Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

Again, if the slave had to suffer from political disqualifications, he had corresponding immunities; for one thing, he was exempt from military service. One very important consequence of this aspect of slavery was the restriction of the field from which recruits could be drawn for armies; it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the whole of the industrial population of antiquity was not available for military purposes, but the statement is somewhere near the truth; and from this followed a further consequence, which eventually helped to break up the Empire, viz., that the armies were increasingly recruited from the populations on the confines of the Empire, and ceased to be Italian. First Gaul, Spain and Illyria, and Thrace, then the Teutons from Central Europe, sent free recruits to the Roman armies, till the time came when the less civilized military element threw off the traditions of the civil government, and society returned to the conditions which had prevailed before the Roman Empire inaugurated the reign of peace. Agricultural slavery in Italy is sometimes said to have been the cause of the depletion of the Roman armies; ancient authors complain that the hardy breed of peasants from the central hills of Italy disappeared, and that, because their place had been taken by slaves, the recruiting grounds were barren of the right kind of population. The real state of the case was the reverse: the Roman wars had exhausted the Roman free population, which was then replaced by slaves. Between the end of the second Punic War and Cæsar’s campaigns in Gaul, Rome had been continuously draining Italy of her free population; it was inevitable that the sons of the small farmer should be replaced by slaves, and that eventually small farms should be merged in large holdings, and that the slave barrack should stand alone where the scattered homesteads of the peasant proprietor had adorned the landscape.

Two forms of slavery in antiquity have almost monopolized the attention of most writers on the subject—domestic slavery and agricultural slavery; both lend themselves to sensational treatment; but along with these there was industrial slavery in all its forms; where we have free artisans, antiquity had slaves; and it is questionable whether the slaves employed by a great manufacturing firm in antiquity were less well off than the mill hands of a Lancashire town of today; in many industries they were possibly better off than the class of operatives who are “sweated” in East London; the slave of antiquity was at least provided with the necessaries of life by his employer. It is true that the slave operative could be bought and sold and even mortgaged; he could be bequeathed by will, but these mischances commonly happened to him collectively, and no more affected him individually than a change of owners affects the men working in an English manufactory; indeed, the slave had an advantage over the free artisan; he was part of the capital, his value was relatively greater, he occupied the place now taken by the machinery. A body of well trained, well organized slaves stood in much the same relation to capital in ancient times as the plant of a manufactory to the modern capitalist; and a new owner would no more have thought of disbanding or disabling the slaves employed in a publishing establishment, or brick works, than a modern owner would break up the machines in a cotton mill which he had acquired. When we read of the enormous number of slaves owned by some ancient millionaire, we must not think of butlers and grooms and footmen, but of clerks and “hands”; where we now say that such and such a capitalist employs so many thousand men, the ancients said that he owned so many thousand slaves.

The slave could earn money for himself, and we can see through the minute regulations of the codes as to the conditions under which he could earn and hold money, a recognition of the fact that a man’s free labour is generally more effective than his forced labour; the slave’s opportunity of earning put him, as we should now say, upon piece work; he earned so much for his master, so much for himself; his master gave him the advantages of organization, of capital, of a commercial reputation, and for these he paid in a proportion fixed from time to time by legislation, keeping the remainder of his earnings; that he paid more highly for these advantages than the present value of money, and the general security of society would render equitable, is quite true; but then the whole scale of interest on capital was far higher than it is now. The slave who traded, as he often did, with his master’s capital, paid less for its use than the interest which would have been demanded of a stranger. We must not think of the “peculium,” the slave’s private earnings, as we may think of the purse accumulated by a modern domestic servant from gratuities and other sources of private revenue, but as a real wage earned even by a slave. The regulations which still bound the enfranchized slave to his master in the new relation of patron seem at first sight harsh, the liberty in reference to the former master remaining incomplete, but their aspect changes when we reflect that they rendered manumission more easy, and that the slave’s opportunities of earning money both before and after manumission were made for him by his connexion with his master. The proprietor of a large business might have every feeling of kindliness and consideration for a trusted slave, who managed some department of that business, but he might think twice before rewarding him with his liberty, if that act involved not only the loss of the slave’s services, but the creation of a commercial competitor.

Much has been written in condemnation of Roman agricultural slavery, and justly so, if the agricultural slave was dealt with in the spirit of the elder Cato; but here again we must be careful to distinguish. The ergastula, the slave barracks, did not account for all the agricultural slaves, and in the later days of Augustus the ergastula were preferred by free men to military service; nor can the system of the ergastula have been as rigorous in practice as in theory; the two great servile insurrections which proved so serious a danger to Rome could not have assumed such alarming dimensions, had not the slaves who organized them been in possession of means of communication. Nor must it be forgotten that there were many slaves who would now be convicts, many who had been sold into slavery from a conquered country, never having known any other condition of life. The ancients did not often make the mistake of setting a delicately nurtured man to hard menial labour, for his value in that capacity was small; similarly the increasing difficulty of finding slaves after Rome ceased to extend her conquests increased the value even of navvies, and their condition was improved by the exigencies of sound economy; even a Cato, when slaves were dear, took care not to wear them out before their time. Though a slave was not protected except by public opinion against his master, who might beat and even kill him, he was protected against all other men, who could not injure him without incurring damages for wanton destruction of another man’s property. There were cruel savage men among the ancients as there are among the moderns, but on the whole the servile condition does not seem to have been abused. Roman masters and even mistresses occasionally beat their slaves, but vapulation was a constant feature of human existence till a very few years ago even in Europe. Shakespeare’s masters frequently strike their servants; that worthy though foolish citizen, M. Jourdain, after frequent threats and much aggravation, slapped his maidservant on the face; the use of the stick is not an exclusive prerogative of the slave owner.

The more domestic of the Latin authors, such as Cicero and Horace, do not give us a disagreeable picture of slavery; the relations between slaves and masters in their day seem to have been in every respect as pleasant as those between employers and servants in these days; and the taunt of servile origin so frequent in the Classics amounts to little more than the taunt of connexion with trade so common in some circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact the frequency of this disparagement tends to prove that it was easy to rise from the servile condition to positions of great wealth, and even political influence. The two vulgar rich men in the Satyricon of Petronius, Trimalchio and Habinna, had both been slaves; and the latter is made to say that he had become a slave voluntarily, as that was the easiest method of becoming a Roman citizen; this may be wilful exaggeration on the part of Petronius for a satirical purpose; but it would have no point if it did not carry a certain element of truth. Pallas and his brother Felix, the freedmen of the Emperor Claudius, were, the former practically Prime Minister, the latter Procurator of Judæa; numerous similar instances show that a man might have been a slave and yet rise to high office; the intermediate step seems generally to have been through the Equestrian Order—in one of its aspects, as we have seen, the financial department of the Civil Service.

This introduces us to another feature of slavery as practised in antiquity, viz. its cosmopolitan influence, which was at work in every class of society, but in the highest class most of all; nothing else so effectually broke down the barrier between the Greek and the Roman, between the Eastern and Western half of the Mediterranean, between North and South.

War in ancient times had many of the aspects of a speculation, and among the profits of war the sale of captives was reckoned; the conquered had no rights against the conqueror except under special terms. When the victim was a civilized State, the free men who were thus sold into slavery had the opportunity of buying back their own freedom; they practically paid a ransom; the transaction was a rough and ready and efficacious method of exacting an indemnity. There would be a certain proportion who could not pay the indemnity, and these became slaves, but in their new status they were not wasted on unprofitable occupations; the philosopher, the physician, the accountant, the merchant, continued their various occupations in the service of their master, and if they proved their efficiency rapidly passed through the stage of slavery to that of freedmen.

Of the twenty famous schoolmasters whom Suetonius honours with short biographies, three only were certainly not freedmen, Orbilius, the teacher of Horace, Pomponius Marcellus, and a certain Valerius Probus, who hailed from Beyrout, and must have been himself free, whatever his parentage, as he began life with the endeavour to get a centurion’s commission; fifteen were certainly freedmen, and two probably. Their nationalities are strangely varied; three were certainly Italians, three others possibly, two were Syrians, if we so class Probus, three Gauls, one Spaniard, one Illyrian, six certainly Greek, and one probably. Of the three Gauls, one, M. Antonius Gnipho, gave lessons first in the house of Julius Cæsar during the latter’s boyhood; he was a man of exceptional intellectual brilliance and generous character. Suetonius does not state that Gnipho actually taught Cæsar, though the inference suggests itself, and in any case the youthful Cæsar must have known him, and have received impressions, if not information, which may have influenced the future conqueror of Gaul. These men were for the most part highly respected and made large professional incomes; they taught either in houses of their own, or by special arrangement in the houses of their patrons; one of them, M. Verrius Flaccus, taught on these terms the grandchildren of Augustus, who paid him a handsome annual stipend on condition that he only admitted such pupils to his classes as were approved of by his employer; he had previously taught independently; a statue was erected to his memory at Præneste; this indicates that in spite of his servile origin he was held in high honour. Horace must have known Verrius Flaccus, even if he were not actually a relative, and Horace’s allusion to the persuasive schoolmasters, who coax children to learn the elements by giving them biscuits, suggests a well known trait of this Verrius Flaccus, who was the first schoolmaster to offer prizes, “some ancient book handsome or scarce,” says Suetonius. It is interesting to note that the most fashionable of these schoolmasters, and the one who made the largest fortune, was a man who, in the opinion of the Emperors Tiberius and Claudius, both good judges, was totally unfit to be entrusted with the charge of youth; while the one of whom it is recorded that in his old age he sank into extreme poverty is Horace’s old friend, the freeborn Italian Orbilius. This man also was honoured with a statue.

The proportion of men of servile origin in this one profession was very large, if we may infer that the short list given by Suetonius of its leaders indicates conditions which prevailed through the rank and file; nor was it held in special disrepute. Tacitus mentions a schoolmaster not included in this list who became a Senator; another, M. Pomponius Marcellus, was admitted to the inner council of Tiberius, and anticipated the “supra grammaticam” episode of a much later age; he reproved the Emperor for a solecism in the wording of a decree, telling him, “You can give the citizenship to men, Cæsar, but not to a word.”

Men who had been freeborn in their native countries, but had passed into servitude by fortune of war, found new and wider careers open to them in the service of their conquerors; they obtained access to the masters of the world, and were able to direct their thoughts to new channels, and directly influence their policy; they were further able to push the fortunes of their relatives and connexions at home; for as freedmen, and even as slaves, they were not cut off from correspondence with the countries which they had left.