Emma Southon: “The most humiliating task was holding the chamber pot while the master urinated”

BarcelonaThe Roman Empire would not have been possible without slaves, but we can rarely hear their voices. The British historian Emma Southon (Brighton, 1984) has searched for them in epitaphs and graffiti and explains it in Servus. How slavery created the Roman empire (Pasado y Presente).

Our image of Rome is very influenced by cinema and series. Have we been too lenient or indulgent with the Romans when explaining their slave system?

— Yes, we are too kind to the Romans. Even when films like Gladiator, series or books acknowledge slavery, they very rarely adopt the perspective of an enslaved person and almost never acknowledge the extent to which slavery was horrifying in Rome. Often the idea is conveyed that it was not that bad, that it was a sort of benevolent slavery. The problem is that, for a long time, especially in Europe and the English-speaking world, there has been a great interest in remembering the Romans as heroes. And to be able to continue admiring them, the more unpleasant parts of their culture have been overlooked.

Most enslaved people did not leave written records. How have their stories been recovered?

— I have been grateful for every small fragment of writing and, fortunately, there are very many of them. We do not have the complete biography of any enslaved person, because it was considered that their lives were not worth explaining. But in urban settings throughout the Empire, we have thousands of epitaphs of people who died as slaves. And what do they remember? They wanted to record who they loved. It is much less common for them to define themselves by their work than literature would have us believe; they are described as someone's husband, wife, mother, daughter, or friend. The graffiti in Pompeii show us the same. When two enslaved people call themselves maritus and uxor (husband and wife) on a tombstone, you have a love story: legally they could not marry nor did they have any legal protection, so they appropriated a legal term only to express a romantic bond. And every woman who is described as a mother has experienced a pregnancy and has gone through childbirth. Extrapolating all these life experiences has a special charm that you do not have when you write about emperors.

Is there any individual story or any of these traces that has captivated you in particular?

— I love the little graffiti in the houses of Pompeii. There is one in a house where the name of a woman named Romula appears seven or eight times. On one wall, she wrote: “Romula lives here with her boyfriend”. In another room, she just carved her name, and further on, there is a small fragment of poetry. It is evident that she moved throughout the house and that, every time she could, she left her mark. I like to imagine her as a teenager who simply wants to leave a trace and let everyone know that she loved someone.

In the book, beyond violence and great revolts like that of Spartacus, you place great emphasis on everyday “small victories”. Why?

— Because, otherwise, history becomes just a catalog of miseries. Slavery entailed inherent horrors, but enslaved people did not live it nor speak of it as a constant horror. I like to see human beings acting in the most human way possible within a system designed to dehumanize them. I love the small daily rebellions: the enslaved who complain that they are being robbed, who drink their good wine when they are out, or who do not come when they are called. Pliny the Younger, on one occasion, took two enslaved boys to Rome so they could act as his secretaries, and one day they vanished because someone paid them to go and act as an audience at a poetry reading. Or those who take as long as is humanly possible to run an errand, taking themselves little vacations. They are not grand revolts, but it is a way of saying: “This minute is mine”.

In the introduction, it is anticipated that urine plays a surprisingly prominent role in the book. Why was it so present in this context?

— Because the Romans talked about it a lot! The main reason is that, when Roman writers wanted to give an example of a deeply humiliating and unbearable task for an enslaved person, they always mentioned having to hold the chamber pot while the dominus urinated. Seneca mentions it a couple of times. You stop and think about it for two seconds and you see that it is truly a degrading situation, and at the same time you know that all these authors who write about it made their slaves do it and then despised them for having done it. Furthermore, urine was collected and used as a cleaning product and in medicinal remedies, so it was part of their daily life much more than ours.

Was there a great abyss between being enslaved in an urban house and working in a mine or in the countryside?

— The problem is that almost all the written records we preserve come from urban environments: people who lived in cities or towns, who knew how to read and write or were part of a literate culture and could pay to leave a record of their lives. In contrast, about the people enslaved in the countryside, in production workshops, or in the mines, we know practically nothing. Archaeology is very fragmentary and historically has focused little on them. For the vast majority, we only have numbers: a fragment of a sales contract at a gold mine or a note from the procurator of Egypt saying that he has bought 40,000 tunics for the slaves of a quarry. We know they were there and that they were vital to the Empire, even if we do not have their individual stories.

Freedmen –enslaved people who achieved freedom– have often been seen as an example of social mobility. Why do you explain that this freedom was, in reality, another layer of control?

— They were indeed a useful example of success for the system, because they allowed one to say: "Look at what you can achieve if you behave well". As a freedman, no one could hit, kill, or sell you, and you had access to citizenship. But if you were freed during the lifetime of your dominus, you remained bound to him by very strict moral and legal obligations: you had to show him constant gratitude and, if you did not, you could be punished or re-enslaved. Furthermore, the Romans jealously protected the distinction between the free-born and freedmen: you carried a social stigma, there were jobs you could not do, and people you could not marry. That is why Roman writers were so angry when someone freed their slaves in their will: those freedmen had no living patron to whom they owed obedience and, on top of that, they often inherited money. This frightened the elite so much that they ended up passing laws to limit how many people you could free on your deathbed.

Was there ever any movement in the ancient world that advocated for the abolition of slavery?

— Not a single one. The only voice questioning it is very late, in the 5th century: a bishop named Gregory of Nyssa, who suggests that perhaps slavery is wrong. But this is already after the fall of the Western Empire and everyone treated him like a madman. During the Roman Empire, there was nothing of the sort.