The Roman Guide to Slave Management by Jerry Toner Read Free Book Online Page B

not permit them some socialising.
    Clothes should also be given out according to how well they are deserved. Those slaves who have worked hard should be rewarded with better quality shoes and tunics, whereas those who have shirked their responsibilities must realise that they face the consequences of their idleness in all aspects of their life. As a standard rule, I give each farm slave a one-metre-long tunic and a coarse blanket every other year. When you issue the tunic or the blanket, make sure that you make them hand in their old ones so that your female slaves can make patchwork from them. A stout pair of wooden shoes should be issued every other year. In all matters of clothing you should think about usefulness rather then appearance. To keep the slave protected against wind, cold and rain, give them long-sleeved leather tunics, extra patchwork clothes, or hooded cloaks. If you do this then there is no weather so bad that some work cannot be done outside.
    Your slaves need adequate shelter to sleep in. House your domestic slaves in small bedrooms or storage rooms, and provide an old mattress for them to lie on and an old cloak to use as a blanket. In the country, you will almost certainly find room among the rafters of some building to use as sleeping quarters for the slaves. If it is large enough, and the risk of fire is low, then you may well find the rafters in the kitchen can provide a cosy area all year round. The worst thing for a farm is to be workedby slaves housed in a kind of underground prison block, for anything that is done by men who have no hope is done badly.
    It is a sad fact that today, wherever you travel in the empire, you see the land being worked by slaves instead of the yeomen of old who made Rome great. These days, farms are trod by feet in chains, by hands which have been punished, by faces which have been branded. Mother Earth is not so stupid that she doesn’t notice that proud and free peasants have been swapped for insolent and lazy slaves. It is not surprising that we do not get the same profits from farms worked by slaves as we used to get from the labour of Roman citizens. The fundamental problem is that the slave has no incentive to work hard. He gets fed whatever the farm produces. But there are some precautions you can undertake to try to minimise this shortfall and force or bribe the slave into working more productively.
    The first, which I have already mentioned but cannot emphasise enough, is to reward hard work. It is very demoralising for good slaves if they see that they are doing all the hard work, but that the lazy slaves get just as much food as they do. It is also essential that each slave should have a clearly defined long-term goal. If you are so minded, this can be for them to win their freedom. You will find it both fair and beneficial to offer freedom as a long-term bonus for loyalty and hard work. If the slave believes that the goal is attainable then he will work diligently towards it. Allowing your slaves to have children provides them with another incentive to work hard. If they do they will enjoy the fruits and pleasures of animproved family life. But if they displease you, then the children can be sold off to another owner as a punishment. If you organise occasional sacrifices and holidays as a reward for the hardest workers then you will also make it more likely that the work will get done well.
    The second is to have clear job roles. This generates clear accountability and ensures hard work, since slaves knows that if a certain piece of work is not carried out then the blame can clearly be laid at the feet of one of them. If, on the other hand, everyone does the same thing, none of the slaves will think that any job is his own responsibility. If an individual works hard then all will benefit, rather than him specifically, whereas if they all slack off then it is impossible to identify who was most responsible. That is why ploughmen must be kept distinct from