Nearly everybody in Rome worshiped money with mad pursuit, and all but the bankers denounced it. “How little you know the age you live in,” says a god in Ovid, “if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand!”51—and a century later Juvenal sarcastically hails the sanctissima divitiarum maiestas, “the most holy majesty of wealth.” To the end of the Empire Roman law forbade the Senatorial class to invest in commerce or industry; and though they evaded the prohibition by letting their freedmen invest for them, they despised their proxies and upheld rule by birth as the sole alternative to rule by money, or myths, or the sword. After all the revolutions and the decimations the old class divisions remained, with brand-new titles: members of the Senatorial and equestrian orders, magistrates and officials, were called honestiores, i.e., “men of honors” or offices; all the rest were humiliores, “lowly,” or tenuiores, “weak.” A sense of honor often mingled with the proud gravity of the senator: he served in a succession of public posts without pay and at much personal expense; he administered important functions with a fair degree of competence and integrity; he provided for public games, helped his clients, freed some of his slaves, and shared a part of his fortune with the people through benefactions before or after his death. Because of the obligations his position entailed, he was required to have a million sesterces to enter or remain in the Senatorial class.
One senator, Gnaeus Lentulus, had 400,000,000 sesterces; but with this exception the greatest fortunes in Rome were those of businessmen who did not disdain to handle money or trade. While reducing the powers of the Senate, the emperors had favored the business class with high office, had protected industry, commerce, and finance, and had based upon equestrian support the security of the Principate against patrician intrigue. Membership in this second order required 400,000 sesterces and specific nomination by the prince. Consequently many men of means belonged to the plebs.
The plebs was now a motley receptacle of such innominate businessmen, freeborn workers, peasant proprietors, teachers, doctors, artists, and freedmen. The census defined the proletarii not by their occupation but by their offspring (proles); an old Latin treatise called them “plebeians who offer nothing to the state but children.”52 Most of them found employment in the shops, factories, and commerce of the city at an average wage of a denarius (forty cents) a day; this rose in later centuries, but not faster than prices.53 Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs from it only in rapidity; we must expect to find it in every age and under every form of society and government; but rarely has it been so thorough and unsentimental as in ancient Rome. Once all men had been poor, and had not known their poverty; now penury rubbed elbows with wealth, and suffered from consciousness. Absolute destitution, however, was prevented by the dole, the occasional gifts of patrons to clients, and the lordly legacies of rich men like Balbus, who left twenty-five denarii to every citizen of Rome. Class divisions verged upon caste; yet an able man might free himself from slavery, make a fortune, and rise to high office in the service of the prince. The freedman’s son became a fully enfranchised freeman, and his grandson could become a senator; soon a freedman’s grandson, Pertinax, would be emperor.
During the first century many high offices were filled by freedmen. They often had charge of the imperial finances in the provinces, the waterways of Rome, the mines and quarries and estates of the emperor, and the provisioning of the army camps. Freedmen and slaves, nearly all of Greek or Syrian origin, managed the imperial palaces and held vital positions in the imperial cabinet. Petty industry and trade fell increasingly into the control of freedmen. Some of them became great capitalists or landowners; some accumulated the largest fortunes of their time. Their past had seldom given them moral standards or elevated interests; after their liberation money became the absorbing interest of their lives; they made it without scruple and spent it without taste. Petronius savagely excoriated them in Trimalchio, and Seneca, less bitter, smiled at the new rich who bought books in ornamental sets but never read them.54 Probably these satires were in part the jealous reactions of a caste that saw its ancient prerogatives of exploitation and luxury encroached upon, and could not forgive the men who were rising to share its perquisites and power.
The success of the freedmen must have given some consoling hope to the class that did most of the manual work in Italy. Beloch estimated the slaves in Rome about 30 B.C. at some 400,000, or nearly half the population; in Italy at 1,500,000. If we may believe the table gossipers of Athenaeus, some Romans had 20,000 slaves.55 A proposal that slaves be required to wear a distinctive dress was voted down in the Senate lest they should realize their numerical strength.56 Galen reckoned the proportion of slaves to freemen at Pergamum about A.D. 170 as one to three—i.e., twenty-five per cent; probably this proportion was not much different in other cities.56a Human prices varied from 330 sesterces for a farm slave to the 700,000 ($105,000) paid by Marcus Scaurus for Daphnis the grammarian;57 the average price was now 4000 sesterces ($400). Eighty per cent of the employees in industry and retail trade were slaves, and most of the manual or clerical work in government was performed by servi publici—“public slaves.” Domestic slaves were of every variety and condition: personal servants, handicraftsmen, tutors, cooks, hairdressers, musicians, copyists, librarians, artists, physicians, philosophers, eunuchs, pretty boys to serve at least as cupbearers, and cripples to provide amusement by their deformities; there was a special market at Rome where one might buy legless, armless, or three-eyed men, giants, dwarfs, or hermaphrodites.58 Household slaves were sometimes beaten, occasionally killed. Nero’s father killed his freedmen because they refused to drink as much as he wished.59 In an angry passage of his essay on anger Seneca describes the “wooden racks and other instruments of torture, the dungeons and other jails, the fires built around imprisoned bodies in a pit, the hook dragging up the corpses, the many kinds of chains, the varied punishments, the tearing of limbs, the branding of foreheads” ;59a all these, apparently, entered into the life of the agricultural slave. Juvenal describes a lady as having slave after slave thrashed while her hair was being curled,60 and Ovid pictures another mistress jabbing hairpins into her maidservant’s arms;61 but these tales have the earmarks of literary concoctions and must not be taken for history.
We are in danger of exaggerating the cruelty of the past for the same reason that we magnify the crime and immorality of the present—because cruelty is interesting by its very rarity. By and large the lot of a domestic slave under the Empire was lightened by a growing acceptance into the family, by mutual loyalty, by the pretty custom of owners waiting on the slaves at certain feasts, and by a security and permanence of employment exceptional in modern times. The joys of family life were not denied them, and their tombstones reveal as much tenderness as those of the free. One reads: “His parents have raised this monument to Eucopion, who lived six months and three days; the sweetest and most delightful babe, who, though he could not yet speak, was our greatest happiness.”62 Other epitaphs show the most affectionate relations between masters and slaves: one owner declares that a dead servant was as dear to him as his son; a young noble mourns the death of his nurse; a nurse expresses her grief over a dead charge; a learned lady raises an elegant memorial to her librarian.63 Statius writes a “Poem of Consolation to Flavius Ursus on the Death of a Favorite Slave.”64 It was not unusual for slaves to risk their lives to protect their masters; many voluntarily accompanied them into exile; several gave their lives for them. Some owners freed their slaves and married them; some treated them as friends; Seneca ate with his.65 The refinement of manners and sensitivity, the absence of a color line between master and slave, the tenets of the Stoic philosophy, and the classless faiths coming in from the East had a share in the mitigation of slavery; but the basic factors were the economic advantage of the owner, and the rising cost of slaves. Many slaves were respected as having high cultural abilities—stenographers, research aides, financial secretaries and managers, artists, physicians, grammarians, and philosophers. A slave could in many cases go into business for himself, giving a share of his earnings to his owner and keeping the rest as his peculium, a “little money” peculiarly his own. With such earnings, or by faithful or exceptional service, or by personal attractiveness, a slave could usually achieve freedom in six years.66
The condition of the workers, and even of the slaves, was in some measure relieved by the collegia, or workers’ organizations. By this period we hear of these in great number and in proud specialization; there were separate guilds of trumpeters, horn players, clarion blowers, tuba players, flutists, bagpipers, etc. Usually the collegia were modeled on the Italian municipality: they had a hierarchy of magistrates and one or more favorite deities whom they honored with a temple and an annual feast. Like the cities, they asked and found rich men and women to be their patrons, and to repay compliments by helping to finance their outings, their assembly halls, and their shrines. It would be an error to think of these associations as corresponding to the labor unions of our time; we can picture them better in terms of our fraternal orders, with their endless offices and titles of honor, their brotherly hilarity and jaunts, and their simple mutual aid. Rich men often encouraged the formation of these guilds and remembered them in their wills. In the collegium all the men were “brothers” and all the women “sisters,” and in some of them the slave could sit at table or in council with freeborn men. Every “member in good standing” was guaranteed a fancy funeral.
In the last century of the Republic demagogues of all orders discovered that many collegia could be persuaded to vote almost to a man for any giving candidate. In this way the associations became political instruments of patricians, plutocrats, and radicals; and their competitive corruption helped to destroy Roman democracy. Caesar outlawed them, but they revived; Augustus dissolved all but a few useful ones; Trajan again forbade them; Aurelius tolerated them; obviously they persisted throughout, within or beyond the law. In the end they became vehicles through which Christianity entered and pervaded the life of Rome.