De l’influence de l’esclavage sur les mœurs des Romains.

CHAP. 6: > On the influence of slavery on the morals of the Romans.

If, to judge the moral effects of slavery, we had only the observations made by European colonists about themselves or their slaves, we would not know what to think; for none of them has yet thought to write on such a subject. Even in the countries where masters enjoy very extensive civil and political liberty, as in the United States of America, no one has ventured to research, and still less to expound, the effects that servitude produces on morals. These countries have given birth to great generals and skilled statesmen, but to few observers of human nature [76]. For us to be able to form any ideas on the object of our research, it was necessary for men born and raised in countries where slavery is no longer permitted to go and study its effects in the places where it exists. The countries of Europe where domestic servitude is still established have been no more fertile in observers: what we know of the effects that slavery produces there, we owe to men who were foreign to them, and who belonged neither to the master class nor the slave class.

The peoples of antiquity were no less reserved in this regard than the modern peoples. The philosophers of Greece and Rome wrote on a multitude of subjects; but none, not even among the moralists, broached the subject of slavery. One might believe that the state of enslavement of one part of the human race to the other appeared so natural to them that they did not conceive that there could be another way of being. However, when we see the possessors of men who exist in our time maintain the same silence on slavery as those of antiquity, or speak only to answer those who attack it, can we not also believe that the subject is in itself so terrible, for the men who command as well as for those who obey, that no one has had the courage to make it the object of his research? We cannot have, for judging the effects of slavery among the ancients, the resources we possess for judging the results it produces among the moderns. Not only do we know of no work from antiquity written by a man who belonged to a people among whom slavery was not permitted; but we are ignorant of whether such peoples ever existed. History speaks to us of slaves only in the rare circumstances where they inspired fear or gave aid to their masters, or in the less rare circumstances where they were sacrificed for the amusement of their possessors.

But if historians have not concerned themselves with making known to posterity the relations that existed between masters and slaves; if they have not observed the connection that existed between slavery and the morals they have described, it is easy to supplement their silence; they have presented us with the facts; it is for us to examine how these facts are linked together. The events they have described and the laws whose existence they have recorded agree, moreover, so well with what we know of the consequences of slavery among the moderns, that one can scarcely consider their silence on the connection between effects and causes as a lacuna in the history of the human race.

In speaking of the morals that domestic slavery produces among the diverse classes of the population, I must recall here an observation I have made previously: that I am concerned only with the morals of the most numerous part of the population, and that a few individual exceptions, produced by particular circumstances, can prove nothing against general facts when they are well-established.We saw in the preceding chapter that one of the first effects of slavery is to arrest the development of the intellectual faculties of the various classes of the population concerning the phenomena of nature; men whom force or cunning has invested with the power to command others cease to apply their intelligence or their physical organs to the study or improvement of things; they act upon them only through the intelligence and physical organs of their slaves. For their part, the slaves, being moved only by the fear of punishments, yield to their masters only that portion of their strength they are unable to withhold; those that can be hidden, such as the greater part of the intellectual faculties, are always withdrawn from their dominion, and remain without development. A master can command his slave to execute well or poorly something for which he shows him the model; he can indeed compel him to repeat certain words, to learn certain books by heart; but he could not demand of him a discovery or even a new thought; he could not demand of him the improvement of anything.

It is even evident that when, in a nation, one part of the population acts upon things only through the intermediary of the other, and this latter part is reduced to mechanically executing what the former prescribes, everything related to the sciences, the arts, and industry must rapidly decline. The objects produced by human industry are not eternal; most are even destroyed rather quickly. If the things we use, which constitute the comfort of a civilized people, were not incessantly renewed, the richest nations would in a short time be reduced to the same state as savages. But when all the labors necessary for a people's well-being fall into the hands of slaves, when the industrious part of the population is reduced to blindly executing what is prescribed by masters who are strangers to the sciences, the arts, and industry, it necessarily follows that the models become worse every day. The Roman practitioner who, by the capture of a city, became the possessor of a free and industrious man, could employ him to instruct his slaves; he could give them as models the objects of art that this man had produced; but when there were no longer any industrious peoples to enslave, a man born a slave had to be employed to instruct another slave, and the disciple must always have been worse than the master: the crude work that one had fashioned became the model for a work cruder still. The masters could not demand more, for their taste was formed only by the things they had before their eyes, and it was not in their power to conceive, and still less to have executed, anything that was above the intelligence or the capacity of a slave raised by another slave [77].

Slavery, which is an obstacle to the development of the intellectual faculties in the study of the natural sciences and industrial arts, is not always an obstacle to these same faculties developing among the masters, in the arts that are suited to giving man dominion over his fellow men. Thus we see that among the peoples of antiquity, the men who belonged to the master class cultivated the arts of war, eloquence, and government for as long as they were not themselves enslaved. The epochs in which they displayed the most talent in this regard were those in which the struggles to attain command were the most violent. But when Rome no longer had external enemies to fight, when the masters had been enslaved by one of the most powerful among them, there no longer existed for the possessors of men any subjects for intellectual or physical activity. One of the first moral consequences that slavery produced among the masters, even before political liberty had been destroyed, was the love of idleness. We shall see that this passion is in fact inseparable from the contempt attached to industrial occupations, whenever the possessors of men cannot employ their activity in extending their dominion over their fellow men. This phenomenon is reproduced in all epochs and under all climates.

From the absence of intellectual and physical activity, and from the possession of riches acquired through pillage or oppression, was born an unbridled passion for all sensual pleasures. The gluttony and voracity of the great reached a point of which it is impossible today to form any idea; the earth was ravaged to supply their debaucheries, and the riches of a province were swallowed in a meal [78]. Indolence was joined to sensuality: the custom of reclining on cushions while they took their meals was brought from the Orient, and soon it was adopted by women as it had been by men. While the masters were thus languidly reclining on down and purple, slaves were always present to spare them the slightest movement, while others, with fans, took care to cool the air, or to protect them from flies. An extraordinary dish caused them so much pleasure that it was brought in to the sound of the flute [79].

As the women were not secluded as they are in some countries of the Orient, and as the house of a great man contained a multitude of young slaves of both sexes, the morals of the masters promptly experienced the effects that were bound to result from such a mixture. In reading the writers of antiquity, one observes that among these peoples love had none of the characteristics of delicacy that it has among the moderns; it was almost always a brutal passion that differed in no way from that of animals. The reason for this difference is clear: a master who had only to show a sign of his will to have a young female slave beaten with rods, or even to have her put to death, must have been accustomed to little resistance. Man stoops to persuasion and prayer, he resigns himself to waiting, only when he cannot make use of force and authority. The habit of living with slaves was a very active cause of corruption for the young people of both sexes. Among those who possessed a great number of slaves, the interval separating the birth from the extinction of desires must always have been of short duration; and among a people in whose midst the aristocracy had taken deep root, the example of the great must always have carried away the multitude. Thus, history is filled with facts that attest to the immorality of all classes of the population; when the number of slaves had greatly multiplied, the corruption became such that they seemed to forget even the very laws of modesty [80].

In general, historians take little trouble to inform us of the private morals of nations; domestic life, which is almost everything in man's existence, seems scarcely worthy of their notice. It is therefore impossible for us to know well how Roman women were treated by their husbands, and what kind of happiness was reserved for the weaker sex. But when we see that any individual who enjoyed a somewhat considerable fortune possessed or could acquire a multitude of young female slaves, it is difficult to believe that men of great fortune were very attentive husbands. It is equally difficult to believe that women who saw rivals in each of their female slaves were faithful wives, or that they were not devoured by jealousy [81]. History does not report the particular discords to which the existence of slavery gave rise between spouses, nor the individual crimes that were the consequences of these discords. But one fact that it attests to is sufficient, in itself, to allow us to judge the interior of families in whose midst a great number of slaves existed: this is the conspiracy of the patrician women against their husbands; it is the condemnation to death, in a single instance, of one hundred and sixty of them, all wives of senators, convicted, with regard to their husbands, of the crime of poisoning [82].

It was, doubtless, to protect themselves from these acts of desperation on the part of their wives, that men eventually granted them the right of repudiation, a right that had, for a long time, belonged only to husbands. But then another kind of disorder arose; the men did not renounce their female slaves; but their wives, wounded by the preference these slaves obtained over them, changed husbands as often as they had the means. These changes became so frequent that they led some writers to say that women no longer counted the years by the number of consuls, but by the number of their husbands.

The licentious conduct of the stronger sex necessarily entails the depravity of the weaker sex; it was impossible that a girl raised amidst a crowd of female slaves, a sort of forced witness to their corruption and to the liaisons that existed between them and her brothers or her father, could be a very restrained wife. Thus, one finds nowhere examples of a depravity as gross as that of Roman women. If history has preserved the names of a few of them who were commendable for their morals, these are but rare exceptions that attest to the general corruption. The writer of antiquity who most devoted himself to describing the private morals of the individuals whose lives he published almost never speaks of a famous man without at the same time mentioning the debaucheries of his sisters, his daughters, or his wife. According to him, the daughters and wives of the great sold their charms; it was for money that they gave themselves to their lovers. Adultery and incest were crimes so common and so public in the last days of the republic that it seems the great no longer took the trouble to hide them [83]. The senate thought to stop this disorder by exiling the women most known for the dissoluteness of their morals; but it was a powerless remedy; a multitude of men and women formed frightful associations to give themselves over to debauchery in common [84]. One of these associations was discovered at the most flourishing epoch of the republic: the number of the guilty, of whom women formed the greater part, rose above 7,000; more than half were condemned to the ultimate punishment. The women who were under the power of their fathers, their husbands, or their guardians were delivered to them to be put to death in private; the others, says Livy, were executed in public, for lack of relatives authorized by law to take charge of the execution [85].

Having no intellectual occupation to engage in, and leaving industrial labors to their slaves, the Romans showed themselves as passionate for games and spectacles as they were for physical pleasures; but these games and spectacles were not those that would have pleased an active and intelligent population in need of relaxation; they were those suited to an idle, coarse, ignorant people, susceptible to being moved only by the most violent physical stimuli; chariot and horse races, wrestling, boxing, representations of battles, combats of ferocious beasts, and above all, gladiatorial combats—such were the games for which individuals of all classes were passionate, women as well as men, patricians as well as plebeians [86].

The need for violent spectacles developed as slaves multiplied, that is, as it became easier to live in idleness. The generals who wished to win the favors of the multitude had no better means than to have multitudes of ferocious beasts brought from all parts of the earth to have them destroy one another, or to give gladiatorial combats. It appears that at first it had been enough for the people of Rome to see combats of quails or cocks; but when its armies had destroyed or reduced to slavery an immense number of free and industrious peoples, it was necessary to give them combats of men, lions, or tigers. Pompey, in his second consulate, had five hundred lions and eighteen elephants appear; the carnage of all these animals amused the people of Rome for five whole days. Gladiatorial combats followed, in their growth, the same progression as the combats of ferocious beasts. Only a small number of victims were sacrificed as long as the rarity of slaves kept their price very high; but when enslaved men became a common and valueless commodity, human blood was lavished. Caesar and Pompey, who, in this kind of merchandise, were two of the republic's greatest suppliers, caused an immense number of them to perish in the circus. Trajan showed himself more generous still: he gave his happy subjects a festival that lasted 123 days; and each day he had slaughtered, for their trifling pleasures, about 90 ferocious animals and nearly 82 men, in all 10,000 men and 11,000 beasts [87]. Thus, the writers of the time have passed down to us the memory of this excellent prince, and his glory has been carried to the heavens by writers of our own time [88].

When a man is placed in such a position that he cannot engage in any labor without the fruit of his pains being immediately snatched from him, he naturally ceases to work. If one wants him to engage in some kind of occupation, the principle of activity that has been destroyed in him must be replaced by another principle; the fear of punishments must then do what the hope of rewards no longer does. It is therefore not possible to doubt that the Romans compelled to work, by means of punishments, the men they had enslaved, just as the masters of modern colonies compel them to it. But what did these punishments consist of? By what kind of punishments were the slaves forced to execute the labors prescribed to them? What were the food, clothing, and dwellings that the masters gave them? The historians of Rome were no more concerned with the treatment of slaves than ours are with the treatment of our domestic animals. It is easy to see, however, that as the multiplication of slaves caused their value to fall, their lot became more and more miserable.

In early times, the vanquished peoples were incorporated among the citizens and enjoyed the same prerogatives; those who were reduced to slavery became the work companions of their masters; they had the same food and probably also the same clothing. When their number had increased, the labors were exclusively abandoned to them; it became shameful to engage in any kind of industry. The custom practiced by several barbarous nations, of immolating a few prisoners on the tombs of generals killed in combat, had led to the slaughter of a few slaves. The victims were multiplied as the number of captives caused their price to fall; soon the religious belief that had commanded these murders was lost sight of; and, after having had a few men killed to obey a horrible superstition, thousands were slaughtered for the pleasure of seeing blood flow.

The masters, by renouncing labor and giving themselves over with a kind of fury to all physical pleasures, multiplied the fatigues of their slaves, and left them a smaller share in the products of their labors; they were consequently obliged to give their punishments twice the intensity; it was necessary to increase them first, because a more considerable quantity of labor was demanded of the enslaved population, and second, because in demanding greater fatigues of it, less was granted to its needs. The punishments and the debasement to which citizens whom their debts had made slaves were subjected can give us an idea of the degradation and punishments reserved for foreigners who had fallen into servitude as a result of the misfortunes of war. We often see, in history, slaves of Roman origin escaping from the prisons where they were detained, presenting themselves in the public squares with their bodies torn by rods, and imploring the protection of their fellow citizens. It was not only the desire to obtain excessive labors from them that had produced the cruelties of which they bore the bloody testimony; it was the resistance they had opposed to the infamous passions of their masters. But these cruelties are recounted by history only because of the seditions they brought about; those that were exercised upon slaves of foreign origin, even those exercised upon individuals born Roman which gave rise to no political event, have been buried in oblivion; they have always been considered the legitimate exercise of a master's power over his property [89].The multiplication of slaves and the cruelties of which they were the object were bound to compromise, and did in fact compromise, the safety of their possessors. The Roman patricians, to protect themselves from their conspiracies, took care to foment divisions and discord among them; they did not believe themselves safe unless each of their slaves distrusted all the others. They took their precautions further: a law was passed, which ordered that, whenever a master was found dead in his home, all his slaves, of whatever age and sex, should be, without trial, sent to their execution. The application of this law doubtless caused a great number to perish; we see, in the Annals of Tacitus, that a citizen having been found dead in his house, the four hundred slaves he possessed were slaughtered by order of the senate; children and women were no more spared than men of mature age [90].

Whenever men are condemned to relentless and fruitless labors, when they are not masters of any of their movements, and when they are constantly exposed to contempt, insult, and arbitrary punishments, simple death ceases to be a punishment; for it to become fearsome, it must be accompanied by torments that exceed in their intensity all the pains scattered throughout the course of life. It was therefore necessary for the Romans who wished to punish their slaves with death to devise tortures capable of frightening the men most weary of bearing life. These tortures could only be determined by the caprices of the masters, since the laws saw in slaves only properties. The practice of lashing them with rods, and then nailing them to a cross, was the most generally adopted kind of torture. The torments of the individual thus nailed lasted several days before death came to put an end to them, unless, out of pity, the executioner had attacked one of the parts essential to life. The writers who have given us the description of this torture do not say that women were exempted from it, nor even children of the most tender age, who were condemned to perish when their master had died from an unknown cause [91].

However, there is a degree of misery that no fear can render bearable; the Roman slaves often revolted, whatever care the masters took to brutify and divide them. The numerous seditions that historians report are almost all caused by debtors reduced to slavery [92]. Slaves of foreign origin could not find the same resources in the free population; they had neither relatives, nor friends, nor patrons; for them, no one in the republic felt the slightest sympathy. Nevertheless, they managed to organize conspiracies, and sometimes showed themselves to be formidable to their possessors; but their efforts were always betrayed by their lack of skill with weapons; they had no other results than to increase the harshness of the masters, and to augment the misfortunes of their victims.

The pride that manifested itself in the Roman aristocracy, from the moment of its formation, only grew as the patricians extended their power over a greater number of slaves. The men who did not belong to this caste and who were designated by the name of plebeians were at first so debased that they were excluded from civil functions, sacerdotal functions, and military commands. The patricians, fearing to defile the purity of their blood by alliances with plebeians, forbade themselves, by a law, from marrying persons who did not belong to their caste; they left to other women only the honor of aspiring to be their concubines. At the same time that they oppressed, as a privileged body, the multitude placed beneath them, each of the members of this body sold his protection to a fraction of this multitude. It was impossible for this protection to diminish in any way the privileges of the patricians, since, in each case, the protected had for support only a single individual against the entire aristocracy. But if the protected gained little from it, the protectors gained much: the clients, who could not marry the daughters of their patrons, were obliged to provide them with a dowry, if they were not rich; they were obliged, moreover, to ransom them and their children, if they fell into servitude [93]. Any person who did not belong to the aristocratic class had to choose a patron from among its members, and any individual who had a patron was abject [94].

If the pride of the great possessors of men was excessive with regard to the individuals who were in the ranks of the plebeians, it was more energetic still with regard to the men who had passed through the state of slavery. The very title of freedman inspired such contempt for the one who bore it that it has passed down to us, through the centuries and revolutions; we all judge as if we were descendants of Roman senators. This contempt did not stop at the individuals who had had the good fortune to escape servitude: it passed to their descendants and pursued them to the last posterity. As for the men who were in a state of slavery, the masters saw them at such a distance beneath them that they could not imagine they had anything in common.

Men who tend toward their prosperity only by devoting themselves to the study of things, or by acting upon them, have no success to expect from cunning or deceit: it is not by surprise that a farmer can draw a rich harvest from his fields, or that a manufacturer can set machines in motion; for them, there is success only in truth, and ruin only in error. But it is not the same for men in whose eyes industry is debasing, who see honor only in command, and who found their prosperity on the gratuitous labor of the rest of the population; for these, cunning and bad faith are placed among the primary means of success; frankness and truth are causes of ruin. We know, in fact, of no people who carried the art of seducing, corrupting, or deceiving men as far as the Roman aristocracy; to keep its slaves in obedience, three means were sufficient for it: brutishness, force, and terror; but, to reduce the plebeians to being mere instruments in its hands, or to subjugate and despoil foreign nations, it needed moreover to resort to cunning and perfidy. Thus, it never ceased to make use of them, from its origin to its destruction; the profound art with which it deceived the nations perhaps served it more in enslaving them than the arms of its legions [95].

One can judge by the preceding what effects slavery produced on the morals of that part of the people that held the middle ground between the aristocracy and its slaves. Most of the vices I have already observed were common to it and the patricians; one found in the one as in the other, contempt for labor, love of idleness, the need for physical enjoyments, greed, a passion for the grossest spectacles, cruelty, pride, perfidy, and vengeance. Some of these vices were modified, however, by the difference in social positions; the patrician, in his pride, saw nothing above him; the plebeian was proud with regard to the slaves, the freedmen, and the foreigners he oppressed; but, with regard to the aristocracy, he was the most vile and grovelling of men; he had even less independence and personal dignity than professional beggars have among the moderns [96]. We will see better what the morals of this class of the population were when I expound the influence of slavery on the nature of government, and on the relations of nations among themselves [97].