The Roman Guide to Slave Management (7 page)

The first step you must take to ensure that your slaves behave well and work hard has already been done: you have bought good slaves. The next step is training them. It is clear to everyone that the way in which you bring up your children is reflected in their individual character. In the same way, it is essential that you educate and train your slaves properly for the roles that you wish to assign to them. This is why it is often best and easiest to buy slaves who are new to servitude. I mentioned that one friend of mine always buys prisoners of war who are still young enough to be trained, in the way that foals are so much more biddable than mangy old nags.

Training can begin immediately. Some foolishly believe that it is possible to reason with a slave. They think that slaves can be made more likely to obey you simply by explaining to them the advantages of doing so. But in fact slaves need to be trained as you would a wild beast if obedience is to be instilled. Again, this is not a simple matter of the whip. You will get the best
results by giving them as much food as they want. Praise them generously, especially those who are clearly ambitious and so are likely to be more motivated by praise. Make sure that you compel them to forget their old gods and start to worship at the household shrine. Once they realise that it is our pantheon of gods that has made us great, they will be far more likely to accept the justness of their low position.

Once trained, give slaves enough food for them to do their jobs, but not so much as to make them lazy. Those slaves who are performing manual labour should receive more generous rations than those who are performing light domestic duties. Slaves need fuel to work efficiently and cannot be expected to give good service on an empty belly. I always make a point of checking the slaves’ rations personally whenever I visit my estates. This ensures that the cooks are not cheating by keeping some of the supplies aside for their own profit. It also shows the slaves that you are taking an interest in their welfare, which will boost their morale and make them work harder. For there are three things that slaves think about: food, work and punishment. If you give them food to eat but no work to do, it will make them lazy and insolent. If you give them work and punishment without food it quickly weakens them in the same way as violent attacks do. By far the best course is to give them work to do together with sufficient food. You cannot manage people without rewarding them, and food is a slave’s reward. Slaves are just like normal people in that they perform badly if good behaviour brings no benefits and there are no punishments for failure.

Keep a close eye, therefore, on your slaves’ behaviour and allocate your food accordingly. Privileges should be granted in accordance with how well they have been deserved. Food makes a good bonus for pleasing performance. I like to reward domestic slaves with the leftovers from my dinners when they have served well. In the country, I give slaves free time to have the opportunity to keep their own chickens and pigs and tend their own kitchen gardens, or go foraging in the woods for berries and the like. Or I will give them extra rations of the hard cheese made in Luna in Etruria. I will also give them a little extra wine vinegar, but be very careful here. Drinking wine makes even free men behave insolently, so it should be obvious that extra wine should be given to slaves only rarely and under supervision.

In all our dealings with the victuals of slaves we must act like a doctor when he issues his prescriptions. Great care must be made to ensure that each slave gets both what is just and what is suitable for his lowly position. Slave food should be functional not luxurious. I recommend a basic diet of rough bread, salt, grapes, olive oil, olive mash and dried fruit. This can be supplemented with small performance bonuses as described above. You will find the following guides useful:

30 kg of wheat per month in winter for slaves in chain gangs.

35 kg of wheat per month in summer to allow for the harder work of sowing, weeding and harvesting crops.
Increase rations when slaves begin to work the vines, and reduce them when the figs ripen. Do not cut them back as much as that cheapskate Cato advises in his manual unless you wish to wear your slaves out with hunger.

20 kg of wheat per month for the overseer, the housekeeper, the foremen, and shepherds, to allow for their lighter load.

Put in a wooden barrel ten parts of crushed grapes and two parts of very pungent vinegar. Add two parts of boiled wine and fifty of sweet water. With a paddle mix all these three times a day for five days. Add one forty-eighth of seawater drawn some time earlier. Place a lid on the barrel and let it ferment for ten days.

Obviously this is not the finest Falernian! But it should last for about three months and if there is any left after then it will make excellent, very sharp vinegar.

Store all the windfall olives you can. Add the small olives from mature olive trees, which will yield very little oil. Issue these olives sparingly to the slaves to make them last as long as possible. When they are used up, give the slaves fish-pickle and vinegar. Give slaves a pint of oil a month. Also give them half a pound of salt each per month.

During the day, slaves should eat their lunch sitting separately to avoid time-wasting and idle chatting. But in the evenings they should be allowed to eat together. For we would be too hard if we did not permit them some socialising.

Clothes should also be given out according to how well they are deserved. Those slaves who have worked hard should be rewarded with better quality shoes and tunics, whereas those who have shirked their responsibilities must realise that they face the consequences of their idleness in all aspects of their life. As a standard rule, I give each farm slave a one-metre-long tunic and a coarse blanket every other year. When you issue the tunic or the blanket, make sure that you make them hand in their old ones so that your female slaves can make patchwork from them. A stout pair of wooden shoes should be issued every other year. In all matters of clothing you should think about usefulness rather then appearance. To keep the slave protected against wind, cold and rain, give them long-sleeved leather tunics, extra patchwork clothes, or hooded cloaks. If you do this then there is no weather so bad that some work cannot be done outside.

Your slaves need adequate shelter to sleep in. House your domestic slaves in small bedrooms or storage rooms, and provide an old mattress for them to lie on and an old cloak to use as a blanket. In the country, you will almost certainly find room among the rafters of some building to use as sleeping quarters for the slaves. If it is large enough, and the risk of fire is low, then you may well find the rafters in the kitchen can provide a cosy area all year round. The worst thing for a farm is to be worked
by slaves housed in a kind of underground prison block, for anything that is done by men who have no hope is done badly.

It is a sad fact that today, wherever you travel in the empire, you see the land being worked by slaves instead of the yeomen of old who made Rome great. These days, farms are trod by feet in chains, by hands which have been punished, by faces which have been branded. Mother Earth is not so stupid that she doesn’t notice that proud and free peasants have been swapped for insolent and lazy slaves. It is not surprising that we do not get the same profits from farms worked by slaves as we used to get from the labour of Roman citizens. The fundamental problem is that the slave has no incentive to work hard. He gets fed whatever the farm produces. But there are some precautions you can undertake to try to minimise this shortfall and force or bribe the slave into working more productively.

The first, which I have already mentioned but cannot emphasise enough, is to reward hard work. It is very demoralising for good slaves if they see that they are doing all the hard work, but that the lazy slaves get just as much food as they do. It is also essential that each slave should have a clearly defined long-term goal. If you are so minded, this can be for them to win their freedom. You will find it both fair and beneficial to offer freedom as a long-term bonus for loyalty and hard work. If the slave believes that the goal is attainable then he will work diligently towards it. Allowing your slaves to have children provides them with another incentive to work hard. If they do they will enjoy the fruits and pleasures of an
improved family life. But if they displease you, then the children can be sold off to another owner as a punishment. If you organise occasional sacrifices and holidays as a reward for the hardest workers then you will also make it more likely that the work will get done well.

The second is to have clear job roles. This generates clear accountability and ensures hard work, since slaves knows that if a certain piece of work is not carried out then the blame can clearly be laid at the feet of one of them. If, on the other hand, everyone does the same thing, none of the slaves will think that any job is his own responsibility. If an individual works hard then all will benefit, rather than him specifically, whereas if they all slack off then it is impossible to identify who was most responsible. That is why ploughmen must be kept distinct from vineyard workers and shepherds distinct from ordinary labourers.

As part of this specialisation, each slave must be encouraged to take personal responsibility for the care and upkeep of his tools. He must be urged to store them away from the rain, clean and oil them and not leave them lying around. The cost of replacing such tools is in itself expensive but it also means that many days’ labour are lost from having slaves sitting about without the tools to work. Giving them their own tools and punishing those who fail in this duty will help reduce such losses markedly.

There is a final benefit to this dividing of the roles among your slaves: the estate will become self-sufficient. For every task you will have a slave. So if you need a shearer you will have one, a barber, you will have one, a
blacksmith, you will have one. No longer will you have to hire in the costly services of outside contractors.

Gang labour makes slaves work faster, harder and better. You should form them into groups of about ten. This is a particularly easy number of men to keep watch over. Larger gangs can be difficult for an overseer to control on his own. So, on your estate, you should assign these groups to different sections of it, and the work should be distributed in such a way that the men will not be on their own or in pairs, since they cannot be supervised properly if they are scattered all over the place. The other problem with larger groups is that the individuals within the group will not feel that the work has anything to do with them personally. It all gets lost in the crowd. But a gang of the right size has the effect of making individuals compete with each other, and also identifies the shirkers. Jobs always become more interesting when there is an element of competition. It will also mean that no one will complain when those who don’t pull their weight are punished for it.

Take care to assign each slave to the kind of work most suitable to his or her physical or mental attributes. Herdsmen, for example, should be diligent and very thrifty. These two qualities are more important for this role than stature or physical strength, since it requires concentration and skill. When it comes to ploughmen, intelligence, though necessary, is still not sufficient. You need a slave with a big voice that will make him scary to the cattle. Yet he should also be gentle, because otherwise he will treat your cattle cruelly and they will neither obey his commands nor will they last long before they
get worn out by the hardship and the torment of his lash.

When it comes to shepherds, you should again bear in mind that strength and height are of no use in that job. Make your taller slaves ploughmen because there is no job on the farm that is less tiring to a tall man than ploughing. This is because when ploughing a field the slave stands upright and rests his weight on the plough handle. When it comes to general labourers and field workers, slaves can be any size or shape you want. All they need is to be able to cope with hard work. Slaves who you assign to work in the vineyards should be broad-shouldered and muscular. These physical types are well suited to digging and pruning. It also matters less if they are dishonest because vineyard slaves work together in groups, so are easily supervised. It is also the case that dishonest slaves tend to be the cleverer ones, which is a benefit when it comes to tending vines since they need strong and intelligent care. This is why you so often see vineyards being looked after by slaves in chains. Mind you, an honest man of equal intelligence will always perform better than a thief.

Don’t think that slaves are always best for farming your estates. It is definitely better to work unhealthy land with hired labourers than with slaves since it requires greater dedication and effort. It is also probably better to use free men to carry out the more important agricultural tasks, such as bringing in the grape harvest. Some special problems arise from using slaves as herdsmen and shepherds. This is a particularly difficult and unpopular job, not only because the herdsmen are exposed to the elements but because they also face the risk of being
attacked by bandits and wild beasts. It is a lonely existence too, with long periods away from human contact, from sociability and from the household. It is best to leave such troublesome jobs to poor free men who need the money and so can be relied upon to do a decent job.

If you do use slaves as herdsmen you must realise that it is almost impossible to supervise them. They are likely to cause problems wherever they go, either by stealing things or getting into fights. You must also realise that you need to use different kinds of physical specimens for different kinds of herding. Use older slaves for larger animals, but assign small boys to the small animals. Those who go out with the cattle along the trails in the hills and pastures must be stronger than those who tend beasts back at the farm. That is of course why you see young men out in the pastures when boys and even young slave girls can cope with looking after the animals on the farm itself.