Slave labour and incentives Flashcards
Halstead, P. (2014), Two-Oxen Ahead: Pre-Mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean, pg. 169.
“‘The final stage in processing grain for human consumption usually involved grinding to flour, and in recent decades, most Mediterranean farmers entrusted this task to a commercial mill, despite the apparently universal conviction that millers were dishonest”.
Mills were important as needed for food
millers were dishonest as they were slaves being punished
Pherekrates Fr. 10).
At that time there was no slave for anyone, no Manes nor but the women had to toil with all the chores of the house themselves. Then, in addition, they would grind the grain early in the morning, and the village echoed as they worked millstones
This is a mythical time before slavery, claiming women have to grind grain, Means slaves took over this tedious job
THE ODYSSEY
Twelve women worked these mills making flour of barley and of wheat, the marrow of men. The others had gone to sleep, having ground their wheat, but she alone, the feeblest, had not stopped. She stopped working her mill and, standing up, spoke a word, a sign for her master: ‘“Father Zeus, lord of gods and men, you have thundered from the starry sky, yet there are no clouds anywhere: surely you are revealing a sign for someone. Bring to pass this word uttered by my wretched self. May the suitors for the last time feast today in the halls of Odysseus. They bring me sorrow with bitter labour as I make them barley flour, may they dine here for the final time.”
Slave women are grinding grain and it feels like punishment as suitors are eating so much
Lysias 1.18 (beginning of fourth century):
* “So it is up to you,” I said, “to decide between two options as you wish, either to be whipped and thrown into a mill and for you to experience such suffering forever, or to tell me everything truthfully”
mills became a place of punishment as they were dark and awful conditions, chained up and walking in circles all the time
Menander’s Heros 3-4 (end of fourth century):
You look as if you’ve done a terrible crime, Daos!You’re distressed. Expecting to be sent quern- pushing (i.e. milling) in leg irons?
shows mills as place of punishment and how cruel they were
Cicero Letters to Quintus I .2.14):
Furthermore, a slave called Licinus (you know him) belonging to our friend. He has run away. He was in Athens with Patro the Epicurean posing as a free man, and passed from there to Asia. Later, one Plato of Sardis, an Epicurean, who is a good deal in Athens and was there when Licinus arrived, having later learned from a letter of that he is a runaway, arrested him and gave him into custody in Ephesus but from his letter we are not sure whether the fellow was
put into gaol or into the mill.
Mills still place of punishment even though they had worked out how to use donkeys for this
Apuleis Metamorphoses
* “Their skins striped with livid welts, their seamed backs half-visible through the ragged shirts they wore; some with loin-cloths but all revealing their bodies under their clothes; foreheads branded, heads half-shaved, and feet chained together. They were wretchedly sallow too, their eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness, they could barely see, and like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash.”
novel describes the poor conditions of the mills and how they were branded and in awful conditions
Augustine On the Spirit and the Letter 33.58:
Suppose a master, for example, who should say to his servants, I wish you to labour in my and, after your work is done, to feast and take your rest but who, at the same time, should require any who refused to work to grind in the mill ever after.
again mill place of punishment if slave refuses to work
Theophrastus Characters 20.10:
While they are drinking [a man of bad taste at his symposium] says. “The delight of the guests has been arranged”; if they bid it, “The servant will go and fetch her right now from the pimp, so she can pipe us all to happiness.”
evidence of slaves being used for performance and likely prostitution
XENOPHON SYMPOSIUM 2.1
When the tables had been removed and the guests had poured a libation and sung a hymn, there entered a man from Syracuse, to give them an evenings merriment. He had with him a fine flute-girl a dancing-girl—one of those skilled in acrobatic tricks,—and a very handsome boy, who was expert at playing the cithera (string instrument) and at dancing; the Syracusan made money by exhibiting their performances as a spectacle.
seems Syracusan man-made money by exhibiting the slaves and their performance
not called slaves but seem to be
same as in muslim empire e.g Inan who was the daughter of a slave woman and became famous for her performance and eventually brought by ruler of empire
(Juvenal Satire 10.77-81).
‘“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”
he is slagging off the fact that elite romans are now trying to buy favour with gladiator games and circuses etc
(Cicero, For Sestio 133 — 1st century BC).
* In the late Republic too — ‘“Everybody knows that, since he treats with disdain a law of mine,
which explicitly forbids anyone to give gladiatorial games within two years of his being a candidate for office either actually or prospectively”.
Cicero banned people from putting on these efforts made by the elite to buy people favour in the form of gladiators
(Juvenal Satires 6.107-1 12).
* “Besides, his face was really disfigured: there was a furrow chafed by his helmet, an enormous lump right on his nose, and the nasty condition of a constantly weeping eye. But he was a gladiator. That’s what makes them into what she [an imaginary elite Roman woman] preferred to her sons and her fatherland, to her sister and her husband. Its the steel that they’re in love with.”
he seems to be a jealous man that gladiators were sexy things
or hes gay
(Cassius Dio, History of Rome, 48.43.3).
* Another [magistrate], who had been enrolled in the senate, desired to fight as a gladiator. Not only was he prevented from doing this, but an act was also passed prohibiting any senator from fighting as a gladiator
dont know motifs, might be the Romans don’t wanna lose their own men for no good cause, or politics or because they like the fact its slaves as no one cares about them and they are exotic adding to appeal
Cassius Dio 72,22,3),
the Emperor Commodus was said to have fought in the arena with a wooden sword — to the disapproval of the crowd.
suggests people like watching slaves, maybe as not as rigged or its exotic and interesting
US doesnt have anything to this scale, no where does really
