The key ideas

How to Manage Your Slaves

Marcus Sidonius Falx, Jerry Toner, 2014

A Roman aristocrat gives practical advice: how to buy a slave, how to keep order, when to punish and when to set someone free. This aristocrat never existed. He was invented by a Cambridge historian, who added a commentary on the real Roman sources to every chapter. A satire that shows slavery through the voice of someone who saw it as normal.

Who it is for

For anyone curious about Ancient Rome who wants to understand how a society can treat as normal something that seems monstrous today.

So many slaves, so many enemies.

What the book is about

Imagine a handbook for the owner of an estate. A calm tone, practical advice, an eye for profit. How to choose goods at the market, how to keep order, when to punish and when to reward. Only here, the goods are people.

The author of this advice, the Roman aristocrat Marcus Sidonius Falx, never existed. He was invented by Jerry Toner, a historian of Ancient Rome at Cambridge. Falx’s voice is fictional, but Toner takes what he says from Roman sources: treatises on running an estate, laws, letters and philosophy. After each chapter, Toner steps out of the role and explains what his character’s words are based on.

Why this format? A textbook can tell you that slavery was cruel. This satire shows something else, and it’s unsettling: how cruelty can sound from the inside, to someone who sees it as the ordinary order of things.

Idea 1. Goods with a sign around the neck

Falx starts with the purchase, treating it like any major deal. Sellers are crafty, he warns, so look carefully: at posture, at teeth, at signs of illness. And be sure to find out whether the slave has ever tried to run away.

Toner explains that this reflects real practice. At the Roman market, slaves were put on display with a sign stating their origin and defects. If the seller had hidden an illness or a tendency to run away, the buyer could return the “goods”.

This law protected the buyer. The person being sold was not its concern.

In conversations about layoffs, people are sometimes called “units” or “resources”. That isn’t slavery, but it’s worth noticing how such language pushes the person aside.

When people are talked about in the language of a deal, their suffering can drop out of sight. Language sometimes makes cruelty invisible to the one using it.

Read in Livria

About the author

Jerry Toner is a historian of Ancient Rome at the University of Cambridge who writes about the everyday life and popular culture of the Romans. Marcus Sidonius Falx is the fictional Roman aristocrat in whose voice the book is written.

All books by this author: Marcus Sidonius Falx, Jerry Toner

Terms from the book

  • Satire: A genre that mocks or exposes something, often by presenting it with a straight face. Here, it’s a story told by a fictional master who sees slavery as normal.
  • Talking tool: An expression from Varro’s Roman treatise on farming, where slaves are listed alongside oxen and carts as tools of labour.
  • Peculium: A small amount of property or savings that a master allowed a slave to manage. Legally, it still belonged to the master.
  • Saturnalia: A Roman festival in December during which, for a few days, masters and slaves were allowed to swap roles.
  • Freedman: A former slave who had been set free. He kept obligations to his former master and could face mockery because of his origins.

All terms

Similar books