Читать книгу Tiberius the Tyrant - John Charles Tarver - Страница 6

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The politician of to-day is as incapable of imagining a wholesome state of society in which slavery is a recognized and universal institution, as he is of believing that any political constitution can be really good without representative government. The Romans, however, contrived to civilize the world, so far as it was accessible to them, without representative government and with slavery. Slavery is, in fact, a necessary condition in the evolution of civilized society, and was an important factor in the evolution of the Roman Empire. Teuton and Celt, no less than Greek or Roman or Phœnician, equally used and doubtless equally abused the institution; no race can claim to have been at all periods of its history free from the curse.

In order to arrive at a fair conception of slavery as it existed in antiquity, it is necessary to clear our minds once for all of prepossessions created by the conditions of slavery in America or other countries, where the slave and the slave owner have been distinguished by such marked racial differences as exist between the white man and the coloured man, between the highly civilized man and the savage. Even in the department of negro slavery, as practised in America, there are two sides to the question, and Tom Cringle’s Log must be set against Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mr. T. Booker Washington, an American negro who has done perhaps more for the emancipated black men than any living man, himself born a slave, refuses to join in the wholesale condemnation of American slave owners; to him the mischief of the institution lay less in its injurious effects upon the negro than upon the white man, who despised wholesome industry, and tended to become useless rather than cruel.

The political student has to approach the subject without prejudice, and investigate all the consequences and accompaniments of slavery, not only some of them. It is further necessary in dealing with such a question to discount the antipathy to pain and discomfort which is so marked a feature of modern life. Granted that under certain circumstances slavery resulted in a vast amount of hideous suffering, still slavery was not the only condition in ancient life, or mediaeval life, or even modern life, that has resulted in suffering. Wherever a man finds himself in an irresponsible position towards a number of his fellow creatures, wherever a society or the rulers of a society live in terror of any section of that society whether slave or free, there is always the probability of great cruelty. If all the pain and sorrows of humanity from the beginning of time until now could be reckoned up and estimated, and assigned to their various causes, it is questionable whether slavery would show the blackest record.

Antiquity has left us some notorious instances of cruelty to domestic slaves, and the stories of a few sensational cases have been preserved; but even the English domestic servant in Christian London in the nineteenth century is exposed to cruelty, and if the records of our law courts survive, posterity on the evidence of a few exceptional cases will be able to pass a stern sentence upon English men and women of today. Could we estimate all the pains of all the operatives in modern England, all the lives that are shortened, or rendered intolerable by disordered health, could we arrive at a clear understanding of all that is suffered by puddlers in iron foundries, by stokers on our great ships, by men and women employed in lead works, in brick works, in chemical works, in numberless other dangerous industries, we might well pause before condemning slavery as the one social condition predominantly productive of human suffering. True, the modern operative is free, but free to do or to be what? The chain is there; it is only a different kind of chain.

When St. Paul travelled from Puteoli to Rome, he passed through a country in which a form of slavery was universal, which is commonly held to have been the cruellest known to Italy; he passed by the barracks of the agricultural slaves, and the conditions of travelling were such as to give him every opportunity of making observations; he lived certainly for two years after this date, and possibly much longer, but he nowhere lifts up his voice against slavery in general, or even this particular form of slavery. Not long before St. Paul made this journey, it had been necessary to inspect the slave barracks in the same part of Italy, because free men had acquired the habit of adopting servitude in order to escape military service.

In fact that picture of antique slavery which represents it as a scene of whippings and tortures, of rapes and murders, of humiliating or disgusting services exacted by one man from another, and as the exclusive condition under which such things occur, is a false picture.

The importance of slavery as a factor in the life of the ancients does not in fact depend so much upon its moral influence upon individuals as upon its political consequences, which were many and far-reaching in their effects.

The condition of slavery in the ancient world did not in itself involve the same measure of personal degradation with which it is associated in these days; it was only one of many inequalities recognized by society. If a slave could not appear in the law courts of Rome, no more could the resident alien, however rich, however noble in the city from which he came; if the slave could not hold real property, no more could the sons of his master; if he could under certain conditions only acquire personal property, his master’s son was similarly disqualified; the ceremony by which each acquired freedom was the same; neither could make a will, nor work entirely for his own profit; both were included in the family; the domestic disqualifications under which the slave lived were common to him and the children of the house; the political disqualifications he shared with the free citizens of any community not expressly recognized under treaty by the inhabitants of the community in which he lived. Ancient society never contemplated individual independence as the fundamental condition of human existence; it was based on the contrary theory, that individual independence was the exception, and the privilege of the few; only gradually, and as the consequence of established law and habitual order rendering personal security possible for the mean man without the intervention of a powerful protector, did the modern conception of the rights and obligations of the individual human being grow up; and in its perfect development the conception has only very recently been realized.

The slave and his master might be, and commonly were, members of the same race; if they were of different races, the slave might be a more highly civilized man than his master, better educated, more capable in many respects; there were hordes of slaves drawn from less civilized races, and even from savage races, and the work which fell to their share tended to be menial or arduous according to their unfitness for work demanding previous training; but the fact that the slave was by no means universally of an inferior type of humanity to his owner, and frequently quite the reverse, put slavery as an institution on a totally different footing from that which it has held in modern times.

Again, if the slave had to suffer from political disqualifications, he had corresponding immunities; for one thing, he was exempt from military service. One very important consequence of this aspect of slavery was the restriction of the field from which recruits could be drawn for armies; it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the whole of the industrial population of antiquity was not available for military purposes, but the statement is somewhere near the truth; and from this followed a further consequence, which eventually helped to break up the Empire, viz., that the armies were increasingly recruited from the populations on the confines of the Empire, and ceased to be Italian. First Gaul, Spain and Illyria, and Thrace, then the Teutons from Central Europe, sent free recruits to the Roman armies, till the time came when the less civilized military element threw off the traditions of the civil government, and society returned to the conditions which had prevailed before the Roman Empire inaugurated the reign of peace. Agricultural slavery in Italy is sometimes said to have been the cause of the depletion of the Roman armies; ancient authors complain that the hardy breed of peasants from the central hills of Italy disappeared, and that, because their place had been taken by slaves, the recruiting grounds were barren of the right kind of population. The real state of the case was the reverse: the Roman wars had exhausted the Roman free population, which was then replaced by slaves. Between the end of the second Punic War and Cæsar’s campaigns in Gaul, Rome had been continuously draining Italy of her free population; it was inevitable that the sons of the small farmer should be replaced by slaves, and that eventually small farms should be merged in large holdings, and that the slave barrack should stand alone where the scattered homesteads of the peasant proprietor had adorned the landscape.

Two forms of slavery in antiquity have almost monopolized the attention of most writers on the subject—domestic slavery and agricultural slavery; both lend themselves to sensational treatment; but along with these there was industrial slavery in all its forms; where we have free artisans, antiquity had slaves; and it is questionable whether the slaves employed by a great manufacturing firm in antiquity were less well off than the mill hands of a Lancashire town of today; in many industries they were possibly better off than the class of operatives who are “sweated” in East London; the slave of antiquity was at least provided with the necessaries of life by his employer. It is true that the slave operative could be bought and sold and even mortgaged; he could be bequeathed by will, but these mischances commonly happened to him collectively, and no more affected him individually than a change of owners affects the men working in an English manufactory; indeed, the slave had an advantage over the free artisan; he was part of the capital, his value was relatively greater, he occupied the place now taken by the machinery. A body of well trained, well organized slaves stood in much the same relation to capital in ancient times as the plant of a manufactory to the modern capitalist; and a new owner would no more have thought of disbanding or disabling the slaves employed in a publishing establishment, or brick works, than a modern owner would break up the machines in a cotton mill which he had acquired. When we read of the enormous number of slaves owned by some ancient millionaire, we must not think of butlers and grooms and footmen, but of clerks and “hands”; where we now say that such and such a capitalist employs so many thousand men, the ancients said that he owned so many thousand slaves.

The slave could earn money for himself, and we can see through the minute regulations of the codes as to the conditions under which he could earn and hold money, a recognition of the fact that a man’s free labour is generally more effective than his forced labour; the slave’s opportunity of earning put him, as we should now say, upon piece work; he earned so much for his master, so much for himself; his master gave him the advantages of organization, of capital, of a commercial reputation, and for these he paid in a proportion fixed from time to time by legislation, keeping the remainder of his earnings; that he paid more highly for these advantages than the present value of money, and the general security of society would render equitable, is quite true; but then the whole scale of interest on capital was far higher than it is now. The slave who traded, as he often did, with his master’s capital, paid less for its use than the interest which would have been demanded of a stranger. We must not think of the “peculium,” the slave’s private earnings, as we may think of the purse accumulated by a modern domestic servant from gratuities and other sources of private revenue, but as a real wage earned even by a slave. The regulations which still bound the enfranchized slave to his master in the new relation of patron seem at first sight harsh, the liberty in reference to the former master remaining incomplete, but their aspect changes when we reflect that they rendered manumission more easy, and that the slave’s opportunities of earning money both before and after manumission were made for him by his connexion with his master. The proprietor of a large business might have every feeling of kindliness and consideration for a trusted slave, who managed some department of that business, but he might think twice before rewarding him with his liberty, if that act involved not only the loss of the slave’s services, but the creation of a commercial competitor.

Much has been written in condemnation of Roman agricultural slavery, and justly so, if the agricultural slave was dealt with in the spirit of the elder Cato; but here again we must be careful to distinguish. The ergastula, the slave barracks, did not account for all the agricultural slaves, and in the later days of Augustus the ergastula were preferred by free men to military service; nor can the system of the ergastula have been as rigorous in practice as in theory; the two great servile insurrections which proved so serious a danger to Rome could not have assumed such alarming dimensions, had not the slaves who organized them been in possession of means of communication. Nor must it be forgotten that there were many slaves who would now be convicts, many who had been sold into slavery from a conquered country, never having known any other condition of life. The ancients did not often make the mistake of setting a delicately nurtured man to hard menial labour, for his value in that capacity was small; similarly the increasing difficulty of finding slaves after Rome ceased to extend her conquests increased the value even of navvies, and their condition was improved by the exigencies of sound economy; even a Cato, when slaves were dear, took care not to wear them out before their time. Though a slave was not protected except by public opinion against his master, who might beat and even kill him, he was protected against all other men, who could not injure him without incurring damages for wanton destruction of another man’s property. There were cruel savage men among the ancients as there are among the moderns, but on the whole the servile condition does not seem to have been abused. Roman masters and even mistresses occasionally beat their slaves, but vapulation was a constant feature of human existence till a very few years ago even in Europe. Shakespeare’s masters frequently strike their servants; that worthy though foolish citizen, M. Jourdain, after frequent threats and much aggravation, slapped his maidservant on the face; the use of the stick is not an exclusive prerogative of the slave owner.

The more domestic of the Latin authors, such as Cicero and Horace, do not give us a disagreeable picture of slavery; the relations between slaves and masters in their day seem to have been in every respect as pleasant as those between employers and servants in these days; and the taunt of servile origin so frequent in the Classics amounts to little more than the taunt of connexion with trade so common in some circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact the frequency of this disparagement tends to prove that it was easy to rise from the servile condition to positions of great wealth, and even political influence. The two vulgar rich men in the Satyricon of Petronius, Trimalchio and Habinna, had both been slaves; and the latter is made to say that he had become a slave voluntarily, as that was the easiest method of becoming a Roman citizen; this may be wilful exaggeration on the part of Petronius for a satirical purpose; but it would have no point if it did not carry a certain element of truth. Pallas and his brother Felix, the freedmen of the Emperor Claudius, were, the former practically Prime Minister, the latter Procurator of Judæa; numerous similar instances show that a man might have been a slave and yet rise to high office; the intermediate step seems generally to have been through the Equestrian Order—in one of its aspects, as we have seen, the financial department of the Civil Service.

This introduces us to another feature of slavery as practised in antiquity, viz. its cosmopolitan influence, which was at work in every class of society, but in the highest class most of all; nothing else so effectually broke down the barrier between the Greek and the Roman, between the Eastern and Western half of the Mediterranean, between North and South.

War in ancient times had many of the aspects of a speculation, and among the profits of war the sale of captives was reckoned; the conquered had no rights against the conqueror except under special terms. When the victim was a civilized State, the free men who were thus sold into slavery had the opportunity of buying back their own freedom; they practically paid a ransom; the transaction was a rough and ready and efficacious method of exacting an indemnity. There would be a certain proportion who could not pay the indemnity, and these became slaves, but in their new status they were not wasted on unprofitable occupations; the philosopher, the physician, the accountant, the merchant, continued their various occupations in the service of their master, and if they proved their efficiency rapidly passed through the stage of slavery to that of freedmen.

Of the twenty famous schoolmasters whom Suetonius honours with short biographies, three only were certainly not freedmen, Orbilius, the teacher of Horace, Pomponius Marcellus, and a certain Valerius Probus, who hailed from Beyrout, and must have been himself free, whatever his parentage, as he began life with the endeavour to get a centurion’s commission; fifteen were certainly freedmen, and two probably. Their nationalities are strangely varied; three were certainly Italians, three others possibly, two were Syrians, if we so class Probus, three Gauls, one Spaniard, one Illyrian, six certainly Greek, and one probably. Of the three Gauls, one, M. Antonius Gnipho, gave lessons first in the house of Julius Cæsar during the latter’s boyhood; he was a man of exceptional intellectual brilliance and generous character. Suetonius does not state that Gnipho actually taught Cæsar, though the inference suggests itself, and in any case the youthful Cæsar must have known him, and have received impressions, if not information, which may have influenced the future conqueror of Gaul. These men were for the most part highly respected and made large professional incomes; they taught either in houses of their own, or by special arrangement in the houses of their patrons; one of them, M. Verrius Flaccus, taught on these terms the grandchildren of Augustus, who paid him a handsome annual stipend on condition that he only admitted such pupils to his classes as were approved of by his employer; he had previously taught independently; a statue was erected to his memory at Præneste; this indicates that in spite of his servile origin he was held in high honour. Horace must have known Verrius Flaccus, even if he were not actually a relative, and Horace’s allusion to the persuasive schoolmasters, who coax children to learn the elements by giving them biscuits, suggests a well known trait of this Verrius Flaccus, who was the first schoolmaster to offer prizes, “some ancient book handsome or scarce,” says Suetonius. It is interesting to note that the most fashionable of these schoolmasters, and the one who made the largest fortune, was a man who, in the opinion of the Emperors Tiberius and Claudius, both good judges, was totally unfit to be entrusted with the charge of youth; while the one of whom it is recorded that in his old age he sank into extreme poverty is Horace’s old friend, the freeborn Italian Orbilius. This man also was honoured with a statue.

The proportion of men of servile origin in this one profession was very large, if we may infer that the short list given by Suetonius of its leaders indicates conditions which prevailed through the rank and file; nor was it held in special disrepute. Tacitus mentions a schoolmaster not included in this list who became a Senator; another, M. Pomponius Marcellus, was admitted to the inner council of Tiberius, and anticipated the “supra grammaticam” episode of a much later age; he reproved the Emperor for a solecism in the wording of a decree, telling him, “You can give the citizenship to men, Cæsar, but not to a word.”

Men who had been freeborn in their native countries, but had passed into servitude by fortune of war, found new and wider careers open to them in the service of their conquerors; they obtained access to the masters of the world, and were able to direct their thoughts to new channels, and directly influence their policy; they were further able to push the fortunes of their relatives and connexions at home; for as freedmen, and even as slaves, they were not cut off from correspondence with the countries which they had left.

Their influence, great as it was in breaking down the intellectual barriers between Rome and her allies and subjects, and in forming the conception of a world-wide empire, was even greater in the world of finance. Even the great Cæsar failed to throw open the Roman Senate to the civilized world, and admission to that body continued to be jealously guarded, in spite of occasional exceptions, till the Senate had been practically superseded by the Imperial Household; but admission to the Equestrian Order was a relatively easy matter; no sanctity attached to the Order, no historic glamour; and a skilled financier found his way into its ranks with comparative ease. Roman bankers such as Cicero’s friend Atticus, needed the assistance of clever Jews and Greeks, for Roman money was invested privately as well as publicly in all parts of the Empire; municipal securities, then as now, were a favourite investment; cities and colonies were in the habit of borrowing money for local improvements; the knowledge possessed by men, who had been acquainted with the local and personal conditions was a valuable commodity; and any Roman, who aspired to play a great part in the financial world, drew into his service men from all parts of the Empire; these men were not infrequently rewarded by admission to the Equestrian Order; some of them were free men, the majority were slaves to begin with. The process was so common that the term “Libertus” is used much in the same way as we employ the terms “agent,” or “man of business.” Not the least important consequence of the system was the admission of the Jews to a share in the control of administration; “they of Cæsar’s Household” were not domestic servants, but financial secretaries of considerable importance.

Slavery has been reproached with being responsible for the horrors of the arena, and a general indifference to the sanctity of human life; but this love of spectacular bloodshed, this indifference to the sufferings and death of human beings and animals, is by no means an exclusive feature of societies in which slavery is an accepted institution. Bull fights are being extended at the present day from Spain to France; bull baiting, bear baiting, badger baiting, prize fighting, cock fighting, were accepted amusements in England till the beginning of the present century, some of them are not unknown to our contemporaries; nor is it easy to distinguish that delight in the sufferings of condemned criminals, or in the encounters between trained combatants, which filled the Roman amphitheatres, from the excitement which drew crowds to look on at the merciless tortures and executions of the period of the Reformation, and led the fashionable friends of Madame de Sevignê to watch a woman being burned alive. So far were gladiatorial combats from being one of the hardships imposed by slavery, that we have repeated references in the early Imperial period to the misconduct of Roman knights, and even Senators, who exhibited themselves in the arena. A skilled gladiator risked his life, as does a skilled toreador, and he enjoyed the same measure of popular favour; there were statues of gladiators as well as of schoolmasters.

The tendency of the Empire was to break down the barriers between the free man and the slave; as political power ceased to be the privilege of a caste, and became the reward of recognized merit bestowed by the head of the administration, the importance of free descent was diminished; the spiteful remarks about freedmen and servile origin, which we occasionally find in the Latin authors, were suggested by the improved position of slaves and freedmen; they represent the impotent malice of a caste, which saw that the sceptre was departing from between its knees; the distinction was long preserved by literature, for the boys of the Roman Empire, like the boys of England, were brought up on the works of the great Athenians, who spoke of the slave as the slave was spoken of when the free citizens in the most liberal of Greek States were really an aristocracy of birth entrusted with the conduct of affairs among a population by which they were far outnumbered, and which included many men as wealthy as the freeborn citizens, and no less enlightened.

It was largely through slavery that men of letters, men of science, architects, engineers, sailors, and even soldiers, found their way from all parts of the world into the executive services of the Empire. Rome had become cosmopolitan without being aware of the fact, long before the genius of Cæsar finally started her on an admittedly cosmopolitan career.

In spite of the pleasant personal relations which often prevailed between slaves and their owners, emancipation on a large scale was not regarded with favour, the statesmen who on different occasions of emergency released slaves in large numbers in order to fill up vacancies in the army were spoken of reproachfully; the step was always felt to be a desperate one.

The reason, however, of the objection to such emancipations was less fear of the slaves, or dislike, than the interference which it involved with industrial pursuits; it amounted to a wholesale confiscation of property; an analogous process at the present day would be summarily to impress large bodies of operatives; this would bring many industrial communities to a standstill. Similarly when at a later period we find restrictions imposed upon the custom of emancipating slaves by testament, this may well have become a means of throwing the responsibility of maintaining superfluous slaves upon the public dole fund, and of exempting the heir from the necessity of supporting them. Emancipation does not seem to have been regarded as an unmixed blessing. We have the well known case of Cicero’s secretary Tiro; Tiro was a slave, but he was his master’s friend; the relations between them were of a most affectionate nature; Cicero’s letters to him are full of anxious inquiries after his health, of demands that he shall run no risk of over fatigue; that he shall take the best medical advice; and yet it was only late in his life that Cicero bestowed liberty on Tiro. The letters in which Cicero’s relatives, and especially his son, congratulate Tiro on his elevation, show that, slave though he was, he was no less respected than loved. That such relations were common we may infer from the statement made by Paterculus, that in the proscription of B.C. 43 the fidelity of sons to their fathers was least; the merit of wives stood first, of freedmen second, of slaves third.

The institution of slavery did not demoralize the ancients in the same way that negro slavery is said to have demoralized the Americans, or coloured slavery in general to demoralize white men; it was a totally different institution.

In this, as in all other details of ancient history, the memory of the bad, the exceptional, the sensational, is preserved; the normal conditions are forgotten; and as it is much easier to declaim than to inquire, the essential but unobtrusive features of any particular institution escape notice. On the whole, the action of slavery in ancient times was beneficial to civilization, and the eventual dismemberment of the Empire was not due chiefly to the existence of slavery. The races who broke up the Empire themselves recognized slavery, and it was long before agricultural slavery disappeared even from England.