coli rura ab ergastulis pessumum est, ut quidquid agitur a desperantibus
(Farming done from the ergastulum is utterly bad, as is everything else done by men without hope)
Pliny, Naturalis Historia 18.36INTRODUCTION
When Keith Hopkins argued that ‘Roman writers on agriculture took it for granted that their readers’ land would normally be worked by gangs of chained slaves',Footnote 1 he both summed up contemporary thinking on agricultural slavery in Roman Italy and set the agenda for future work:Footnote 2 after Conquerors and Slaves, many contributors to the debate have used much ingenuity and industriousness to figure out how, where and when the Romans made best use of a labour force that was restricted in its movement and labour capacity by chains round their ankles.Footnote 3 The modern image of the ‘chained slave’ arose directly from a number of crucial ancient texts that mention vincti, compediti or alligati: in particular, a letter of Pliny the Younger, duly cited by Hopkins in conjunction with a number of passages in Columella, and a couple of statements in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, of which the introductory quotation is a good example. There is, then, little doubt that our ancient authorities mention a type of slave they call the servus vinctus, compeditus or alligatus. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence for the fact that the Romans knew of chaining as a form of punishment for slaves. Despite a dearth of archaeological evidence,Footnote 4 both Republican and Imperial writers document the practice: references to chains and chaining litter the Plautine comedies;Footnote 5 and the Imperial counterpart can be seen best in the legal sources,Footnote 6 but is not less evident for instance in the work of Columella.Footnote 7
Nevertheless, the modern construct of the ‘chained slave’ — the slave set to work in chains in the fields of the Roman élite — conjured up by Hopkins and others has no ancient counterpart. This may seem an odd statement given the admission that our ancient authorities mention the servus vinctus, and that the Romans punished slaves with chaining. Yet, in what follows, I wish to take to task once more the passages that are at the core of the modern image of the ‘chained slave’: I contend that whilst the Romans knew of chaining as a punishment for slaves, their land would not normally be worked by gangs of chained slaves. More to the point, I argue that the figure of the ‘chained slave’, set to work in the grain fields, olive groves and vineyards of ancient Italy, is a modern invention; and that the servus vinctus of our ancient sources has quite a different meaning altogether. Once revealed, this meaning allows us to gain a new perspective on the sense of nostalgia that permeates the passages in our early Imperial writers; and to open a new window onto these writers' views on the period of transition between Republic and Empire above and beyond the remit of agriculture.
I
That ‘… chained slaves (servi vincti) … worked in the fields’ is, then, a matter typically taken for granted by modern scholars.Footnote 8 Yet, this assumption is actually, as we shall see in this first section, not borne out by the evidence typically adduced in its support.
VINCTI AT THE MARKET
Was Pliny unusual? Going by his comments on agricultural slave labour expounded in his letter to his friend Calvisius Rufus,Footnote 9 asking for advice on the possible purchase of the estate adjacent to Pliny's in Tifernum Tiberinum, many have thought thus. The estate, as Pliny informs his friend, had repeatedly been run down by bad cultivation, despite being of high natural fertility. The tenants had lost much of their resources and equipment. Consequently, should Pliny choose to acquire it, he would need to re-equip the tenants appropriately. It is at this stage of the letter that Pliny produces the following passage:Footnote 10 ‘Sunt ergo instruendi, eo pluris quod frugi, mancipiis; nam nec ipse usquam vinctos habeo nec ibi quisquam’. It was translated by Betty Radice for the Loeb Classical Library thus:Footnote 11 ‘They [= the tenants] will have to be set up and given a good type of slave, which will increase the expense; for nowhere do I employ chained slaves myself, and no one uses them there’ (my emphases).
As the Loeb translation implies, the passage is seen to document the employment of slaves in chains in the fields of their Roman masters — even if not by Pliny. Hopkins's short comment on the passage is indicative of the modern take: he argued that Pliny ‘… made a special point of the fact that he and neighbouring land-owners did not use chained gangs. This makes sense only if it was common in some other places …’.Footnote 12 In (t)his view, Pliny was unusual — and the ‘chained slave’ usual.
But Pliny's comment on vincti only serves to qualify the preceding sentence; and in that the stress is on the expense to be incurred by Pliny in the purchase of slaves for his tenants. As is well known, slaves came at different prices at the market, depending largely on their age, sex and skill.Footnote 13 A lack of capacity or a (character) fault were similarly influential on the price. Not surprisingly, therefore, slaves were subject to clear labelling by the vendor. In his discussion of the legal situation, W.W. Buckland wrote that ‘[i]t was a direction that on sales of slaves an inscription should be affixed setting forth any morbus or vitium of the slave, and announcing the fact, if the slave was fugitivus or erro or noxa non solutus …’.Footnote 14 The need to place an inscription on the slave subsequently was replaced through the Edict of the Aedile by a declaration. Book 21 of Justinian's Digest, which deals with the Edict of the Aedile, is packed with discussion of what constitutes a defect in a slave that was subject to declaration, that is a fault that reduced the value of the slave.Footnote 15 Chaining was considered one such fault: Marcellus notes that the value of a slave who had been put into chains temporarily as a punishment by his owner subsequently was reduced; and that this was also the opinion of Ulpian.Footnote 16 Marcellus's discussion also makes it clear that a slave's action that led to the chaining of the slave as a punishment — regardless of whether the slave deserved the punishment or not — was subject to declaration on the auction block.Footnote 17 Concerning the actual sale of the slave, Pomponius, in his commentary on Sabinus, states that it was much preferable to actually sell a slave in chains if the slave had been chained, so as to avoid the necessity of the (verbal) declaration of the slave's past otherwise demanded by the Edict:Footnote 18 ‘Ei, qui seruum uinctum uendiderit, aedilicium edictum remitti aequum est: multo enim amplius est id facere, quam pronuntiare in uinculis fuisse’ (‘It is reasonable that the aedilician edict should not be invoked in the case of someone who sells a slave chained; to act thus is much better than to verbally declare that the slave has been in chains’) (my emphases).
In other words, the fact that the slave had been put in chains previously required announcement on the slave-trader's platform, in one way or another: and to do so through actually chaining the slave on the auction block was a possibility. More importantly, though, for present purposes, this also meant that a slave once punished through chaining had hence become a ‘chained slave’, a servus vinctus — whether the slave was subsequently or indeed currently subject to chaining (as punishment) or not; and that the term ‘(servus) vinctus’ had, in turn, become shorthand for ‘qui servi a dominis poenae nomine vincti sunt’, the longer phrase used by Gaius for those who have at sometime or another been fettered by their master as a punishment.Footnote 19 Thus, the label of the chained slave, the attribute of being a servus vinctus, had become attached to the slave — and remained with the slave like a brand, for its cause was seen as a permanent defect — like a female slave's barrenness — in need of unambiguous declaration.Footnote 20 And although masters obviously reduced the value of their human chattel through such punishment,Footnote 21 there is, as stated at the outset, plenty of evidence to document the fact that Roman slave owners considered chaining a suitable means of coercion for their slaves.Footnote 22 It follows that, in a very structural sense, there were better and lesser slaves available from the auction block or the market, to be labelled clearly accordingly: servi soluti and servi vincti (or alligati or compediti);Footnote 23 and that, consequently, such servi vincti would be found amongst the people reduced to slavery by the Romans.Footnote 24
And they would have been found by Pliny in his imagined market-place: what our man from Como is talking about in his letter to Calvisius Rufus is, then, not the pros and cons of the exploitation of chain-gangs on one's fields (vis-à-vis the use of freely moving slave labourers), but rather about the impact on his purse if he provided his tenants with the better type of slave instead of the type that would leave only a minor, or in any case a lesser, mark on his budget — that known as the servus vinctus and advertised on the slave markets accordingly, available cheap because the slaves' past required the appropriate label, causing a depreciation in the value of the slave: slaves that were (at least once) subjected to chaining, and that, therefore, were not the preferred type, but improbi — clearly counterpositioned by Pliny with those who are frugi, hard-working and honest. Logically, the passage is followed by a declaration of Pliny's finances, which frames the exchange on the type of slave needed for the Tifernum estate.
What Pliny does not tell us is how he expected his tenants to work these (or other) slaves. It is notable, then, that what Pliny does imply, if we wish to take his words at face value, is a general reluctance — at least in northern Umbria — to make use of slaves that were known to have experienced chaining as a punishment. It would also suggest, in turn, that, again if taken at face value, masters in the upper Tiber valley at least were usually surrounded by the better type of slave, a point evidently dear to Pliny's heart, and, what is more, part of the discourse of the upper circles in Como too — for Pliny's Transpadane neighbour Plinius Paternus appears equally well versed in this matter.Footnote 25 Whatever the geographic implications of Pliny's comment are, it is obvious that the passage quoted above provides no evidence for the use of chained labour or the employment of slave chain-gangs in the fields of the Roman élite. Rather, Pliny's concern is with the type of slave to be bought; and with an attempt at self-fashioning that makes him produce the snippet in question: ‘for I do not use vincti myself, and neither does anyone else there’, would make for a better rendering, avoiding translation of the contemptuous word for lack of an (English) equivalent.
VINCTI IN THE VINEYARD
Whether or not Pliny actually avoided servi vincti, he did not make a direct connection between these slaves and any specific area of work on the estate. Such a connection, however, typically is seen in a number of other writers. First, there is Cato's mention of compediti in his De Agricultura: in the context of the general organization of a wine-producing estate, Cato offers the following food ration recommendation:Footnote 26 ‘Familiae cibaria. Qui opus facient per hiemem tritici modios IIII, per aestatem modios IIII S, vilico, vilicae, epistatae, opilioni modios III, conpeditis per hiemem panis P. IIII, ubi vineam fodere coeperint, panis P. V, usque adeo dum ficos esse coeperint, deinde ad P. IIII redito’ (my emphasis). The passage was translated by William Davis Hooper for the Loeb Classical Library thus: ‘Rations for the hands: Four modii of wheat in winter, and in summer four and a half for the field hands. The overseer, the housekeeper, the foreman, and the shepherd should receive three. The chain-gang should have a ration of four pounds of bread through the winter, increasing to five when they begin to work the vines, and dropping back to four when the figs ripen’.
The brief commentary to the translation states that ‘(t)he field hands, and especially the unruly, were chained together, and at night kept in an underground prison, the ergastulum’: both translation and interpretation sum up well the scholarly agreement on the matter under discussion here, that is to understand Cato's reference to compediti as evidence for the employment of gangs of chained slaves in viticulture. And in the lack of any other meaning for the word, this translation and interpretation seem natural. In fact, if this were the only text we had that mentioned compediti (or vincti or alligati), one would probably not be able to question the translation and interpretation traditionally attached to it. But Cato is not alone in mentioning vincti in the context of a wine-producing estate.
Another, not less often cited, passage to document the Romans' use of chain-gangs for the cultivation of their vineyards is in Columella's De Re Rustica. In book 1, Columella regrets the need for the employment of alligati in the vineyards; the passage reads as follows:Footnote 27
Vineae non sic altos quemadmodum latos et lacertosos viros exigunt, nam hic habitus fossuris et putationibus ceterisque earum culturis magis aptus. Minus in hoc officio quam in ceteris agricolatio frugalitatem requirit, quia et in turba et sub monitore vinitor opus facere debet ac plerumque velocior animus est improborum hominum, quem desiderat huius operis conditio. Non solum enim fortem, sed et acuminis strenui ministrum postulat, ideoque vineta plurimum per alligatos excoluntur. Nihil tamen eiusdem agilitatis homo frugi non melius quam nequam faciet. [My emphasis.]
The translation offered by Harrison Boyd Ash for the Loeb Classical Library demonstrates well the typical understanding of the passage:
Vineyards require not so much tall men as those who are broad-shouldered and brawny, for this type is better suited to digging and pruning and other forms of viticulture. In this department husbandry is less exacting in the matter of thrift than in the others, for the reasons that the vinedresser should do his work in company with others and under supervision, and because the unruly are for the most part possessed of quicker understanding, which is what the nature of this work requires. For it demands of the helper that he be not merely strong but also quick-witted; and on this account vineyards are commonly tended by slaves in fetters. Still there is nothing that an honest man of equal quickness will not do better than a rogue. [My emphasis.]
Like Cato, who distinguishes the compediti from other members of the familia, Columella, too, makes a number of important distinctions here; but he does so in much greater detail — which allows us to unpack his understanding of alligati as well as to contextualize Cato's cryptic comments.
First, then, Columella associates a quick and bright mind in a slave with a lack of obedience and virtue. The catch-22, however, is apparent: for vine-dressing requires a certain amount of brains and mental ability (in addition to physical strength), that is, those attributes typically found, according to Columella, in the less virtuous slave, which is precisely why these slaves, when at work in the vineyards, are kept in check through close supervision — both by way of observation through a taskmaster and through peer-group pressure: ‘in turba et sub monitore vinitor opus facere debet’.Footnote 28
It is actually decisive that Columella foregrounds these two aspects — in place of the whip (or chains) — to extract maximum labour from his slaves in the fields: here, as elsewhere, he emphasizes his general preference for the employment of slaves of a better quality, and in book 3 criticizes outright the opinion of people who regard it as acceptable to purchase any old slave, ‘even some culprit from the auction block’, for vine-dressing.Footnote 29 If read in conjunction with the above passage, we can see how in Columella's logic such slaves are likely to be alligati, the equivalent of Pliny's vincti in his letter to Calvisius Rufus, that is slaves whom their masters regarded as devious, or in any case less obedient than others, and who, consequently, had been subject to severe punishment, carrying thereafter the appropriate label with them. And like Pliny, Columella counterpositions these slaves with those who are frugi: a moral verdict par excellence, but not an attempt to describe the slaves' working conditions.Footnote 30 Manifestly, vincti were the lesser type of slave in the masters' mind — homines nequam. Yet, because of their intelligence, they were regarded as useful for tasks that required more than just muscles — vine-dressing for instance. But to assume that Columella here suggests that the slaves he calls alligati worked in chains in the vineyards of their masters remains without any support. Indeed, Columella's comments on the slaves that are chained as a punishment is unambiguous about the slaves' physical detention in the ergastulum.Footnote 31 It makes more sense, therefore, to render the phrase that has led to confusion in the same manner as the passage in Pliny's letter to Calvisius Rufus: ‘that's why vineyards are often tended by alligati’.
Coming back to the De Agricultura, we can begin to understand better what Cato says, which Columella partially untangles for us through his explanation of the association of servi vincti with vineyards. Following his lead, there is no need to understand Cato's compediti in a literal sense, that is as gangs of slaves set to work in the vineyard in fetters. Leaving aside, here, the possibility of comprehending Cato's mention of work in the vineyard merely as a temporal indication, these slaves are understood better as the equivalent of Columella's alligati — and Pliny's vincti — no matter what their more specific labour duties. But despite Cato's so very brief mention of these slaves, he perhaps opens here a unique window onto these slaves' differentiated treatment that merits further exploration, as regards not just dietary matters, but also work and family arrangements.Footnote 32 In the meantime, in any case, we would do better if we stuck to the Latin — compediti — when translating the relevant bits in Cato's De Agricultura.
VINCTI AND ESTATE MANAGEMENT
The Columellan passage just discussed is of course reminiscent of a remark of Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia about the right kind of overseer for one's estate. As with Pliny the Younger's letter to Calvisius Rufus, Columella's discussion of slave labourer types, and Cato's food ration scheme, this passage regularly has been used also to demonstrate the employment of chain-gangs in the fields of aristocratic Romans:Footnote 33 ‘Dehinc peritia vilicorum in cura habenda est, multaque de his Cato praecepit. nobis satis sit dixisse quam proximum domino corde esse debere et tamen sibimet ipsi non videri. coli rura ab ergastulis pessumum est, ut quidquid agitur a desperantibus’. And the translation of Harris Rackham for the Loeb Classical Library runs as follows:Footnote 34 ‘The next point requiring attention is the efficiency of bailiffs, and Cato has given many instructions with regard to these. Let it be enough for us to say that the bailiff ought to be as near as possible to his master in intelligence, and nevertheless not think so himself. Farming done by slave-gangs hired from houses of correction is utterly bad, as is everything else done by desperate men’ (my emphases).
As the Loeb translation implies, Pliny's desperantes, Rackham's ‘desperate men’, or Peter Brunt's ‘men without hope’,Footnote 35 a term I have adopted, typically are understood to be slave labourers put to work in the fields in chains and otherwise locked away in the ergastulum. Moreover, Pliny's dictum has been dissected repeatedly by scholars into two distinct parts: one concerning advice on the vilicus, the other regarding advice on the agricultural slave labourers, the slave-gangs as Rackham put it, on the estate. Furthermore, the passage has been used to argue that Pliny the Elder, just like Pliny the Younger, disagrees with Columella on the need to use chained slave labourers at least for some tasks.Footnote 36 The problem with this interpretation is, as we shall see, that the above passage does not refer to ordinary slave labourers; it illustrates rather Pliny's remarks on the vilicus. These, in turn, are influenced, as Pliny happily admits, by Cato's thoughts on the matter,Footnote 37 but echo even more Columella's comments — despite Pliny's lack of due acknowledgement here;Footnote 38 and they can be understood fully only if read in conjunction with these.
Like Cato and Columella, then, Pliny is eager to offer some remarks on the best type of vilicus, albeit in a much more condensed form than his predecessors. In this endeavour, he compresses some of the points made by Columella about the character and nature of the vilicus.Footnote 39 The latter frames his comments on the choice of vilicus quite explicitly by discussion of the right type of slave for the job. In the first instance, Columella recommends not to appoint a vilicus who is physically attractive, or who is used to the luxuries of town life: such slaves are lazy and up to mischief at all times.Footnote 40 Instead, Columella counsels as follows:Footnote 41 ‘Eligendus est rusticis operibus ab infante duratus et inspectus experimentis. Si tamen is non erit, de iis praeficiatur qui servitutem laboriosam toleraverunt …’ (‘A man is to be chosen who has endured agricultural labour from childhood on, and who has been tested by experience. Yet, if such a person does not exist, one is to be put in charge from those who have borne a laborious servitude …’).
The situation is clear: the vilicus is to be chosen from amongst the slaves experienced in farm work from an early age; or, alternatively, from amongst those slaves who have behaved themselves appropriately and who are known to do their work without any hassle. This final prescription is very important in the light of the fact that Columella advises also that the vilicus ought to be of an active state of mind (vigens sensus), as well as in possession of a retentive intellect (memoria tenacissima):Footnote 42 for according to Columella's assessment of slaves possessing of such capacities, which we encountered earlier on, the pool of slaves from which one can choose is likely to contain individuals who are prone to use their cleverness in a way disliked by their masters — and who may therefore have been punished through chaining and the occasional period in the ergastulum: our servi vincti, compediti, alligati. And it is precisely from this type of slave, brains or no brains, that one should under no circumstances choose one's vilicus. For work as an ordinary field labourer or vine-dresser, under due control through a taskmaster and peer-group pressure, servi vincti are perfectly acceptable, although not Columella's first choice. But to put one of those who have experienced the ergastulum and who struggle with their lot as slaves in control of one's farm, no doubt would prove ruinous.
If we now return to Pliny, the parallel is immediately obvious, even if Pliny has done his best to compress the matter to excess. Like Columella, Pliny advises the selection of a vilicus who is of the necessary intelligence, but counsels against the appointment of one who does not realize his limits, and who puts (t)his intelligence to unwanted use: ‘nobis satis sit dixisse quam proximum domino corde esse debere et tamen sibimet ipsi non videri’. And he supports his counsel by reference to a commonplace — namely that those who know the ergastulum make for bad vilici (and everything else): ‘coli rura ab ergastulis pessumum est, ut quidquid agitur a desperantibus’. In fact, the passage is crucial for the argument presented here: for it is completely inconceivable that Pliny could imagine the potential vilicus to come from amongst slaves who are actually or even permanently chained, ‘de jour et de nuit’ as Robert Étienne put it,Footnote 43 and imprisoned in the ergastulum; no one, no doubt, would ever consider this anyway, and to advise against it thus would be bare of any meaning. Here, then, as in the passages discussed above, the label describes the slaves' perceived character, identified in past behaviour, rather than their current location or treatment. It comes as no surprise that the views expressed by Pliny, like the underlying conceptualizations, are, in essence, identical with those of his predecessor, and with those of his nephew. Nor should we be astonished to realize that the section in which Pliny places his discussion of the vilicus is followed by a discussion of farm and slave management, including a reminder of the importance of due and timely labour arrangements — as Columella, from whom he borrowed, had done too.Footnote 44
INTERIM CONCLUSION
As is evident from the passages discussed so far, our ancient agricultural authorities regarded and conceptualized slaves subjected to punishment through chaining and time in the ergastulum as the least amongst the ‘slave breeds’Footnote 45 — to be recognized and known by the one single common denominator that these slaves' past embraced — regardless of what caused the punishment. That Roman poetry should on occasion portray these slaves' station more graphically by alluding to the rattling of chains in the Italian countryside should neither surprise nor confuse:Footnote 46 it goes in any case without saying that even without fetters and shackles whilst at work in the vineyards, grain fields, olive groves or elsewhere on the estate, the lot of slaves (who had been) subjected to chaining as a punishment was anything but enviable. But beyond Cato's cursory comments on these slaves' food allowances, and Columella's brief considerations of their treatment during the period of chastizement, we are told little in general by the sources under discussion of how servi vincti were to be treated, and what kinds of work they typically were put to, during or after their punishment; and their more precise labour and living conditions may well remain a mystery.Footnote 47 But at least we can be fairly certain that the passages that feature them, and that typically have been employed as evidence for the use of chained slave labour in the fields of the Roman élite from Cato onwards, have in fact nothing to do with it. And with the lack of evidence from which the use of slave chain-gangs cultivating their master's vineyards in shackles or harvesting their master's grain in fetters can be extracted, the time has come to abandon the concept for good.Footnote 48
II
One of the fringe benefits of the analysis of the servus vinctus conducted here is that the sources discussed so far document the use of punishment through chaining in the Romans' management of their agricultural slave labour force from the beginning of the second century bc to the end of the first century ad — that is they bear witness to a continuity in the Romans' slave management. Yet, the early Imperial discourse from which the passages discussed at greater length above have been taken implies not a continuity but a change (for the worse) in the quality of the slave labour force, and in the productivity of agricultural estates, between Republic and Empire. More to the point, our early Imperial writers are full of nostalgia for the old days, and critical of a shift experienced in their own age. This shift typically is understood by modern scholars to relate to changes in landholding patterns and production units, as well as in the provisioning of the slave labour force, that is to the rise of a different, and much larger, type of estate: the debate over Pliny the Elder's famous remark that latifundia have destroyed Italy — latifundia perdidere Italiam — is a good example of this.Footnote 49
In the past, modern scholars have been keen in particular to investigate the changes implied by this and other comments in our literary sources from the point of view of a ‘crisis’ that affected tota Italia more or less equally and simultaneously; this approach is now largely out of fashion, and replaced by analysis of regional differentiation.Footnote 50 The new orthodoxy places, rightly, archaeological evidence centre stage in the effort to gain an improved understanding of different modes of production and consumption in the countryside of Roman Italy. The results are not at all at ease with the notion of a drastic reorganization of landholding patterns across Italy of the type traditionally associated with Pliny's comment; nor do they necessarily suggest a realistic backdrop to the sense of nostalgia inherent in our early Imperial writers vis-à-vis (perceived) changes affecting the countryside of Roman Italy.Footnote 51
Pliny's latifundia, as is well known, have received perhaps even more scholarly attention than his men without hope; yet, it is notable that this attention typically has been undivided — that is no attempt has been made to understand Pliny's résumé of the problems affecting the Italian countryside in combination with his ensuing comments about slave management that were central to the above discussion. But, only when we read Pliny's concerns in context can we gain a fuller understanding than if we focus on landholding patterns and production units alone; and only then can we put to rest the tension between the results of recent archaeological study, and the sense of drastic change experienced by Pliny and his peers. As we shall see, there was indeed an element of change that affected the countryside (and more) of Italy; but it need not have been mirrored in a change in landholding and production patterns: in any case, the latter aspects are not what Pliny and his peers refer to. The following, then, is an attempt to take further our newly-gained understanding of the servus vinctus and the passages from which he arose, and use it as a key for a better appreciation of the larger context that produced them. For this we shall have to revisit the issue of our writers' attitudes towards slave and estate farming, before turning to an aspect of the Augustan social legislation.
VINCTI AND MORES
The context, then, from which the above passages stem documents in the first instance that Pliny lived in a world in which the regular visit to one's estates was an ideal, sometimes even realized:Footnote 52 a world that they saw as being in danger; and a world in which, as Pliny put it in the very paragraph from which the above snippet stems, ‘to cultivate well is necessary, superlatively well however brings loss’.Footnote 53 Pliny exemplifies his critique with the attempt of Lucius Tarius Rufus to buy up as many farms as possible in Picenum, only to pronounce that ‘moderation is the most advantageous of all things’.Footnote 54 It is easy to recognize in this the essence of Columella's much longer treatment of the matter,Footnote 55 which leads to an identification of estates that are too large to allow the exercise of good management with the exploitation of slaves of lesser quality: it is the filthy rich who, not being able to make the rounds of their estates, either let them lie waste or have them tended by debtors and slaves who are marked by the ergastulum:Footnote 56
For one should hold as much land as one needs, so that we may be seen to have bought what we can deal with, not what is a burden to us and what we deprive others of; for that is the behaviour of the over-mighty who possess the territory of whole peoples of which they cannot even make the rounds, but leave them to be trampled by cattle, and devastated and plundered by wild beasts, or keep them under their control by means of debt-bondsmen and labour from the ergastulum.
To achieve, on the other hand, the best results, our ancient authors leave no doubt that there is a need for constant oversight. Pliny states that the owner must ‘visit his farm frequently’, because ‘in the field, the master's eye is the best fertilizer’,Footnote 57 a point he makes clear by the example of the freedman Gaius Furius Chresimus, who earned the largest possible returns from a small farm — and his neighbours' envy — through attentive, close and personal supervision of the slave labour force.Footnote 58
There is more to this than ‘a traditional ideology of the soil’ that was part of Roman mores.Footnote 59 First, we have here a clear distinction in the writings of our ancient authorities between two types of estate management: on the one hand, there are estates that are run by good, hands-on management through the owners, and, on the other hand, estates that lack personal supervision by the owners. The former type brings with it the employment of good and hard-working slaves, who, as a result of regular masterly supervision, continue to be frugi — and thus soluti; whilst the latter type leaves labourers and cultivation to their own devices. The former type logically makes for the best cultivation of the land and a maximization of returns — the maxim of old; and the latter type causes a deterioration not only in the quality of the slave labour force, but, consequently, of the financial rewards too.Footnote 60 It is precisely this daunting scenario that is at the heart of Columella's criticism at the very beginning of his De Re Rustica, where he makes it clear that ‘… the matter of husbandry, which all the best of our ancestors had treated with the best of care, we have delivered over to all the worst of our slaves, as if to a hangman for punishment’.Footnote 61 Logically, having produced a list of the problems that accrue if slaves remain beyond the reach of masterly control on such estates, Columella recommends that estates far afield, which cannot be supervised personally by the owner, be let out to tenants instead.Footnote 62 It is, perhaps, in this sense that land that was too much or too dispersed for a single man to control sensibly — and in person — could (have) be(en) postulated as the ruin of Italy, bringing with it a lesser (and lessening) type of slave labourer and cultivation, thus reducing the overall level of productivity in the Italian countryside. Already Seneca the Younger connected vast expanses of land with cultivation by servi vincti — ‘vasta spatia terrarum colenda per vinctos’.Footnote 63 And Pliny drives home the (perceived) change between Republic and Empire in arguing that in his day estates are cultivated by ‘feet that have been chained, hands that have been condemned, and faces that have been branded’.Footnote 64 Logically, Pliny is not surprised to see ‘that the returns of labour from the ergastulum are not the same as from labour of imperators’.Footnote 65 In the mind of Pliny, as in those of his contemporaries, land was worked better and with greater returns in the Republic than in the Empire. Yet, the reason for the difference between Republic and Empire was to be found not so much in changes in landholding patterns or production units, but identified in issues such as the type of slave labour employed, and the level of attention paid to estates and slaves by the owners.
Economic considerations, however, were not the only driving force behind Pliny's remark; latifundia, understood in the sense here foregrounded, also broke with Roman tradition. Slave labour employed under due masterly supervision and hands-on management could be seen as a continuation of an earlier ideal and model that combined due care for one's land and homestead, worked by one's own hands and fertilized by one's own sweat, with the pursuit of imperial aspirations and the defence of Romanitas. The prime example for this ideal is of course Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, whom Livy immortalizes as found ploughing his fields when he was called to fight for Rome against the neighbouring Aequians.Footnote 66 In the days of absentee ownership, paired with a busying of oneself in the Forum and the Curia, and extended military service far afield, the extension of one's body through one's slaves, a point well made by Brendon Reay on the example of Cato, allowed for the maintenance of this ideal through the working of one's fields by one's hands.Footnote 67 But the decisive point made by Columella, and then so vividly brought to the fore by Pliny, lies in the importance of regular masterly supervision of the slave labour force. And this supervision extended to the management slaves. In fact, much of Columella's comment on servi vincti is framed by instructions to his readership to keep a close eye on the vilicus, and to check in person whether the slave manager has executed punishments as directed by the master — for the power of punishment is that of the paterfamilias, as Columella emphasizes twice.Footnote 68 Clearly, Pliny and Columella regard such masterly supervision as fundamental for the maintenance of traditional mores: not one's sweat but one's eye had become the best fertilizer — and regular visits to one's rural estates the glue that blends tradition with a form of land exploitation that Cincinnatus could not have been further removed from. Slave labour left unattended and to the mercy of brutal slave overseers, of the kind that Pliny's latifundia brought with them, did not fit this model.Footnote 69
The change in the quality of the slave labour force, along with problems over the level of due masterly supervision of slaves and estates, quite clearly vexed our Imperial writers; and the figure of the servus vinctus was, as we have seen throughout, central. But the perceived shift actually is not borne out by the corresponding Republican discourse. That discourse is, of course, substantially thinner than its Imperial counterpart; but even so, it allows for immediate identification of the same preoccupations and recommendations. Like Pliny the Elder, Cato stresses that only through masterly supervision, exercised through residence or regular visit, ‘the estate gets better, one will have less wrongdoing, and you will get better returns’.Footnote 70 Indeed, the Elder Pliny remarked that Cato offered the same kind of advice as himself — for instance concerning the purchase of good land over bad land.Footnote 71 And despite the prescriptive nature of the De Agricultura and Cato's preference for better slaves, it is notable that Cato, as we have seen, accepted the existence of servi vincti on his ideal estate: clearly, this type of slave was as well-known in Republican days as it was in the early Empire, and could not be left out, even in a treatise seeking to establish the best of estate worlds.Footnote 72
Moreover, Pliny's principal point of reference is actually not the age of Cato, but the ‘plough-to-dictator’ and ‘sowing-to-consul’ days.Footnote 73 And that there should have been changes from the days long before the onset of Rome's drive for an overseas empire goes without saying. Just as it goes without saying that throughout all of Italy's ancient past there were changes in the countryside, concerning the numbers of estates, and the type of estates: no period of history ever stood still, nor was any particular region of Italy ever excluded from such change — one way or another. It is, clearly, much more difficult to identify these changes in our evidence, and to assess their impact on ancient Italy and its population.Footnote 74 But the recent archaeological work briefly referred to above (p. 85) does not suggest a drastic and dramatic reorganization of the Italian countryside in the first century of imperial rule. And the similarities in discourse between Republic and Empire, here merely sketched on the example of the Romans' approach to the management of their agricultural slave labour force, does not support an argument for abrupt change either.Footnote 75 But why, then, should slave and estate management practices already known to Cato cause upset and frustration in the early Empire? Why should Pliny counsel against the employment of servi vincti on one's rural estates and stress Cato's example — who, as we saw, accepted the use of servi vincti? To answer this question, we will have to leave the countryside of Italy for the moment, and instead revisit the legal condition of Pliny's men without hope.
VINCTI AND THE LAW
These men, as we saw, were slaves who had been subjected to punishment through chaining, at least once; and who figured in the writings of Roman estate owners either side of the events that Ronald Syme immortalized as The Roman Revolution.Footnote 76 But whatever that political revolution brought to others, these slaves drew one of the shorter straws: for, as Gaius tells us, Augustus legislated that servi vincti should be barred from Roman citizenship upon manumission.Footnote 77 The lex Aelia Sentia, which contained the relevant clause, along with the consequences for those affected, was discussed at length by the Roman jurists.Footnote 78 Gaius writes in his Institutes that ‘there are three types of freedmen; for they are either Roman citizens, or Latins or amongst the dediticii’.Footnote 79 And he defines the last category thus:Footnote 80
… slaves who have been chained by their masters as a punishment, or those who have been branded, or interrogated under torture concerning some wrongdoing and convicted of that offence, or handed over to fight in gladiatorial combat with swords or with the beasts, or sent to the games or thrown into custody, and who have afterwards been granted freedom, whether by that master or by another, shall be free men of the same status as peregrines who have capitulated.
Put differently, upon manumission, from which servi vincti were not excluded in principle, these slaves became dediticii, incapable of Roman civitas, and all that went with that — until the time of Justinian.Footnote 81 In contrast to Junian Latins, who could acquire citizenship upon fulfilment of certain conditions, dediticii were barred from this forever, including those slaves who joined this category as freedmen because they were regarded as guilty of moral disgrace — turpitudo — as a result of the slave status they held before manumission.Footnote 82 In other words, one aspect of what modern scholars call the Augustan social legislation turned our servi vincti into men without hope. Before that statute was passed, servi vincti stood a chance of acquiring freedom with civitas.Footnote 83 Without Roman citizenship, however, the liberty acquired by former slaves was largely without meaning — not least because the lack of citizenship meant that they lacked the power of succession, and thus the basis for the foundation of a line: as far as the law was concerned, they remained natally alienated — as was the slave.Footnote 84 But the importance of upholding the hope for full release from slavery for a smooth and effective working of a slave system is evident in our sources, and has long been recognized by modern scholars.Footnote 85 For servi vincti, in contrast to other agricultural slave labourers, such hope did not exist any more under imperial government, and there was thus no prospect of any real betterment for them in the social hierarchy of the Roman world. But this means that they also lacked an inducement to good and hard labour to achieve this goal: they were truly desperantes — and hence not the right type to choose for the management of one's estate. Whilst their employment as ordinary slave labourers was in principle accepted, the lack of aspiration for betterment would have had an impact on the slaves' labour performance — or in any case on the masters' perception of that performance. This is precisely what we can witness in the discourse discussed in this paper. To be sure, there was nothing that prevented Pliny and his peers from avoiding punishment of their slaves through chaining. But to renounce doing so, meant to reduce the master's power of coercion: perhaps here is where the lex Aelia Sentia stung worst — for it either compromised the slave owners' powers over their slaves (that is that of the paterfamilias over his household),Footnote 86or the quality of their assets.Footnote 87 And we have seen already which choice they made.
The changes that our Imperial writers are concerned about were, then, not the result of alterations in the Romans' labour provisioning, or in the organizational patterns of their agricultural estates as traditionally argued. Rather, the changes they were trying to come to terms with were the result of a legal innovation that caused the very same management and estate practices to have worse effects on the (perceived) labour efficiency of one's slaves and, thus, on the productivity of one's estates.Footnote 88 That is why the two Plinys and Columella can cite Cato as their role model and express concern over the negative impact that following his advice and example bring with it — in the first century of imperial rule. And it explains also why, now, latifundia became the target of scorn: for whilst large estates attracted, as they always had done, little or no masterly supervision, they now entailed, from the Augustan age onwards, a further deterioration of the slave labour force that was unknown in Cato's days.
The ancient master's perception of the impact that the Augustan statute had on the exploitation of the Italian countryside is evident in the passages discussed here. And it is easy to see how scholars might construe from these a notion of fundamental change in the landowning practices of the Roman élite between the Republic and the Empire. But whatever those landowning practices, and the changes that we may or may not be able to document in the archaeological (or other) record, the passages in question reflect a quite different issue — if read in conjunction with each other, and in context, along with the relevant legal discourse on the matter. Clearly, both slaves and masters were stung by the Augustan legislation that turned servi vincti into men without hope: the slaves because they lost the capacity to citizenship; and their owners because a capacity inherent in their status as masters was infringed.
CONCLUSION
Both in the Republic, as in the Empire, Roman slave owners made use of slaves of different qualities; and in both the Republic and the Empire, masters employed chaining as a means of coercion for their unruly agricultural slaves. But at no point in the history of Roman slavery, between the second century bc and the first century ad, do our agricultural authorities suggest that slaves worked on the land in chains. Hopkins's contention that ‘Roman writers on agriculture took it for granted that their readers’ land would normally be worked by gangs of chained slaves' lacks evidential support. All the same, the onset of imperial government brought with it a marked change in the fate of slaves subjected to severe punishment that worsened their lot in a fundamental way: the lex Aelia Sentia of ad 4 turned servi vincti and similarly punished slaves into men without hope by barring them forever from the acquisition of Roman citizenship, confirmed, it seems, in ad 212, through Caracalla's exclusion of them from the magnum beneficium.Footnote 89 But despite their negative perception, and the anger over perceived losses, Columella, just like the two Plinys, accepts in principle the exploitation of servi vincti, and thus the punishment of slaves through chaining, as did Cato — even if they make it equally clear that these slaves should be used in combination with the employment of other, better slave labourers on one's estate. Gaius Furius Chresimus, no doubt, would have disagreed greatly with their partial acceptance of a reality that was far from ideal. But there is no reason to assume that there was a single unified approach to the matter, either in the ancient literary discourse here foregrounded or in the long-gone past itself, just as there is little reason to think that the Roman revolution was experienced negatively only by slaves and masters. For such a negative experience potentially was shared by all whose status capacities were compromised by the imperial government, in farming or in the Senate: to paraphrase Pliny, pessumum est quod agitur a desperantibus. Perhaps the author of one of the grandest scholarly achievements of the early Empire was not attracted as strongly as often thought ‘… to the legitimating power of an Augustan frame for his account of Italy …’?Footnote 90
