Churchill Fellow Jerry Toner has published an entertaining and informative guide to the realities of slavery in ancient Rome with an introduction written by Mary Beard.
How to Manage Your Slaves by Marcus Sidonius Falx, published earlier this year has just been released in the US under the title—The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Marcus Sidoniud Falx to good reviews from the New Yorker and Bloomberg News among others.
Narrated by the fictitious, cranky, and old-fashioned Marcus Sidonius Falx, this Roman’s-eye view of slavery provides an unvarnished and, darkly comic tour of Roman institutional slavery.
Drawing on a wealth of original sources, including Seneca and Pliny the Younger, the book explores all facets of Roman slave-ownership: where and how to buy slaves, how to tell a productive slave from a problematic one, what to do in the event of an uprising and guidance on the delicate subject of when you should let your slaves engage in amorous relations with each other—or their master. Toner provides commentary after each chapter to place Falx’s guide in the historical context of ancient Rome.
The book aims to provide insight into Roman attitudes to slavery and why slaves meant so much to them. For the modern reader, to whom slavery may seem comfortably confined to the ancient past, the book ends with a stark reminder that slavery is still very much a modern reality:
‘before we congratulate ourselves on how far we have come, we should remember that it is a tragic fact that even though slavery is illegal in every country in the world, it still exists widely. The NGO Free the Slaves estimates that there are 27 million individuals who are forced to work under the threat of violence, without pay or hope of escape. There are more slaves in the world today than there were at any point in the life of the Roman empire.’
How to Manage Your Slaves by Marcus Sidonius Falx is published in the UK by Profile Books and in the US as The Roman Guide to Slave Management: A Treatise by Marcus Sidoniud Falx by Overlook.
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Image top: Mosaic floor with slaves serving at a banquet, Dougga, 2nd century AD. Photograph Dennis Jarvis.
