The most popular plays of Plautus and Terence focus on the role of slaves. In Prisoners of War by Plautus, the prisoners face a moral dilemna: because they were captured they are now slaves and it would be cheating to try to escape rather than to wait to be ransomed/bought back by their families. In The Rope by Plautus, the beautiful young girl that the hero is in love with is a slave, who he seeks to buy from her owner. It then turns out that she had been born free but was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery.
In The Brothers and Phormio by Terence, once again the love interest centers around slave girls and the challenge is not that of winning hearts but rather bargaining with the procurers who own them.
While Plautus and Terence both borrowed their plots from Greek sources, they modified them in accordance with Roman slave laws, and legal niceties are often key to the resolution.
So -- from the context of the plays -- what are these laws?
Slaves can have, earn, and save money. If they save enough, they can buy their own freedom. The procedure for an owner freeing a slave is quite simple and informal. You tap the slave with your hand, turn him around, and say "Be free, henceforth." But in addition to paying their master, they also have to pay a substantial tax to the Roman government to legalize the transaction.
Slaves can be trusted advisors, teachers, and companions of their owners, but they cannot plead a case and their testimony is inadmissible in a court of law.
There is no obvious physical difference between slaves and freedmen. It's not a matter of race or even nationality. And record-keeping seems to be extremely sloppy. Hence it is easy to kidnap children and sell them as slaves in other cities.
Prisoners of war become slaves. People in debt can sell themselves into slavery to pay off the debt. Criminals may be enslaved as punishment. And the children of slaves are slaves.
However one becomes a slave, once one is a slave, one is treated as property that can be bought and sold and that is totally at the mercy of the owner. Owners can do whatever they please with their slaves, including hiring them out as prostitutes. And there's no sense that there's anything morally wrong with the owners who act as procurers or the slaves who do their bidding. Prosperous young men who enjoy their services fall in love with them and then seek to buy them from their owners, and these are tales of sweet innocent love. Otherwise, these young men would marry as arranged by their parents -- a financial transaction, with the bride's family paying a dowry. So buying a prostitute slave seems much more romantic than that alternative. And in the comic resolution, it may turn out that the slave girl is actually from a good family, having been kidnapped as a child, and that she's exactly the one that the parents would have wanted him to marry anyway.
Owners administer whatever punishment they please on their slaves; and the slaves have no recourse to the law (where their testimony is inadmissible). An owner can even execute a slave, and need not have a reason for doing so.
But, surprisingly, slaves are shown as, for the most part, loyal to their masters; having a sense that this is their fate and their role, and they have no right to dispute it. They are bound by a code of honor; and except in the case when they have just been made slaves by capture in war and have not yet gotten used to the idea, they don't seem at all inclined to escape, though little seems to be done to prevent them from doing so. Rather they focus their efforts on convincing their owners to freeing them or try to earn the money needed to buy their freedom.
By the time of Petronius, the Republic is dead and many of its institutions have changed. But slavery remains and, in fact, seems even more important to society that it was before.
In the Satyricon, Trimalchio, the nouveau riche party-giver, is a former slave, as are many of his wealthy guests. One such guest came from the provinces and voluntarily sold himself into slavery, not because of debt, but because he knew that the prospects for advancement as a slave in Rome were far better than as an ordinary taxpayer in the provinces.
The world is in constant flux. And slavery is a transitional state. Ambitious slaves just need to be prudent -- to not anger their owners and bring on punishment, and to save the allowance they are paid and earn additional money, to quickly accumulate enough to buy their freedom and pay the manumission tax. Once freed, they can rise socially as their wealth increases.
The conspicuous consumption of these wealthy former slaves is part of their world view -- fortune is arbitrary, unstable, and just as unpredictable as the acts of a despot like Tiberias, Caligula, or Nero. With no belief in gods or moral rules, it makes sense to play the game was well as you can play it, and if you happen to be on top today, then eat, drink, and be merry. As for what happens after death, you just hope that it will be a continuation of this same kind of life, with the same kind of pleasures.
It's easy come and easy go both in terms of money and of life. Those who happen to do well today enjoy watching gladiatorial battles and staged wars fought to the death. Perhaps the pleasure of watching people suffer and die in the arena comes in part from the relief of knowing that, today at least, it's not they themselves who are suffering and dying -- for only chance separates them from the victims.
Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer
Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer
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