Words&Dirt

“You should always tell the truth, unless you find yourself in a situation where it would be utter moral folly to do so.”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 505

“Human beings were not the least significant portion of the wealth to have been plundered by the Republic during its wars of conquest. The single market established by Roman supremacy had enabled captives to be moved around the Mediterranean as easily as any other form of merchandize, and the result had been a vast boom in the slave trade, a transplanting of populations without precedent in history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, had been uprooted from their homelands and brought to the center of the empire, there to toil for their new masters. Even the poorest citizen might own a slave. In rich households the labor glut obliged slave owners to think up ever more exotic jobs for their purchases to specialize in, whether dusting portrait busts, writing invitations, or attending to purple clothes. By their very nature, of course, such tasks were recherché. The work of most slaves was infinitely more crushing. This was particularly the case in the countryside, where conditions were at their worst. Gangs were bought wholesale, branded, and shackled, then set to labor from dawn until dusk. At night they would be locked up in huge, crowded barracks. Not a shred of privacy or dignity was permitted them. They were fed the barest minimum required to keep them alive. Exhaustion was remedied by the whip, while insubordination would be handled by private contractors who specialized in the torture––and sometimes execution––of uppity slaves. The crippled or prematurely aged could expect to be cast aside, like diseased cattle or shattered wine jars. It hardly mattered to their master whether they survived or starved. After all, as Roman agriculturalists liked to remind their readers, there was no point in wasting money on useless tools.

The exploitation was what underpinned everything that was noblest about the Republic––its culture of citizenship, its passion for freedom, its dread of disgrace and shame. It was not merely that the leisure that enabled a citizen to devote himself to the Republic was dependent on the forced labor of others. Slaves also satisfied a subtler, more baneful need.  ‘Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.’ So every Roman took for granted. All status was relative. What value would freedom have in a world where everyone was free? Even the poorest citizen could know himself to be immeasurably the superior of even the best-treated slave. Death was preferable to a life without liberty: so the entire history of the Republic had gloriously served to prove. If a man permitted himself to be enslaved, then he thoroughly deserved his fate. Such was the harsh logic that prevented anyone from even questioning the cruelties the slaves suffered, let alone the legitimacy of slavery itself.

It was a logic that slaves accepted too. No one ever objected to the hierarchy of free and un-free, merely his own own position within it. What the rebels wanted was not to destroy slavery as an institution, but to win the privileges of their former masters. So it was that they would sometimes force their Roman prisoners to fight as gladiators: ‘Those who had once been the spectacle become the spectators.’ Only Spartacus himself appears to have fought for a genuine ideal. Uniquely among the leaders of slave revolts in the ancient world, he attempted to impose a form of egalitarianism on his followers, banning them from holding gold and silver and sharing out their loot on an equal basis. If this was an attempt at Utopia, however, it failed. The opportunities for violent freebooting were simply too tempting for most of the rebels to resist. Here, the Romans believed, was another explanation for the slaves’ failure to escape while they had the chance. What were the bogs and forests of their homelands compared to the temptations of Italy? The rebels’ dreams of freedom came a poor second to their greed for plunder. To the Romans, this was conclusive evidence of their ‘servile nature.’ In fact, the slaves were only aiming to live as their masters did, off the produce and labor of others. Even on the rampage they continued to hold a mirror up to Roman ideals.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 2307-39