and Petronius
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
The most popular plays of Plautus and Terence focus on the role of slaves. In Plautus’ The Prisoners of War, the prisoners, slaves by capture, face a moral dilemma: should they try to escape, breaking the code of honor, or wait to be ransomed by their families? In Plautus’ The Rope, the beautiful young girl whom the hero loves is a slave, and he seeks to buy her from her owner. It turns out that she had been born free but was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. In The Brothers and Phormio by Terence, the men are concerned not about winning the hearts of slave girls but about bargaining with the procurers who own them.
While Plautus and Terence both borrowed their plots from Greek sources, they modified them in accordance with Roman slavery laws. Legal niceties are often key to the resolution. Extrapolating from those plays, what were those laws?
Slaves can have, earn, and save money. If they save enough, they can buy their own freedom. The procedure for an owner to free a slave is simple and informal. You tap the slave with your hand, turn him around, and say “Be free, henceforth.” But in addition to paying their masters, slaves also have to pay a substantial tax to the Roman government to legalize the transaction.
Slaves can be trusted advisors, teachers, and companions of their owners, but they cannot plead a legal case, and their testimony is inadmissible in a court of law.
There is no obvious physical difference between slaves and freedmen. It’s not a matter of race or even nationality. And record-keeping is sloppy, making it easy to kidnap children and sell them into slavery..
Prisoners of war become slaves. Debtors can sell themselves into slavery to pay off what they owe. Criminals can be enslaved as punishment. And the children of slaves are slaves.
Owners can do whatever they please with their slaves, including hiring them out as prostitutes. And there’s no sense that there’s anything morally wrong with the owners who act as procurers or the slaves who do their bidding.
Prosperous young men who enjoy the services of slave girls sometimes fall in love with them and then seek to buy them from their owners. Otherwise, these young men would marry as arranged by their parents — a financial transaction, with the bride’s family paying a dowry. Buying a prostitute slave is portrayed as more romantic than an arranged marriage. In the comic resolution of such tales of sweet innocent love, it may turn out that the slave girl is actually from a good family, having been kidnapped as a child, and that she’s exactly the one that the parents would have wanted him to marry in the first place.
An owner can execute a slave, without justification. But, surprisingly, slaves are typically portrayed as loyal to their masters. They accept their fate and their role. They are bound by a code of honor; and don’t seem inclined to try to escape. They focus instead on persuading their owners to free them or on trying to earn the money needed to buy their own freedom.
By the time of Petronius, the Republic was dead and many of its institutions had changed, but not slavery. In a world in constant flux, slavery was a transitional condition. Ambitious slaves needed to be prudent — to please their owners, to save the allowances their masters paid them, and to earn additional money, in the hope of buying freedom and paying the manumission tax. Once freed, they could rise socially as their wealth increased.
In the Satyricon, Trimalchio, the nouveau-riche party-giver, is a former slave, as are many of his wealthy guests. One such guest came from the provinces and voluntarily sold himself into slavery, not because of debt but because he knew that the prospects for advancement as a slave in Rome were far better than those of an ordinary taxpayer in the provinces.
The conspicuous consumption of these wealthy former slaves is part of their world view. The fortunes of everyday life are as arbitrary and unpredictable as the despots who rule the Empire. With no belief in gods or moral rules or in an afterlife with judgment and retribution, these former slaves play the easy-come, easy-go game of life as best they can. They eat, drink, and make merry. They enjoy watching gladiatorial contests as confirmation of their good luck: at least for today, they aren’t the ones suffering and dying. Only chance separates the onlookers from the victims.
