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

to leave 4,116 slaves in his will.
    Members of the Roman intelligentsia were often descended from slaves. The father of Horace was a freedman who became a tax-collector or possibly an auctioneer’s assistant but in a
substantial enough way to leave him the competence of a gentleman. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, was slave as a boy to Epaphroditus, one of Nero’s courtiers.
    Of course, the life of slaves, even in Rome, could be heavy with humiliation and cruelty. Ovid writes of porters being chained in Rome. Vedius Pollio, a Roman aristocrat, fed his slaves to his
lampreys for ‘trivial offences’. The 400 slaves (a large enough number to have included
silentarii
– slaves employed to keep the others quiet) of the household of the
Prefect Pedanius Secundus were led off to execution by soldiers, through a sullen crowd, after one of them had murdered him.
    In the early days, the concept of slavery – of one man helping another till the soil – could be described by the historian Mommsen as ‘innocent’. But as the numbers of
slaves increased so did the Romans’ fear of them. Laws relating to slavery under Nero, for instance, were both repressive, through fear, and humane, through a sense of justice. The law under
which the 400 slaves of Pedanius Secundus were executed in AD 61 had been initiated by Augustus but theclassical schoolmaster’s favourite,
Seneca, so famous for his clemency, did not even attend the agonizing debate in the Senate deciding that the law be enforced in this case (Professor Michael Grant suggests that the slave who
murdered his master may have been in love with him!). The Senate’s decision was truly Roman: the law was cruel but clear, it had to be implemented.
    The supply of slaves came mainly through conquest. Men, women and children from defeated Italian towns were the earliest source. Then Rome was flooded by the entire population of Sardinia and
the phrase ‘cheap as a Sardinian’ became current. As the Empire expanded, slaves were shipped in from all over the world and the flow only stopped, as Gibbon pointed out, with the
completion of the Roman system of conquest. The international big business of slavery was centred on the little Cycladic island of Delos, where the turnover of 10,000 slaves a day was recorded in
the time of Augustus. Before they were suppressed, kidnappers and pirates dumped slaves anonymously on to Delos. Julius Caesar was himself kidnapped and held to ransom, as a young man. As a general
in Gaul he records selling (the sale of slaves was the general’s perk) 53,000 Aduatuci (defeated Gallic tribesmen) in one day. Perhaps he needed the money to repay Crassus . . .
    There was no uniform for slaves in case they should realize how many they were. The system was based on force and was occasionally broken by greater force. Sicily was the first scene of
effective slave revolts. In that unblessed island, chain-gangs of slaves, mainly Greeks, were used by bulk farmers to run the grain business, which supplied more than half the Roman market. In 104 BC , under the consulship of Marius, the mad young son of a Roman knight, one Titus, armed 500 slaves with weapons being auctioned off by a gladiatorial school and in no time
had an army 4,000 strong. Thisrevolt was put down and all participants executed. The second Sicilian revolt lasted longer. Two slave kings emerged – one called Salvius,
an Italian freedman and snake charmer, the other a Greek called Athenio – and raised an army of 60,000 well-armed slaves and 5,000 cavalry, but enthusiasm and indignation cannot glue armies
together for ever. It was not until the revolt of Spartacus in 73 BC that the Romans were seriously threatened by ‘their enormous slave population’, which
outnumbered them three to one.
    Spartacus and his ultimate destroyer, Crassus, were the stuff movies are made of: one noble, forgiving, heroic, the other greedy, cruel and charmless, the unacceptable face of Roman capitalism.