Toner - How to Manage Your Slaves by Marcus Sidonius Falx

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR SLAVES

Marcus Sidonius Falx is a Roman of noble birth, whose family have kept slaves for generations. After serving with distinction in the legions, he retired to manage his substantial country estates. Marcus now divides his time between his estates in Campania and the province of Africa and his luxury villa on the Esquiline hill overlooking Rome. He holds many strong and rather unpalatable views which he refuses to acknowledge may be wrong. In order to make his book more accessible and palatable for a non-Roman audience, he has employed the services of Dr Jerry Toner, Fellow and Director of Classics at Hughes Hall, Cambridge University, to set his work in context and provide guidance for readers who want to know more about its fascinating if disagreeable subject.

HOW TO MANAGE YOUR SLAVES

MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX

Commentary by Jerry Toner

Foreword by Mary Beard

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3A Exmouth House

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London ECIR OJH

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Text and commentary Jerry Toner, 2014

Foreword Mary Beard, 2014

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 054 2

FOREWORD

I HAVE NEVER COME ACROSS Marcus Sidonius Falx before, but I know his type. The Roman world had plenty of people just like him who owned huge numbers of slaves and who, for most of the time, did not give slavery a second thought. It was completely normal, a natural part of the social order. But the Romans did think about slaves in their own way: how they could control them, and how best to show them off to their friends. And the smarter ones (and that might include Falx here) could actually be a bit scared. They worried about what the slaves were up to behind their backs, and where the battle lines of ancient Roman culture were drawn. All slaves are enemies ran one famous Roman slogan, well known to Falx. And on a notorious occasion in the reign of the emperor Nero, a Roman plutocrat was murdered by one of his 400 household slaves. It didnt, as you will see, make Falx rest entirely easy in his bed, but the whole household was put to death as punishment.

I am a bit surprised that Falx and Toner got on so well. Falx is an aristocrat whereas Toners family so he assures me has its roots in those classes oppressed by the British elite (from an Irish potato field Im told). But it is to the credit of both of them, I guess, that they seem to have hit it off, despite their political differences. Of course, there were slave owners of a very different sort from Falx, There were thousands of small traders and craftsmen who owned just one or two slaves. And very many of them were freed and actually married those who had once been there owners, both male and female. Even in Falxs league, there were a few favored slave secretaries and PAs who lived better than poor free Romans trying to make a living on day labour at the docks, or selling cheap flowers in the Forum. Interestingly some of the free poor got onto the streets to demonstrate, unsuccessfully, against the (strictly legal) punishment of those 400 slaves. But Falx is talking about the use of mass slave labour.

It is hard for us now to understand all the dimensions of the relations between free, and slave, and ex-slave (and it was hard then). But we do have a few glimpses of what the rich Romans thought of their ordinary slave-workers; and Falx is one of the most reliable guides we have to what Romans would have seen as a proud tradition of slave management. He is trying to help everyone share the benefits of his wisdom, and he is a good place to learn.

Thankfully the world has moved on. But his text offers an authentic insight as authentic as you can get into a fundamental aspect of life in Rome and its empire. If it had been published 2,000 years ago it would have topped the management charts. Modern readers may have trouble mastering their prejudices; but underneath the buoyant rhetoric, theyll maybe find Falx not a wholly bad man, by the standards of his day at least.

And Falx points the finger at us too. Do some of his insights still help us manage our own staff. For are we sure that wage-slaves are really so much different from slaves? How different are we from the Romans?

Mary Beard
Cambridge, April 2014

AUTHORS NOTE

MY NAME IS MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX, of noble birth, whose great-great-grandfather held a consulship, and whose mother hails from an ancient senatorial lineage. Our family was given the name Falx the Claw for our stubborn refusal to let anything go. I served with distinction in the Legio VI Ironclad for five years, campaigning mostly against troublesome oriental tribes, before returning to Rome to run my affairs and my substantial estates in Campania and the province of Africa. My family has owned countless slaves for countless generations. There is nothing we do not know about the management of them.

In order to write for a non-Roman audience I have been compelled to use the services of a certain Jerry Toner, a teacher in one of our miserable northern provinces, who knows something of our Roman ways but shares few of our virtues. Indeed a man so soft I have never encountered outside the servile class: he has not once fought in battle, can scarce drink a small amphora of watered wine, and even stoops so low that he himself will clean his babys backside rather than leave such foul tasks to the slaves and womenfolk. He is, however, most blessed to be married to a wife of great beauty and intellect (though she is perhaps more forward with her opinions than a woman ought to be), to whom I am most grateful for ensuring that the meaning of my text is clear for you barbarian readers.

Marcus Sidonius Falx
Rome, pridie Idus Martias

COMMENTATORS NOTE

MARCUS SIDONIUS FALXS existence may be the subject of academic debate, but the reality of his opinions is beyond doubt. They provide a Romans-eye view of slavery. Slavery was a core institution of the Roman world for the whole of its existence. It was so central that it never occurred to anyone that it might not exist. Owning slaves was as normal as voting Conservative in Wiltshire or Labour in Hampstead. Sadly, we dont know what the slaves themselves thought, because their views didnt matter. But we know plenty about what their Roman masters thought of them. The substance of Marcuss words survives in Roman texts on slavery, although he has not followed them slavishly. These sources are often obscure or quite hard to interpret. This single text is his clear and simple manual for managing slaves the Roman way. Needless to say the fact that I have helped bring it to publication does not mean that I approve of it.