Owens, 'Slavery and Society at Rome', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9511
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9511-owens-slavery

@@@@95.11.5, Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome

Keith Bradley, <i>Slavery and Society at Rome</i>. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+202. ISBN 0-521-37887-7
(pb).
	Reviewed by William M. Owens, Classics -- Ohio University
   		owensb@ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu

<i>Slavery and Society at Rome</i> is Keith Bradley's third
book on Roman slavery.  These books and Bradley's numerous
articles comprise a distinguished contribution to our
understanding of ancient slavery.  In the earlier books Bradley
examined Roman slavery's system of rewards and punishments and
Rome's three major slave revolts.[[1]]  <i>Slavery and
Society</i> recapitulates some of these themes but also provides
a more comprehensive treatment of Roman slavery, persuasive in
its conclusions and laudable as a model of social-historical
synthesis.  For these reasons, as well Bradley's careful
documentation and bibliography, <i>Slavery and Society</i> is an
excellent place to begin the study of Roman slavery.

Bradley focuses mainly, but not exclusively on slavery in
Italy between 200 BC and 200 AD.  His themes are four-fold:  (1)
The macro-system aspects of slavery are analyzed in Chapter 2, on
the notion of what constitutes a slave system, and in Chapter 3,
on Rome's means of procuring and maintaining a slave population. 
(2) The material conditions of slavery are surveyed in Chapter 4,
on the nature of the work slaves performed, and Chapter 5, on the
living conditions of slaves.  (3) The attitudes of slave owners
to slaves is the general theme of Chapter 7, which is concerned
with the effects of Stoicism and Christianity on the slave
holders, and of Chapter 8, which looks for evidence of improved
treatment of slaves under the law and through the practice of
manumission.  (4) The reaction of slaves to slavery is addressed
at numerous points and specifically in Chapter 6, which deals
with slave resistance, and in Chapter 9, which offers a reading
of the philosophy of Epictetus that attempts to see if the
philosopher's experience of bondage is reflected in his thought. 

This outline of topics, with its emphasis on material
conditions and personal attitudes reveals one of Bradley's main
goals:  To write social history that reconstructs the reality of
slavery as it was experienced by the individual, or as Keith
Hopkins put it, to evoke "what it was like to be there."[[2]] 
The thought that we may be able to recover something as elusive
as the slave's experience of slavery is intellectually exciting. 
For Bradley this act of recovery may be morally necessary as
well; he seems intent to give the victims of Roman slavery their
due in history.  Such history is probative and subject to
ideological distortion.  Nonetheless, Bradley remains a careful
and objective judge of the ancient evidence.  His reconstruction
takes us closer to knowing how it may have been.

In the introduction Bradley cites four documents to illustrate
not only the diversity of the evidence but also the diverse
character of slavery itself:  a letter written by Quintus Cicero
to his brother expressing delight at Marcus' manumission of his
secretary Tiro; a papyrus fragment regarding the sale of a slave
girl named Abaskantis in 142 AD; a sepulchral inscription for
Musicus Scurranus, a slave in the imperial bureaucracy, dedicated
by sixteen of his own slaves; and an opinion of the jurist Ulpian
on the question of whether a slave who has had his tongue cut out
may be considered "damaged."  As did the free citizens of the
empire, so did the slaves of Rome inhabit a steep hierarchy of
statuses and privileges; at the top were elite slaves such as
Musicus Scurranus, at the bottom the many who were subject to
routine brutality and physical abuse.  A particular excellence of
this book is Bradley's ability to suggest a coherent and
convincing general account of Roman slavery that does not
oversimplify its diverse character.  This was no mean task, for
the evidence is difficult.  As slaves in Rome lived on the
margins of society, so does the evidence for slavery tend to
appear incidentally, in the metaphorical margins of texts whose
focus is something other than slavery.  For example, a
significant source of our knowledge about ancient slave auctions
is Lucian's Vitarum Auctio</i>, a text whose purpose was not the
accurate depiction of social convention but the satire of
philosophical schools.[[3]]  Bradley compensates for the
unreliable character of individual texts by drawing on an
impressively wide range of evidence.  In addition to the four
sources Bradley reviews in the introduction, he argues
effectively from the evidence of poetry, history, the ancient
novel, and material remains.  

Bradley's goal of describing the effects of the system on its
victims is particularly ambitious, given that Roman slaves have
left no record commenting on the effects of their bondage.  A
lesser scholar might have been tempted to infer conclusions about
the slaves' reactions to slavery from broad assumptions about
human nature.  Bradley, on the other hand, attempts to ground his
conclusions about the emotional and psychic life of slaves and
masters as far as possible on ancient evidence.  To do this he
has turned to some forms of unconventional testimony.  Following
the example of Fergus Millar and Keith Hopkins he shows that the
ancient novel, though fiction, may serve as a valuable source for
the ancient social reality.[[4]]  Earlier Bradley himself has
shown how new evidence may be found in familiar texts.  In
<i>Slaves and Masters</i> his reading of the fables of Phaedrus
suggests how slaves themselves may have felt about their bondage. 
This search for new forms of evidence continues in <i>Slavery and
Society</i>, where Artemidorus' <i>Dream Book</i> is read as a
possible source for the attitudes of free persons outside the
elite towards slaves, and allusions to slavery in the former
slave and philosopher Epictetus are analyzed as a possible
evidence for the feelings of an individual slave. 

Bradley's most controversial evidence may be that from other
slave societies, especially those of the New World.  We possess
no ancient equivalent of <i>The Life of Frederick Douglass</i> to
reveal the emotions of a Roman slave, to tell us how he or she
felt about the material and spiritual aspects of bondage. 
However, Bradley's use of comparative evidence is justified by
his approach, which has been influenced by Orlando Patterson's
<i>Slavery and Social Death</i> (Cambridge, Mass, 1982), a book
emphasizing the sociological aspects of slavery, in particular,
the consequences of the power relationship between master and
slave, especially the prestige and honor accorded the former and
the social marginalization and degradation of the latter.[[5]] 
It must be conceded that slavery in the New World functioned
under very different economic and historical conditions from
those of Roman slavery; Roman slavery was not directed to the
production of a cash crop, such as cotton or sugar, in the
context of colonialism and a mercantile economy.  However, in
respect to the social consequences of slavery there are
significant parallels between the two slave societies.  These
social parallels make the comparative material a relevant
supplement to the ancient evidence, particularly as it relates to
our attempt to understand the feelings of the slave, a topic on
which the ancient evidence is particularly reticent.

Bradley assembles this impressive range of evidence in a
manner similar to what Keith Hopkins has called the "wig-wam"
method of proof.[[6]]  While the data provided by a single text
or source are too flimsy to support the weight of a general
conclusion, they may point in a general direction.  When a
sufficient number of sources point in the same direction, they
lean on one another like the sticks of a wig-wam and the edifice
stands.  This method is frequently employed in the
social-historical reconstruction of the ancient world, though not
always persuasively.[[7]]  Bradley, however, has used the method
to good advantage.  Consider, for example, his reconstruction of
the process of enslavement and the effects of this process on its
victims. Bradley depicts a process that was, with few exceptions,
devastating for its victims.  This general conclusion rests on a
number of particular observations culled from a variety of texts. 
Bradley notes that the consequences of enslavement were so feared
that many, such as the Cantabri in 22 B. C. (Cassius Dio
54.5.2-3) preferred to commit mass suicide even before they
became slaves.  For many enslavement was followed by separation
from kith and kin, whose trauma is illustrated in the relief from
the Column of Marcus Aurelius showing a German captive being
separated from her son by Roman soldiers.  The harsh conditions
under which slaves were transported is suggested by the stele of
A. Kapreilius Timotheus, which shows a slaves chained together in
a coffle, conditions which offered no privacy for eating,
sleeping and personal hygeine.  The physical hardship of
transportation is further evinced by the <i>Digest</i>
(14.2.2.5), that contained provisions for slaves who, when
travelling by sea, became sick or killed themselves by jumping
overboard.  But the hardships of transport were not only
physical.  Slaves suffered the loss of their homeland and culture
and had to adapt to a new one.  Aulus Gellius (4.1.4-6) indicates
that slaves were expected to acquire the rudiments of Latin. 
Bradley illustrates the possible extent of dislocation with
reference to a papyrus documenting the transport of Balsamea, who
was born in Mesopotamia, sold as a slave in Phoenicia, and at
seventeen found herself in Oxyrhynchus (<i>P. Oxy</i>. 3053).  

Bradley uses the more controversial forms of evidence,
especially the comparative material, in the context of a
framework established by more traditional forms of evidence and
then only for the purpose of probing a question about which the
ancient evidence is silent.  To suggest the psychic despair
brought about by the cultural dislocation of enslavement he notes
the example of Callirhoe, the heroine of Chariton's <i>Chaereas
and Callirhoe</i>, who was able to bear her fate so long as she
could hear Greek spoken and see the sea.  But when her journey
took her across the Euphrates to Persia, "then longing for her
country and family welled up in her, and she despaired of ever
returning (5.1)."  In the context of the experience of this
ancient fictional character, Bradley introduces evidence absent
from the ancient sources--the testimony of a real slave, Olaudah
Equiano, who was a slave in the British West Indies in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Equiano's
autobiography served as a model for many slave autobiographies
that followed, including that of Frederick Douglass.  A West
African, Equiano and his sister were kidnapped as children by
neighboring villagers and sold successively further and further
from home.  Eventually, the two were separated and Equiano sold
to Europeans, who transported him to the West Indies.  His
account of his kidnapping, transportation, and sale agrees at
many points with the experiences of Roman slaves drawn by Bradley
from ancient sources.  Absent from the ancient evidence but
present in Equiano's narrative is the emotional response of the
victim of these experiences:  the pain attendant on his
separation from his sister; the increasing despair as he was sold
further and further from home; the cultural shock of seeing for
the first time the ocean, sailing ships, and white men.  The
objective parallels between Equiano's experience of enslavement
and that of Roman slaves make a persuasive case for the relevance
of such comparative material.  To argue that Equiano's responses
offer no insight into the feelings of ancient slaves who
experienced similar hardships is to deny the existence of any
human quality that transcends the particulars of time and
culture--and to carry cultural relativism to a perverse degree.

The evidence of New World slavery is not limited to
supplementing the ancient record.  Bradley shows how this
evidence can deepen our appreciation of the ancient material
itself.  Most of the ancient evidence for Roman slavery was
produced by those who owned slaves and reflects interests and
biases of this elite.  The slave narratives of the nineteenth
century treat similar situations, but from the point of view of
the slave, and suggest a new model of how we may read the ancient
evidence.  Consider the stereotype of the servile character. 
From the time of Plautus to that of Salvian, a fifth century
Christian writer, the slaveowner denigrated the slave as truant,
lazy, dilatory, and dishonest.  Bradley shows how the documents
illustrating New World slavery may help us see these perceived
defects of servile character from the slave's point of view:  as
expressions of resistance to slavery rather than deficiencies of
servile character.  The frequency with which Roman masters
complain about the character and performance of their slaves may
then suggest that such resistence was common--not that the
stereotype was true.

A number of Bradley's arguments merit special note.  He offers
a persuasive alternative to the schematic orthodox view that
Rome's chief method of procuring slaves was through warfare
during the Republic and slave breeding under the Principate.[[8]] 
In addition to warfare and breeding, the exposure of infants,
trade, and kidnapping or piracy were all significant sources of
slaves for the Romans.  Of course, different degrees of reliance
were placed on different sources depending on immediate
conditions.  But warfare continued to be a significant source in
the Principate; and there is evidence that breeding was
well-established under the Republic.  Bradley also has some
interesting things to say about the nature of slave labor. 
Noting evidence that slaves were employed in a broad range of
specialized occupations under the empire, from field hands to
imperial bureaucrats, Bradley suggests that this trend may have
gotten under way as early as the second century BC:  Cato assumes
slave labor is normative for the rural context and Plautus
satirizes a variety of domestic slaves.  Bradley associates this
specialization with an effort to improve the efficiency of slave
labor; specialization improved accountability and may have
encouraged slaves to take pride in work for which they had little
motivation otherwise.  Furthermore, he contends that the
distinction among various forms of slave labor led to fine
distinctions in status among the slaves themselves.  Thus, the
population of slaves internally was subject to the same
hierarchical impulse as the rest of Roman society.  Such
variation and sense of hierarchy, Bradley suggests, may explain
why slaves as a class never developed a sense of common identity
or class consciousness.  I should also mention Bradley's masterly
synthesis of ancient texts and archaeological evidence to
illustrate the material conditions under which slaves lived, the
nature of their food, clothing, and shelter (Chapter 5, "Quality
of Life").  Evidence suggests that Roman slaves were likely
provided with what was adequate, and sometimes not even that. 
Bradley argues that the slaves' substandard diet, their rough
clothing and shelter may have served as a constant reminder of
their inferior status; he draws on the testimony of
African-American slaves to suggest the daily effect that such
conditions may have had on Roman slaves.  This section indeed
comes very close to giving us a sense of what it may have felt
like to have been a Roman slave.

Finally, Bradley takes up the question of whether there was
any amelioration in the treatment of slaves over time.  In
Chapter 7 he discusses the possible influence of Stoicism and
Christianity on the institution of slavery.  Both Stoics and
Christians recognized the humanity that the slave shared with his
master; however, Bradley argues that there is no evidence that
this philosophic or spiritual insight led to a questioning of the
institution itself.  Moreover, Bradley is in agreement with Ste
Croix that if Christianity made a difference, it was in providing
a new justification for slavery, preaching that slaves were to
obey their masters as they would their God, but not in
ameliorating the conditions of bondage.[[9]]  In Chapter 8
Bradley argues that neither in the practice of manumission nor in
the judicial treatment of slaves is there evidence that slaves
were being treated with increasing mildness.  In fact, the
judicial treatment of slaves may have gotten worse; an
inscription recovered from Puteoli (<i>AE</i> 1971.88) indicates
the existence of a public torture service run by local
undertakers.  Bradley acknowledges there was a current of
legislation that represented significant gains of principle for
slaves:  the banning of castration and <i>ergastula</i>, the
recognition of the rights of asylum, the prosecution of masters
for homicide.  Still, he argues that the power of masters to
abuse their slaves went unchecked in practice.

As far as his analysis of Christianity and slavery is
concerned, Bradley appears to be arguing against a thesis,
originated by F. Wallon in <i>Histoire de l'esclavage dans
l'antiquite </i>(Paris, 1847) and endorsed more recently by
Joseph Vogt in <i>Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man</i>
(Oxford, 1974), that Christianity contributed to the mitigation
of slavery through the moral improvement of the masters.  Bradley
is probably right that Christianity had little effect on slavery
as an institution; however, in his implicit attack on the views
of Wallon and Vogt he may underestimate the Christianity's
contribution to improving the conditions under which slaves
lived, albeit on an individual level.  For example, Bradley
dismisses a ruling of Constantine's permitting Christian
slaveowners to free their slaves because of their religious
convictions (<i>religiosa mente</i>) as a mere convenience for
those who wished to free slaves in the context of their religious
beliefs, "an adaptation bred of expedience, not a mark of
progress, giving slaveowners another of the choices they had
always given themselves in the past (p. 158)."  The numbers of
these Christian slaveowners cannot be known.  However, they were
enough to occasion an imperial directive; Bradley may be too
ready to discount the significance of their numbers and their
religious motivation.

This book is charged with a sense of the author's commitment
not to mitigate the nature of Roman slavery.  While the intensity
of this commitment may have led Bradley to allow Christianity
less than its due, he is elsewhere a scrupulous weigher of the
evidence.  Indeed, Bradley shows that careful scholarship does
not preclude conviction, feeling, and the ability to judge.  The
author reminds us that behind the dry data is a story of great
human suffering and it is in this regard he is his most evocative
and eloquent:  "What did it feel like to grow up as a slave,
perhaps to live well in a rich household, but gradually to come
to realise that you were the symbol of everything that the
powerful in society thought despicable, rotten and corrupt?  What
was it like to feel a sense of inferiority hammered into you
every day by the food you were given to eat, the clothes you had
to wear, the space you were supposed to sleep in?  And what was
it like to anticipate the lick of the lash, the clasp of the
slave collar, the touch of the branding iron?  To feel so
desperate that you would run away and abandon all family ties and
all the security of the household in an attempt to create a
better life somewhere else, knowing that you would be hounded,
perhaps recaptured and returned to a life more miserable than the
one you had left?" (pp. 179-80)  This eloquence is all the more
moving because it comes at the end of an account that is
carefully argued and meticulously documented.

NOTES

[[1]]  Rewards and punishments:  <i>Slaves and Masters in the
Roman Empire</i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); major
revolts:  <i>Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World</i>
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

[[2]] <i>Death and Renewal</i> (Cambridge, 1983) 203.

[[3]] See Bradley's useful discussion of the <i>Vitarum
Auctio</i> as evidence for slave auctions in <i>CJ</i> 87 (1992)
125-138.

[[4]] Fergus Millar, "The World of the Golden Ass," <i>JRS</i> 71
(1981) 63-75.  Keith Hopkins, "Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,"
<i>P&P</i> 138 (1993) 3-27.

[[5]] In contrast, the works of M. I. Finley, <i>Ancient Slavery
and Modern Ideology</i> (New York, 1980), Keith Hopkins,
<i>Conquerors and Slaves</i> (Cambridge, 1978), and G. E. M. de
Ste Croix, <i>The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World</i>
(London and Ithaca, 1981), have emphasized the economic role of
slavery, especially the proportion of labor and product produced
by the labor of slaves or forced labor.

[[6]] Keith Hopkins (1978)19-20.

[[7]] See, for example, the critique by P. Garnsey and R. Saller,
<i>The Roman Empire</i> (Berkeley, 1987) 46-7 of some economic
arguments of A. H. M. Jones in <i>The Later Roman Empire</i>.

[[8]] Cf. Ste Croix (1981) 228; 234-6 and Hopkins (1978) 102.

[[9]]  Ste Croix (1981) 420.