The Roman Guide to Slave Management Read Online Free PDF Page B

countryside can be taught the crafts of the ploughman, the pruner, the water-carrier, the potter, the sweeper and so on. The slave women can be assigned to such roles as clothes-folder, furniture-polisher, wool-weigher or masseuse. Those who are set to work in the urban household also need to be matched to particular tasks. Beauty, for example, is best suited for serving at table. If you are wealthy, you will expect to have a retinue of slaves, all filling different positions within the household. There must be litter-bearers, a secretary to read your letters to you aloud, and write your replies. Others should be set to provide gentle musical accompaniment at mealtimes, or employed as doorkeepers, concubines, timekeepers and messengers.
    Female slaves can be kept for household tasks andbreeding. The disreputable, of course, buy them to work as prostitutes in brothels. These days many Roman mothers do not wish to perform the difficult task of nursing their own children and prefer to leave it to slave wet-nurses. Here, choosing the right nurse is especially important, since this is often the woman whom your child will first call ‘mummy’. When it comes to babysitting my children, then, I like to employ slave children whom I have fathered with my own slave women. The slaves who are closest to you, as their master, are those who looked after you when you were young. My old childhood-tutor, Felix, used to take me to school every morning, kept me safe from any trouble and helped in everything from getting dressed to playing at gladiators. Of course he had been given the job because he was useless for anything else. As the great Athenian statesman Pericles said when he saw a slave fall from a tree and break his leg: ‘He’s just become a tutor.’
    Many of these tutors are actually highly educated. You should decide whether you want a thoroughly uneducated helper for your boys, like Felix, or a properly educated slave who can help them develop into the great orators you would like them to be. The worst thing is to use a slave who has a little learning but becomes convinced of his own genius. They constantly interfere with the child’s proper education and sometimes even brutally impose their own stupidity on the children. This is particularly important because these tutors can easily infect their charges with their own vices. Even Alexander the Great is reputed to have been permanently afflicted with the vices of his tutor Leonidas.
    Beware of ostentation. There is nothing more vulgar than some social parvenu employing a whole host of completely unnecessary slaves to carry out the most worthless tasks simply as a means to advertise their master’s excessive wealth. One wealthy freedman I know had a nomenclator, a name-caller, whose function was to remind their master of the names of the people he met. How insulting for his guests to have their name prompted by some slave. What is even worse is when people give this job to some old retainer who is good for no kind of productive work and whose brain is addled by age. They make constant mistakes and cause great embarrassment to all. Perhaps the most ridiculous use of slaves in this manner was made by a very rich man called Calvisius Sabinus. He inherited a huge estate, but was uneducated and his memory was so bad that he could not even remember the names of the heroes in Homer’s epics. Wanting to appear as an educated man, and somehow therefore deserving of his fortune, he bought some clever slaves at great expense and set them to memorising the great works of literature. One was to memorise the whole of Homer off by heart, another Hesiod, and nine others were to learn by rote the nine lyric poets. It took great training for them to be able to read well enough to achieve this. But once he had this literary slave gang in place he started to pester his dinner guests, continually asking them for some lines of poetry for his crew to quote. Sabinus claimed that these slaves had cost