Free The Roman Guide to Slave Management by Jerry Toner Page A

way?’ He then admitted that he had bought her from a pirate slave dealer because he fancied her. I demoted him on the spot from his position as manager, and had the woman bathed and dressed in fresh clothes and sent home.
    Perhaps you think me mad to have done that, even though that woman was obviously freeborn. But it will benefit you to treat your slaves with a certain generosity of spirit. You should always be civil to them if they have worked well. Obviously you should not let them be insolent or give them free rein to speak their minds. But if they have positions of authority you should treat themrespectfully. As I have said, I consult them, ask their opinions and even their advice if it is on a matter about which they know more than me. I find that slaves respond well to being treated in this way and go about their work with added enthusiasm. But I even apply this approach to those who have been punished by being chained up in the prison block. I visit them and check whether they are carefully chained, but also ask them if they feel they have been treated unjustly. For the lowliest slave is more likely to be punished unjustly for the simple reason that he has so many different layers of superior above him. And it is these simple, ignorant slaves who are most dangerous when they are smarting from being badly and cruelly treated. I even go so far as to let them make complaints about their overseers and, very occasionally, I uphold their complaints. This way the troublemakers are kept in check by being given a vent for their frustrations while the managers and overseers are kept honest by being aware of the fact that even the most useless slave can be asked to give feedback on their management.
    For you will not be surprised to learn that slaves are often far more brutal towards each other than their master would ever be. In fact, you find that slaves are always jockeying for position, arguing over gradations of rank and quarrelling over all kinds of petty insults, actual or perceived. Those with the clearest tendency to bully their underlings must be themselves kept under control by fear of you if they are not to impose their own reign of terror on those beneath them. Otherwise you will find that your slaves become brutalised and worthless as a result. It is another reason why it is never a good ideato have too many slaves from the same ethnic origin working in the same household, because they seem to be particularly alert to minor differences and so are always quarrelling and fighting.
    And in the final analysis, it is important to remember that your slaves are a significant investment for you and their value needs to be maintained. You must protect your property from any action that will reduce its value. Remember that it is illegal for someone to incite one of your slaves of previously good character to do something wrong. And it is illegal – and you can gain recompense – if someone praises your bad slaves for doing something wrong, such as running away or stealing; for one shouldn’t make a bad slave even worse by praising him. Thus a man is to be found guilty of corrupting a slave whether he is making a good slave bad, or a bad slave worse. In fact there is a long list of acts for which you can gain financial compensation. No one is allowed to get your slaves to falsify their accounts, or have sex with them, or indulge in magic, or waste too much time at the games, or carry out treason, or cause your slave to live luxuriously by fiddling the books, or be disobedient, or gamble, or persuade him to submit to homosexual acts. For whether it derives from brutal treatment to other more subtle forms of corruption you must always be alert to factors that could erode the value of your assets.

   COMMENTARY   
     
    Many upper-class Roman slave owners were influenced by ideas from Stoic philosophy, which insisted that a slave owner had possession only of the slave’s body and not his soul, which remained free.