The Roman Guide to Slave Management by Jerry Toner Page A

happy to do what his master wants. After all, where is the shame in carrying out your master’s wishes? It’s perfectly normal! As I have mentioned, if you wish to purchase yourself a boy as a pet, you would be well advised to go the Saepta Julia and ask to see if they have any Egyptians in the back. These are well suited for such a task, having fair skin, shiny eyes, a low brow, a narrow nose, long unbraided hair and red lips. As for young female slaves, you might consider a blonde-haired Batavian. Whatever your desire, just be careful about getting carried away when haggling over the price and thinking with your passion and not your head. That is when middle-aged men, who are old enough to know far better, end up acting, and paying, like fools.
    I like to reward my favourites with small gifts to show them that they are special to me. The slave girls arealways pleased to receive some clothes that my wife has finished with. My wife is, of course, completely relaxed about these dalliances. What man is without peccadilloes of this kind? Naturally, however, it would be unthinkable for her to indulge in any such acts with her male slaves. For that would bring great shame on the household and my name.
    It is an occupational hazard that you will get some of your slave girls pregnant. They often seem delighted to have acquired some closer link with their master. I like to treat these offspring with greater indulgence than I would normal slaves, and give them slightly better rations and easier work. I mentioned that I like to use them to look after my real children, because they do, after all, share some of my blood and so can be relied upon to be more loyal and diligent. Obviously I cannot be expected to treat all my illegitimate offspring in such a way. So if when born they look sickly, or if I already have a sufficient number of them in the household, I order the mothers to expose the infants by leaving them at the dump. Which reminds me, I heard a very amusing joke about this the other day. One day an idiot had a child by a slave girl, and his father advised him to kill it. But he replied, ‘First, you kill your own children, then you can talk about me killing mine.’
    It is important, though, that you do not allow your female slaves to be exploited for immoral sexual purposes. So whenever I sell a female slave who is still in possession of her looks, I stipulate in the contract of sale that her new owner will not prostitute her. Indeed, the divine emperor Vespasian promulgated a decree whichupheld conditions of that sort, whereby if any woman had been sold on condition that she should not be employed as a prostitute, and she had been so prostituted, then she should become free. He also ordered that if the buyer were later to sell her to someone else without imposing the same condition, she should become free in accordance with the conditions of the original sale, and become the freedwoman of the person who had originally sold her.
    Of course, slaves themselves also wish to have sex with each other and many wish to enter into family relationships. It is completely within your power as to whether you allow them such unions. Slaves cannot legally marry but they can be allowed to enter into an informal bond between themselves. Generally, when I am approached by two of my household slaves I agree to such a union as it generates goodwill, whereas a refusal will only result in spite. Marriage-type relations within the household also promote stability. I recommend that you allow them to raise a family. This brings with it a number of advantages. It makes them contented and more likely to work harder to earn their freedom; it provides ‘hostages’, so to speak, making it less likely that their parents will ever try to run away; and, above all, it means that there will be another generation of home-bred slaves to replace them once the parents have been freed or died, slaves who will be a genuine part of the family and not just