Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero

by W. Warde Fowler

We have seen that the two upper classes of society were engaged in business of various kinds, and especially in banking and carrying out public contracts, or in the work of government, and in Italian agriculture. All this business, public and private, called for a vast amount of labor, and in part, of skilled labour; the great men provided the capital, but the details of the work, as it had gradually developed since the war with Hannibal, created a demand for workmen of every kind such as had never before been known in the Graeco-Roman world. Clerks, accountants, messengers, as well as operatives, were wanted both by the Government and by private capitalists. In the households of the rich the great increase of wealth and luxury had led to a constant demand for helps of all kinds, each with a certain amount of skill in his own particular department; and on the estates in the country, which were steadily growing bigger, and were tending to be worked more and more on capitalistic lines, labour, both skilled and unskilled, was increasingly required. Thus the demand for labour was abnormally great, and had been created with abnormal rapidity, and the supply could not possibly be provided by the free population alone. The lower classes of city and country were not suited to the work wanted, either by capacity or inclination. It was not for a free Roman to be at the beck and call of an employer, like the clerks and underlings of to-day, or to act as servant in a great household; and for a great part of the necessary work he was not sufficiently well educated. Far less was it possible for him to work on the great cattle-runs. And the State wanted the best years of his life for service in the army, which, as has been well remarked, was the real industry of the Roman freeman. But luckily in one sense, and in another unluckily, for Rome, there was an endless supply of labour to be had, of every quality and capacity, for the very same abnormal circumstances which had created the demand also provided the supply. The great wars and the wealth accruing from them in various ways had produced a capitalist class in need of labour, and also created a slave-market on a scale such as the world has never known before or since.

Ever since the time of Alexander and the wars of his successors with each other and their neighbours, it is probable that the supply of captives sold as slaves had been increasing; and in the second century B.C. the little island of Delos had come to be used as a convenient centre for the slave trade. Strabo tells us in a well-known passage that 10,000 slaves might be sold there in a single day.[307] But Rome herself was in the time of Cicero the great emporium for slaves; the wars which were most productive of prisoners had been for long in the centre and the west of the Mediterranean basin. All armies sent out from Rome were accompanied by speculators in this trade, who bought the captives as they were put up to auction after a battle, and then undertook the transport to Rome of all who were suited for employment in Italy or were not bought up in the province which was the seat of war. The enormous number of slaves thus made available, even if we make allowance for the uncertainty of the numbers as they have come down to us, surpasses all belief; we may take a few examples, sufficient to give some idea of a practice which had lasting and lamentable results on Roman society.

After the campaign of Pydna and the overthrow of the Macedonian kingdom, Aemilius Paullus, one of the most humane of Romans, sold into slavery, under orders from the senate, 150,000 free inhabitants of communities in Epirus which had sided with Perseus in the war.[308] After the war with the Cimbri and Teutones, 90,000 of the latter and 60,000 of the former are said to have been sold;[309] and though the numbers may be open to suspicion, as they amount again to 150,000, the fact of an enormous capture is beyond question. Caesar, like Aemilius Paullus one of the most humane of Romans, tells us himself that on a single occasion, the capture of the Aduatuci, he sold 53,000 prisoners on the spot.[310] And of course every war, whether great or small, while it diminished the free population by slaughter, pestilence, or capture, added to the number of slaves. Cicero himself, after his campaign in Cilicia and the capture of the hill stronghold Pindonissus, did of course as all other commanders did; we catch a glimpse of the process in a letter to Atticus: "mancipia venibant Saturnalibus tertiis."[311] It is hardly necessary to point out that we should be getting our historical perspective quite wrong if we allowed ourselves to expect in these cultured Roman generals any sign of compassion for their victims; it was a part of their mental inheritance to look on men who had surrendered as simply booty, the property of the victors; Roman captives would meet with the same fate, and even for them little pity was ever felt. When Caesar in 49 within a few months dismissed two surrendered armies of Roman soldiers, once at Corfinium and again in Spain, he was doubtless acting from motives of policy, but the enslavement of Roman citizens by their fellows would, we may hope, have been repugnant to him, if not to his own soldiers.[312]

War then was the principal source of the supply of slaves, but it was not the only one. When a slave-trade is in full swing, it will be fostered in all possible ways. Brigandage and kidnapping were rife all over the Empire and in the countries beyond its borders in the disturbed times with which we are dealing. The pirates of Cilicia, until they were suppressed by Pompeius in 66, swarmed all over the Mediterranean, and snapped up victims by raids even on the coasts of Italy, selling them in the market at Delos without hindrance. Cicero, in his speech in support of the appointment of Pompey, mentions that well-born children had been carried off from Misenum under the very eyes of a Roman praetor.[313] Caesar himself was taken by them when a young man, and only escaped with difficulty. In Italy itself, where there was no police protection until Augustus took the matter in hand, kidnapping was by no means unknown; the grassatores, as they were called, often slaves escaped from the prisons of the great estates, haunted the public roads, and many a traveller disappeared in this way and passed the rest of his life in a slave-prison.[314] Varro, in describing the sort of slaves best suited for work on the great sheep-runs, says that they should be such as are strong enough to defend the flocks from wild beasts and brigands—the latter doubtless quite as ready to seize human beings as sheep and cattle. And slave-merchants seem to have been constantly carrying on their trade in regions where no war was going on, and where desirable slaves could be procured; the kingdoms of Asia Minor were ransacked by them, and when Marius asked Nicomedes king of Bithynia for soldiers during the struggle with the Cimbri, the answer he got was that there were none to send—the slave-dealers had been at work there.[315] Every one will remember the line of Horace in which he calls one of these wretches a "king of Cappadocia."[316]

There were two other sources of the slave supply of which however little need be said here, as the contribution they made was comparatively small. First, slaves were bred from slaves, and on rural estates this was frequently done as a matter of business.[317] Varro recommends the practice in the large sheep-farms,[318] under certain conditions; and some well-known lines of Horace suggest that on smaller farms, where a better class of slaves would be required, these home-bred ones were looked on as the mark of a rich house, "ditis examen domus."[319] Secondly, a certain number of slaves had become such under the law of debt. This was a common source of slavery in the early periods of Roman history, but in Cicero's day we cannot speak of it with confidence. We have noticed the cry of the distressed freemen of the city in the conspiracy of Catiline, which looks as though the old law were still put in force; and in the country there are signs that small owners who had borrowed from large ones were in Varro's time in some modified condition of slavery,[320] surrendering their labour in lieu of payment. But all these internal sources of slavery are as nothing compared with the supply created by war and the slave-trade.

This supply being thus practically unlimited, prices ran comparatively low, and no Roman of any considerable means at all need be, or was, entirely without slaves. He had only to go, or to send his agent, to one of the city slave-markets, such as the temple of Castor,[321] where the slave-agents (mangones) exhibited their "goods" under the supervision of the aediles; there he could pick out exactly the kind of slave he wanted at any price from the equivalent of £10 upwards. The unfortunate human being was exhibited exactly as horses are now, and could be stripped, handled, trotted about, and treated with every kind of indignity, and of course the same sort of trickery went on in these human sales as is familiar to all horse-dealers of the present day.[322] The buyer, if he wanted a valuable article, a Greek, for example, who could act as secretary or librarian, like Cicero's beloved Tiro, or even a household slave with a special character for skill in cooking or other specialised work of a luxurious family, would have to give a high price; even as long ago as the time of the elder Cato a very large sum might be given for a single choice slave, and Cato as censor in 184 attempted to check such high prices by increasing the duties payable on the sales.[323] Towards the close of the Republican period we have little explicit evidence of prices; Cicero constantly mentions his slaves, but not their values. Doubtless for fancy articles huge prices might be demanded; Pliny tells us that Antony when triumvir bought two boys as twins for more than £800 apiece, who were no doubt intended for handsome pages, perhaps to please Cleopatra.[324] But there can be no doubt that ordinary slaves capable of performing only menial offices in town or country were to be had at this time quite cheap, and the number in the city alone must have been very great.

It is unfortunately quite impossible to make even a probable estimate of the total number in Rome; the data are not forthcoming. Beloch[325] remarks aptly that though some families owned hundreds of slaves, the number of such families was not large, quoting the words of Philippus, tribune in 104 B.C., to the effect that there were not more than two thousand persons of any substance in the State.[326] The great majority of citizens living in Rome had, he thinks, no slaves. He is forced to take as a basis of calculation the proportion of bond to free in the only city of the Empire about which we have certain information on this point; at Pergamum there was one slave to two free persons.[327] Assuming the whole free population to have been about half a million in the time of Augustus, or rather more, including peregrini, he thus arrives at a slave population of something like 280,000; this may not be far off the mark, but it must be remembered that it is little more than a guess.

What has been said above will have given the reader some idea of the conditions of life which created a great demand for labour in the last two centuries B.C., and of the circumstances which produced an abundant supply of unfree labour to satisfy that demand. I propose now to treat the whole question of Roman slavery from three points of view,—the economic, the legal, and the ethical. In other words, we have to ask: (1) how the abundance of slave labour affected the social economy of the free population; (2) what was the position of the slave in the eye of the law, as regards treatment and chance of manumission; (3) what were the ethical results of this great slave system, both on the slaves themselves and on their masters.

1. From an economical point of view the most interesting question is whether slave labour seriously interfered with the development of free industry; and unfortunately this question is an extremely difficult one to answer. We can all guess easily that the opportunities of free labour must have been limited by the presence of enormous numbers of slaves; but to get at the facts is another matter. In regard to rural slavery we have some evidence to go upon, as we shall see directly, and this has of late been collected and utilised; but as regards labour in the city no such research has as yet been made,[328] and the material is at once less fruitful and more difficult to handle. A few words on this last point must suffice here.

We have seen in Chapter II. that there was plenty of employment at Rome for freemen. Friedländer, than whom no higher authority can be quoted for the social life of the city, goes so far as to assert that even under the early Empire a freeman could always obtain work if he wished for it;[329] and even if we take this as a somewhat exaggerated statement, it may serve to keep us from rushing to the other extreme and picturing a population of idle free paupers. In fact we are bound on general evidence to assume for our own period that he is in the main right; the poor freeman of Rome had to live somehow, and the cheap corn which he enjoyed was not given him gratis until a few years before the Republic came to an end.[330] How did he get the money to pay even the sum of six asses and a third for a modius of corn, or to pay for shelter and clothing, which were assuredly not to be had for nothing? We know again, that the gilds of trades (see above, p. 45) continued to exist in the last century of the Republic,[331] though the majority had to be suppressed owing to their misuse as political clubs. Supposing that the members of these collegia were small employers of labour, it is reasonable to assume that the labour they employed was at least largely free; for the capital needed to invest, at some risk, in a sufficient number of slaves, who would have to be housed and fed, and whose lives would be uncertain in a crowded and unhealthy city, could not, we must suppose, be easily found by such men. Here and there, no doubt, we find traces of slave labour in factories, e.g. as far back as the time of Plautus, if we can take him as writing of Rome rather than translating from the Greek: