A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors Read Online Free PDF Page A

though speculation was, strangely,
considered OK. The poorer Roman citizen, the plebeian, who had only his vote to sell, would never sell his labour. So all the
work,
physical and mental, was performed by slaves. They were
doctors, secretaries, book-keepers, major-domos. Both sides used slaves as soldiers in the Civil Wars, Emperor Augustus as Imperial Guardsmen. Gladiators and actors almost had to be slaves, which
explains the downfall of the Emperors Caligula and Nero, whose performance in these roles, though they delighted the plebs, engendered the fatal distaste of the Roman upper classes. The first was
murdered by young nobs and the second outlawed by senatorial decree.
    A man born into this world was weaned, coddled, taught, fed, entertained and indeed often loved by a variety of slaves from the cradle to the grave. Long-serving slaves were manumitted on his
deathbed – Seneca’s was the classical example – and the rest were left as part of his estate. Slaves in Rome were completely inside society and indeed often, if a play on words is
permissible, inside their owners. By the end of our period few families in Rome were not laced with slave blood, which may have diminished Roman
severitas
but also made Romans more tolerant.
Rich people bought handsome slaves of all sexes for pleasure and display just as randy duchesses in the eighteenth century relished a well-turned calf in a footman or a groom both for public
contemplation and for private enjoyment. Marcus Aurelius, listing the austere attitudes of indifference to sensual pleasures of his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius – a remarkable pair of pure
Emperors – adds that he did not notice ‘the beauty of his slaves’.
    The field slave or mining slave did not fare so well; one Roman matron, a big landowner, the Mrs Helmsley of her day, maintained it was cheaper to work her slaves to death
and replace them than to feed them properly. If slaves wrote love poems they have not come down to us. There are moments in Latin literature describing the love and affection of masters for their
slaves of which Virgil’s second
Eclogue
is the most famous. The desperate love of Corydon for Alexis is told at length and heart-wringingly. Alas the pampered slave boy belongs to
another. Such a beauty in the open market would have cost 24,000
denarii
– the cost of a Porsche today. A run-of-the-mill slave at this time, at the beginning of our millennium, cost
only 500
denarii
and his day’s labour half a
denarius
, but the poets were not interested in such fellows. The size of the Empire and the extent and variety of its conquests
meant that slaves, shuffled anonymously in the markets, could have come from anywhere and be anybody. Virgil’s contemporary, Horace, writes to a friend:
    Dear Phocoan Xanthias, don’t feel ashamed
    Her family’s undoubtedly royal; perhaps
    She’s mourning some palace’s cruel collapse.
    (Horace,
Odes,
Book 11, iv, tr. James Michie, Penguin)
    The reason for the
Lex Aelia Sentia,
which prohibited the manumission of slaves under thirty by masters under twenty, can be imagined. A slave in Rome had many routes to the
‘status’ of freedom, which gave him liberty but not citizenship. Then he could wear the conical little hat of liberty, revived in the French Revolution. He might purchase his
manumission from his master with his
peculium
(literally‘private property’, usually an accumulation of tips). He might earn his freedom through public
service in the fire brigade or as a street cleaner. But the most common way of manumission was from the affection or deathbed gesture of the master. Cicero, whose manumitted slave Tiro edited his
letters, claimed that it should only take six years for a slave to become a freedman and then, if he were shrewd and industrious, he could become a millionaire like Trimalchio – the exuberant
party-giver satirized by Petronius and filmed by Fellini. Pliny records one freedman who became rich enough