Agricola

by William Emerton Heitland

XXXI. SENECA THE YOUNGER.

The chief literary figure of the reigns of Claudius and Nero was L Annaeus Seneca, a son of the rhetorician above referred to, and like his father born in Spain. His life extended from 4 BC to 65 AD. For the purpose of the present inquiry his surviving works are mainly of interest as giving us in unmistakeable tones the point of view from which a man of Stoic principles regarded slavery as a social institution. The society of imperial Rome, in which he spent most of his life, was politically dead. To meddle with public affairs was dangerous. Even a senator needed to walk warily, for activity was liable to be misinterpreted by the Emperor and by his powerful freedmen[936], who were in effect Imperial Ministers. To keep on good terms with these departmental magnates, who had sprung from the slave-market to be courted as the virtual rulers of freeborn Roman citizens, was necessary for all men of note. Under such conditions it is not wonderful that the wealthy were tempted to assert themselves in ostentatious luxury and dissipation: for a life of careless debauchery was on the face of it hardly compatible with treasonable conspiracy. The immense slave-households of Rome were a part and an expression of this extravagance; and the fashion of these domestic armies was perhaps at its height in this period. Now, nothing kept the richer Romans in subjection more efficiently than this habit of living constantly exposed to the eyes and ears of their menials. Cruel laws might protect the master from assassination by presuming[937] the guilt of all slaves who might have prevented it. They could not protect him from the danger of criminal charges, such as treason[938], supported by servile evidence: indeed the slave was a potential informer, and a hated master was at the mercy of his slaves. Under some Emperors this possibility was a grim reality, and no higher or more heartfelt praise could be bestowed[939] on an Emperor than that he refused to allow masters to be done to death by the tongue of their slaves.

Meanwhile the slave was still legally[940] his (or her) master’s chattel, and cases of revolting cruelty[941] and other abominations occurred from time to time. Yet more humane and sympathetic views were already affecting public sentiment, chiefly owing to the spread of Stoic doctrines among the cultivated classes. Of these doctrines as adapted to Roman minds Seneca was the leading preacher. Thus he cites the definition of ‘slave’ as ‘wage-earner for life,’ propounded[942] by Chrysippus: he insists on the human quality common to slave and free alike: he reasserts the equality of human rights, only upset by Fortune, who has made one man master of another: he sees that the vices of slaves are very often simply the result of the misgovernment of their owners: he reckons them as humble members[943] of the family circle, perhaps even the former playmates of boyhood: he recommends a kindly consideration for a slave’s feelings, and admits[944] that some sensitive natures would prefer a flogging to a box on the ear or a harsh and contemptuous scolding. We need not follow up his doctrines in more detail. The general tone is evident and significant enough. But it is the relations of the domestic circle that he has primarily in view. His references to agriculture and rustic labour are few, as we might expect from the circumstances of his life. But we are in a better position to judge their value having considered his attitude towards slavery in general. It should be noted, as a specimen of his tendency to Romanize Greek doctrine, that he lays great stress on the more wholesome relations[945] of master and slave in the good old times of early Rome,—here too without special reference to the rustic households of the rude forefathers round which tradition centred.

Judged by a modern standard, a defect in Stoic principles was the philosophic aloofness from the common interests and occupations of ordinary workaday life. To the Wise Man all things save Virtue are more or less indifferent, and in the practice of professions and trades there is little or no direct connexion with Virtue. Contempt for manual labour, normal in the ancient world and indeed in all slaveowning societies, took a loftier position under the influence of Stoicism. Hence that system, in spite of its harsh and tiresome features, appealed to many of the better Romans of the upper class, seeming as it did to justify their habitual disdain. Seneca’s attitude towards handicrafts is much the same as Cicero’s, only with a touch of Stoic priggishness added. Wisdom, he says[946], is not a mere handworker (opifex) turning out appliances for necessary uses. Her function is more important: her craft is the art of living, and over other arts she is supreme. The quality of an artist’s action[947] depends on his motive: the sculptor may make a statue for money or to win fame or as a pious offering. Arts, as Posidonius[948] said, range from the ‘liberal’ ones to the ‘common and mean’ ones practised by handworkers: the latter have no pretence of moral dignity. Indeed many of these trades are quite unnecessary, the outcome of modern[949] extravagance. We could do without them, and be all the better for it: man’s real needs are small. But to work for a living is not in itself a degradation: did not the Stoic master Cleanthes draw water[950] for hire? In short, the Wise Man may be a king or a slave, millionaire or pauper. The externals cannot change his true quality, though they may be a help or a hindrance in his growth to perfect wisdom.

In his references to agriculture and country matters it is to be remarked that Seneca confirms the impression derived from other sources, that the letting of land to tenant farmers was on the increase. Discoursing on the greedy luxury of the rich, their monstrous kitchens and cellars, and the toiling of many to gratify the desires of one, he continues ‘Look at all the places where the earth is being tilled, and at all the thousands[951] of farmers (colonorum) ploughing and digging; is this, think you, to be reckoned one man’s belly, for whose service crops are being raised in Sicily and in Africa too?’ The coloni here mentioned may be merely ‘cultivators’ in a general sense. But I think they are more probably tenants of holdings on great estates. In speaking of his arrival at his Alban villa, and finding nothing ready for a meal, he philosophically refuses to let so small an inconvenience make him angry with his cook and his baker. ‘My baker[952] has got no bread; but the steward has some, and so have the porter and the farmer.’ A coarse sort of bread, no doubt, but you have only got to wait, and you will enjoy it when you are really hungry. Here we seem to have an instance of what was now probably an ordinary arrangement: the villa, homestead with some land round it, kept as a country ‘box’ for the master by his steward, who would see to the garden and other appurtenances, while the rest of the land is let to a humble tenant farmer. In another passage we have an interesting glimpse of a tenant’s legal position[953] as against his landlord. ‘If a landlord tramples down growing crops or cuts down plantations, he cannot keep his tenant, though the lease may be still in being: this is not because he has recovered what was due to him as lessor, but because he has made it impossible for him to recover it. Even so it often happens that a creditor is cast in damages to his debtor, when he has on other grounds taken from him more than the amount of the debt claimed.’ I gather from this passage that damage done by the lessor to the lessee’s interest in the farm deprived him of right of action against the lessee, in case he wanted to enforce some claim (for rent or for some special service) under the terms of the existing contract[954] of lease. If this inference be just, the evidence is important. For the colonus is conceived as a humble person, whose interest a brutal inconsiderate landlord would be not unlikely to disregard, and to whom a resort to litigation would seem a course to be if possible avoided.

To this question of the rights of landlord and tenant Seneca returns later, when engaged in reconciling the Stoic thesis that ‘all things belong to the Wise Man’ with the facts of actual life. The Wise Man is in the position of a King to whom belongs the general right of sovranty (imperium) while his subjects have the particular right of ownership (dominium). Illustrating the point he proceeds[955] thus. ‘Say I have hired a house from you. Of its contents some belong to you and some to me. The thing (res) is your property, but the right of user (usus) of your property is mine. Just so you must not meddle with crops, though grown on your own estate, if your tenant forbids it; and in a season of dearness or dearth you will be like the man in Vergil wistfully gazing at another’s plenteous store, though the land where it grew, the yard where it is stacked, and the granary it is meant to fill, are all your own property. Nor, when I have hired a lodging, have you a right to enter it, owner though you be: when a slave of yours is hired for service by me, you have no right to withdraw him: and, if I hire a trap from you and give you a lift, it will be a good turn on my part, though the conveyance belongs to you.’ I have quoted this at some length, in order to make the farm-tenant’s position quite clear. His rights are presumed to be easily ascertainable, and his assertion of them will be protected by the law. His contract, whether a formal lease or not, is also presumed to guarantee him complete control of the subject for the agreed term. Whether encroachments by landlords and legal proceedings for redress by tenants were common events in rural Italy, Seneca need not and does not say. I suspect that personal interest on both sides was in practice a more effective restraint than appeals to law.

There are other references to agricultural conditions, which though of less importance are interesting as confirming other evidence as to the latifundia of this period. A good specimen is found in his denunciation of human greed as the cause of poverty, by bringing to an end the happy age of primitive communism, when all shared the ownership of all. Cramped and unsatisfied, this avaritia can never find the way back to the old state of plenty and happiness. ‘Hence, though she now endeavour to make good[956] what she has wasted; though she add field to field by buying out her neighbours or wrongfully ejecting them; though she expand her country estates on the scale of provinces, and enjoy the sense of landlordism in the power of touring mile after mile without leaving her own domains; still no enlargement of bounds will bring us back to the point from whence we started.’ Again, in protesting against the luxurious ostentation of travellers and others, he shews that they are really in debt. ‘So-and-so is, you fancy, a rich man ... because he has arable estates[957] in all provinces of the empire ... because his holding of land near Rome is on a scale one would grudge him even in the wilds of Apulia.’ Such a man is in debt to Fortune. In these as in other passages the preacher illustrates his sermon by references calculated to bring home his points. Naturally he selects for the purpose matters familiar to his audience; and it is this alone that makes the passages worth quoting. The same may be said of his sympathetic reference[958] to the hard lot of a slave transferred from the easy duties of urban service to the severe toil of farm labour. In general it may be remarked that the evidence of Seneca and other literary men of this period is to be taken in connexion with the treatise of Columella, who is the contemporary specialist on agriculture. The prevalence of slave labour and the growth of the tenant-farmer class are attested by both lines of evidence.