That they were willing to make citizens of slaves had always been a sacred tradition of the Roman people. Even their penultimate king, a much admired warrior and administrator by the name of Servius Tullius, had allegedly once been of servile rank. It was true that Claudius himself – whose private interests included ancient history as well as gambling – disputed this tradition, and claimed that the king had originally been an Etruscan adventurer named Mastarna; but most Romans had no time for such scholarly pettifogging. That Servius had been born into servitude was evident both from his name and from his insistence, made in the teeth of aristocratic opposition, that the Roman people would be strengthened, not weakened, by welcoming into their ranks such slaves as they chose to liberate. ‘For you would be fools,’ he had told his fellow citizens, ‘to begrudge them citizenship. If you think them unworthy of its rights, then do not set them free – but why, if you think them estimable, turn your backs on them solely because they are foreign?’14 The logic of this had seemed unanswerable; and so it was, over the course of the centuries, that slavery had served many an able man as a staging post on a journey to becoming Roman. When a law was passed in 2 BC, limiting how many slaves could be set free in a citizen’s will, it made explicit what had always been a guiding principle of slave-owners in the city: that only the talented were qualified to join their ranks.
To walk the Forum, then, and to see foreigners for sale at the foot of the Palatine, their limbs shackled and their feet chalked white to mark them as imports, was, just perhaps, to see the high achievers of tomorrow. ‘No one knows what he can do till he tries.’ Such had been the maxim of a celebrated wit named Publilius Syrus, who as his name implied had originally been brought in chains to Italy from Damascus, but had gone on, after winning his freedom, to become Rome’s leading dramatist, and to be crowned as such by Julius Caesar himself. His cousin, similarly enslaved, had ended up the city’s first astronomer. Another freedman, originally transported in the same slave ship as the two cousins, had founded the study of Latin grammar, teaching Brutus and Cassius, no less. Rome, over the years, had measurably benefited from the influx of foreign talent. ‘It’s no crime,’ as Ovid had once put it, ‘to have had chalked feet.’15
Even the right to run for office, although denied to freedmen themselves, was open to their sons. Many had taken advantage. Although the magistrate who could trace his lineage back to a slave would naturally do all he could to hush it up, everyone knew that ‘numerous equestrians, and even some senators, were descended from freedmen’.16 Augustus himself, so stern in his insistence upon the proprieties of status, had been perfectly content to count the sons of one-time slaves as his friends. Vedius Pollio, the financier with the notoriously extravagant home furnishings, had been one such. So too had been an altogether more estimable adornment of the Augustan regime, the man entrusted by the Princeps with the hymning of Rome’s rebirth, a poet still admired and treasured decades after his death. ‘I am the son of a man freed from slavery.’17 Horace, certainly, had never thought to deny it.
Yet even while honouring the debt he had owed his father, whose devotion and financial backing had given him such a stellar start in life, he had never entirely been able to escape a certain queasiness. ‘No amount of good fortune can change a man’s breeding.’18 Horace had been sufficiently a Roman to dread that slavery might leave an ineradicable taint. The surest measure of a freedman’s achievement was to father a son who despised what he had been. Perhaps this was why, far from being a soft touch, the slave-owning sons of former slaves tended to be notorious for their cruelty. Vedius Pollio, excessive in all things, had enjoyed feeding clumsy pageboys to enormous flesh-eating eels. Even Augustus had been shocked. Yet, however novel a spectacle a fish tank flecked with human body parts might be, it only made manifest what it was about slavery that made freedmen so keen to demonstrate that they had escaped it for good. To be a slave was to exist in a condition of suspended death. Such was the law. Although, under normal circumstances, it was forbidden a master to kill his slaves, there was otherwise no form of violence so terrible that it could not legally be inflicted upon a human chattel. The maid who inadvertently yanked her mistress’s hair might well expect to have a hairpin jabbed into her arm; the waiter who stole from a banquet to have his hands cut off and slung around his neck. Dream of dancing, and a slave was bound to be whipped. At its most brutal, the scarring from such an ordeal would leave a permanent fretwork upon the back. Thongs tipped with metal were designed to bite deep. Unsurprisingly, then, it was required by law of a slave-dealer to state whether any of his wares had ever sought to kill themselves. Barbarians who committed suicide rather than suffer to be enslaved, as did an entire tribe taken prisoner during Augustus’s Spanish campaign, were rather admired. Equally, by the same reckoning, those who submitted to servitude showed themselves fitted to be slaves. The baseness of it could never entirely be escaped. Freedom was like an unscarred back: once lost, it was lost for good.
The presence of a man such as Callistus at the heart of power was, then, profoundly disturbing to many Romans. Everyone took for granted that slaves, by nature, were prone to any number of contemptible habits. Rare was the owner who did not complain about their tendency to lie and thieve. It was evident from his obscenely well-appointed dining room that Callistus was no less inclined to pilfer as a freedman than he had been as a slave. Indignation, though, was not the only response to the spectacle of his wealth. There was anxiety as well. The man who had sold Callistus to Caligula was often to be seen standing outside his house, waiting in line for the chance to beg a favour – and being turned away, to rub salt into the wound. Such a sight served to remind slave-owners of a truth that few of them cared to dwell upon: that fortune was fickle, and that just as a slave might become a free man, so might a free man become a slave. ‘Scorn, then, if you dare, those to whose level, even as you despise them, you may yourself well descend.’19 Many centuries before, while lecturing the Roman aristocracy on the need to accept freedmen as fellow citizens, Servius Tullius had made a similar point: that of ‘how many states had passed from servitude to liberty, and from liberty to servitude’.20 It was perhaps no coincidence that Servius should also have prescribed that slaves, during the festival of the Compitalia, be the ones who made sacrifice to the Lares – and that they be permitted, what was more, to dress and behave like free men for the duration of the festivities. Other days of the year witnessed similar scenes of misrule. Early in July, slavegirls would put on their mistresses’ best clothes and offer themselves up for wild sex to passers-by; in December, the cry of ‘Io Saturnalia!’ would herald an even more riotous celebration of role reversal, in which slaves were allowed to put aside their work and be feasted by their masters. It was, most people agreed, ‘the best day of the year’21 – and yet a world in which every day was Saturnalia was hardly one in which even the most party-loving citizen would care to live. Proprieties had to be maintained – for if they were not, then who could say where things might not end?