The Roman Guide to Slave Management (20 page)

People show off their party clothes and wear brightly coloured tunics instead of the toga. And they put on the felt cap that is usually worn by freedmen, to symbolise the licence of the occasion and the abolition of hierarchy. Even the emperor does. Everyone exchanges presents, as would usually be done only between equals. Gambling is
permitted. Even a timid home-bred slave is not afraid to look straight at the Aedile and shake the dice-box in his face. Slaves cannot be punished and they can even sound off at their masters. Indeed, it is your job as master to wait on them at table at the Saturnalia feast. Extra wine is allotted to the household. Men dress up as women. The slaves will elect a mock king for the evening, and he will put on a crown and cloak, and give everyone ridiculous orders: ‘ride about on the cook as if on horseback’, or ‘everyone drink three fingers of wine’.

How you take part yourself is up to you. One of my friends is an utter killjoy and, while the festivities are in full swing, he takes himself off to a quiet room to escape the noise emanating from the household party. He says that he finds it delightful to sit there during the Saturnalia, when all the rest of the house rings with the merry riot that is going on in the dining room, and with the shouts of the festival-makers. He says that this is best, because then he does not interfere with their fun and they do not feel restrained in any way. Above all, he says that it means they do not distract him from his studies.

What a bore! I feel it is far better to throw yourself into the spirit of things. You will be amazed at how much goodwill it generates among the slaves if you do. What I do is drink and get drunk, shout, play games and throw dice, sing stark naked, clap and shake my belly, and sometimes even get pushed head first into cold water with my face smeared in soot. The household loves it.

It is complete madness. It is a world where all the cornerstones of the normal structure of society are inverted: male and female, master and slave, are all the opposite of
what you expect them to be. It lets the slaves create an image of life as they no doubt want it to be. It is also a world where the beauty of classical form is replaced with the grotesque. Everything is brought down to a base level and the dinner reverberates with loud farting and swearing. They even make rude gestures at each other and show no deference to anyone. They throw things about and you should make sure that only your cheapest crockery is used. In some places they even torture animals for entertainment.

Sex is everywhere, you will not be surprised to hear. No doubt it is all meant to symbolise fertility and abundance but nowadays it is simply an opportunity for the young to indulge in excessive and lewd behaviour. Out in the streets you will find tumultuous processions and the marketplace filled with men leering at the women and making unseemly suggestions to them. And when night falls, no one sleeps. The common people carry on singing, and engaging in wild dancing, and mocking jokes. They do this even in the commercial district, barging in, pounding on doors, shouting and swearing, ridiculing everyone they find. They make it impossible to sleep. And some people are angry with them and the things they say. But others think you should just laugh with them and certainly no one is so uptight that he thinks the festival should be banned. Even the most self-controlled individuals burst out laughing at some of the antics.

Everybody in the crowd joins in with gusto, delighting at being able to poke fun at people who they must normally treat with respect. You sometimes even find
people dressing up in the processions through the street as some of the gods or as satyrs. They walk along making extraordinary, ridiculous gestures that seem to mimic and mock the mannerisms of certain well-known people. I saw one carnival procession where the people impersonated monsters, or they dressed in animal skins. Unnatural deformities, such as a calf with two udders, and dwarves, were put on show alongside them. There is something quite distasteful and even shocking about some of these processions and there are some masters who ban members of their household from attending them, although I think that is a step too far.

It is certainly true that the festival spirit does very occasionally spill over into the real world in protests and rioting. But perhaps it is simply inevitable that such high jinx will sometimes get out of hand. For if we think about the Saturnalia, it is an alternative world that is controlled by the authorities. The reign of the Saturnalian king is brief and its egalitarian spirit dies with him when he is killed in a mock ritual at the end of the festival. There are those who are of the opinion that the festivals threaten the authorities and social stability. They argue that it gives hope of revenge and future justice. In reality, I think they are simply fun holidays, mere opportunities for the people to let off a bit of steam without really changing anything. In fact, they serve to emphasise how we expect the norms of behaviour to be observed throughout the rest of the year. People do not often take advantage of the licence of the period to voice complaints against those in authority. Indeed, when at one festival, a madman seized Caesar’s crown and put it on,
he caused such outrage that he was lynched. Instead, the Saturnalia reinforces the social hierarchy by underlining what a temporary period of transgression and relief this is. You see this in the way that the Saturnalia reconciles citizens with other citizens who have been quarrelling and often settles family feuds. It is a release of the tensions that build up in normal life. Society works better as a result, if only because we have seen how ridiculous and chaotic the world would be if we did not have normal rules. To believe otherwise would be hopelessly optimistic. It would be like saying that because men sometimes dressed as women during the show that women were as a result raised up to positions of authority in normal life. No. The Saturnalia teaches all of us, slaves above all, how stupid and impossible it would be to change the existing order of things, because the result would be a foolish mess.

What is more important is that the day after the festival is over no sense of this party spirit be permitted to continue. I advise you to put on your sternest countenance the following morning. It is often a good time to make an example of a laggard slave, perhaps one who has taken a little too much advantage of the freedom offered by the previous day to offend you in some way.

Once normality has returned, however, I believe it is beneficial to remain on friendly terms with your slaves wherever possible and within the constraints required to maintain authority and respect. I tend to talk with some familiarity with my country slaves, provided that they have behaved themselves properly. I have observed over many years that their unending toil is lightened by
such friendliness on the part of the master. Occasionally I even share a joke with them and, on still rarer occasions, allow them to joke more freely too. I do not recommend taking this approach with urban slaves, however. Their lot is far easier and they will only seek to carry on the familiarity into the many contacts you have with them in your daily life. This can only breed contempt and result in a loss of authority.

I do make an exception with my old childhood tutor, who, remarkably, is still alive although he must be well into his seventies. Given I was under his control as a boy, even though I was free and he a slave, it seems futile of me to try to treat him with a stern face. He can always remember some amusing habit I had as a child or can tell stories of how I used to risk the cane to bunk off lessons. It reminds me of how the greatest conqueror the world has ever known, Alexander the Great, was once as a boy told off by a slave. Alexander was heaping piles of enormously expensive incense on to an altar, and his tutor Leonides told him that he would only be able to afford to invoke the gods in such a lavish way once he had conquered the peoples who produced frankincense. So when Alexander had indeed won control over Arabia, he sent a whole ship laden with incense to Leonides, telling him to worship the gods unstintingly.

As for slaves’ relaxation once they have returned to the normal routine, I allow them two hours rest in the evening, after their meal. I grant them only a modest amount of wine to prevent disturbances and arguments.

I recommend that you do not allow your slaves to join one of those lower-class clubs. Although they are
ostensibly burial clubs with the peaceable purpose of providing enough money for a good funeral, it is to be remembered that societies of this sort have greatly disturbed the peace of many towns. For whatever name we give them, and for whatever purposes they may seemingly be founded, they will not fail to form themselves into political assemblies, however short their meetings may be, which will be used to foment unrest.

Nor should you, under any circumstances, allow your urban slaves to get into the habit of wandering into the city centre and hanging about aimlessly. Before you know it, they will be part of that lazy and sleepyheaded group of slaves who have grown accustomed to idling, to hanging about the Campus Martius, the Circus Maximus, and the theatres, to gambling, to wasting their time in the bars and taverns, and to debauching themselves in brothels. And even if you forcibly manage to bring them back to their old habits, they will never stop dreaming of such follies.

   COMMENTARY   

As with so many aspects of slavery in antiquity, the lived reality will have varied considerably depending on the purpose for which the slave was being used. Those in urban domestic households will mostly have had less physically demanding jobs than those employed to work the fields. But urban slaves probably also had greater opportunities to
have some rest and recreation, because the city provided a far wider array of potential leisure activities than did a rural estate. Domestic slaves were less well supervised than slaves who worked in gangs in the country and so are likely to have been able to snatch some periods of respite even if it was not permitted to them. Agricultural slaves will have had the greatest need for recuperation but their ability to enjoy it will have depended on the attitude of their master. Some masters, particularly at times of slave surplus after large conquests, seem to have been content to work their slaves to death, presumably because they were cheap and expendable. These periods were not the norm in Roman society and slaves for the most part represented a significant financial investment on the part of their master. This status as a valuable asset probably meant that most owners of rural slaves would have sought to ensure that their servants received sufficient rest to enable them to recover properly from their exertions and prepare them for their next day’s labour.

The festival of the Saturnalia was an annual party that clearly gave many slaves a period of significantly enhanced freedom. Domestic slaves probably benefited most from this since their direct relationship with the master and his family meant they would be given tangible rewards for their work throughout the year. There are numbers of ancient references to the Saturnalia that mention how exuberant the festival was, a bit like a Mardi Gras celebration. Whether the reality was quite as raucous as this is impossible to say. Pliny’s description of how he used to hide away in his office during the festival to avoid the noisy party and make sure he did not
spoil the fun may well have been a common experience in the larger households. Many slaves will have felt too inhibited to speak freely to their masters and everyone will have felt too uncomfortable with role reversals to allow the master to wait at table. But we don’t know if that was generally the case, since Pliny was a far from average master. He was rich and also a scholar who was keen to distance himself from what he saw as common entertainments. Rome was in many ways a fairly unsophisticated pre-industrial society and when it partied it partied hard. As for field slaves, it is easy to imagine that the best they will have experienced was some extra rations and a plentiful supply of wine.