Slavery and Society at Rome by Keith Bradley

Slavery and Society at Rome by Keith Bradley

I admit it, I have fallen for the propaganda. The victor writes the history, as we all well know. The Roman empire was nothing if not good at selling itself. Scholars have been knee-deep in ancient Latin texts since the days of … well, the Roman empire, really. Of course, back then it was the very height of modern contemporary and that’s sort of part of the problem.

What with all the flowing togas, laurel wreaths and poetry, the marble statues and the tile mosaics and the splendid villas and the exploits and the Colosseum it is easy to get a little blinded to the fact that despite all its fancy words and thoughts on philosophy and democracy the Roman society was underscored by violence and inequality in a way that creates a massive case of cognitive dissonance.

Keith Bradley writes about slavery as an institution in Roman society and the impact it has on the economy as well as individual lives. This is not a lurid account, but rather academic, written for history students and those with a curious mind, such as myself. It examines the basic attitudes and the conditions under which slavery was upheld and rationalized as a perfectly reasonable use of resources.

What draws me in and holds my interest is of course first and foremost the idea of slavery in general. The very notion that you can own another human being and treat them in any way you see fit, because that is what it all boils down to in the end. I find it endlessly fascinating that the domestics didn’t just slit the throats of their masters while they slept, but that’s just me. It is a case of dominant rhetoric at its wildest, seen from a societal perspective, when each case of slavery must have been an individual tragedy.

It is also fascinating that even some higher level administrators in the Roman bureaucracy were slaves and that they in turn owned slaves. What that basically means is that they served an institution of the government that had enslaved them, they in turn enslaved others and at the end of the day they did not even own themselves. No matter if slaves were sometimes treated well, as members of the household, they were still not basically in possession of that most basic of all things, the illusion of free will.

Keith Bradley writes about the slave supply, the quality of life for the slave, resisting slavery and changes in attitude and progress. He also writes about what it is to be a slave. His prose is clean and easy, his examples many and detailed and well referenced. It is obvious that we are dealing with his area of expertise. Many of the thoughts and questions I have raised above stem from the text itself.

When dealing with things like manumission and the way that actually could mean that the quality of life became worse for the freed slaves, or when speaking of how slaves were the first to feel the brunt of a thing like lacking food supply, Bradley is dispassionate enough that you have to infer what that would mean for the individual yourself.

I like scholarly texts for precisely that reason. There is no sentimentality in this account, merely a stating of established facts. Bradley comments on the life of Epictetus, a philosopher who was born into slavery. Epictetus was much concerned with freedom, as you would assume, in his philosophy. He writes about the violence and cruelty of a slave’s life, and above all the caprice of the everyday existence, where the slave is subjected to the slave owner’s temper and whims and he asks pertinent questions as to how it would feel to live under these conditions, something the reader can benefit from thinking about.

Being a child of the postmodern, or liquid modernity, I have the warped and twisted perception of time that is the bane of linear thinking. This is history, but at the same time all these concerns are alive in the present tense. And my referential grid tends to play all over the intertextual, which is a fancy way of saying my brain is full of random text, quotes and movies. Roy Batty, the lead replicant in the movie Blade Runner tells Deckard “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave” and that about sums it up on an individual level.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history, in psychology, in slavery and in civilisation. I recommend it to anyone who has bought the propaganda that Roman society was civilised in the first place and that it was not built on a foundation of blood, violence and random cruelty.

Mule

Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient – Deserts

The English Patient (1992) is probably the best known of Ondaatje’s novels, largely due to Anthony Mingella’s movie of the same title made in -96. There are always varying opinions about books made into film, ususally on the theme “the book is not like the film, is not enough like the film, is too much like the film” and I personally think this has to do with the idea that the movie and the book can be the same thing, which is of course physically impossible. Not only is the movie a collective effort, it is also a completely different medium – seems obvious when you set it in writing, doesn’t it? So why do people argue the point?

I believe it is because we hold the filmmaker up to our own imaginings and try to see how well they’ve managed to translate the cinematography of the thearte of our minds onto the big screen.  But I digress.

The English Patient is one of those novels that offer a variety of different interpretations depending on what you focus on. You can say that about most novels, true, but normally you have to work harder for it. In this case the question of identity comes to the fore right from the first page. Identity and nationality.

The patient, count Almásy, is actually Hungarian by birth but has during his work in the desert come to the conclusion that nationality does not really matter in the select company of desert explorers he keeps before the war. He falls in love with Catherine Clifton, the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, both of them British. Almásy finally winds up in an Italian villa with a Canadian thief by the name of Caravaggio, a nurse named Hana, also Canadian, and a Sikh sapper working for the British by the name of Kip (or actually – Kirpahl Singh).

The action travels from Cairo to Italy via the Desert and mentions the places alive in peoples memories, such as English gardens and the Canadian lakes. Kip talks of India, and late in the action mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming the wise old fathers would not have done such a thing to the brown races of the world. Activate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism here if you like.

Another aspect is the interpersonal relationships and all their inherent politics. Almáshy and Catherine have an extra marital affair that has devastating consequences, and not only for them personally. In the end it results in Almáshy helping Rommel across the desert. When Clifton tries for a murder/suicide to punish his wife and Almáshy for their betrayal Catherine is hurt badly and when Almáshy tries to go for help he is rejected by the British who regard any foreign national as a threat at this time. Almáshy gets help from the Germans instead on the condition that he guides them through the desert. Catherine is waiting for him in the Gelf Kebir, but she is long dead by the time he gets there. It is when he tries to fly out of the desert in an old plane that has laid buried in the sand for a long time that he catches fire and falls burning from the sky. Rescued and kept alive by a desert tribe he is finally brought in to hospital, claiming to no longer know his name. He becomes The English Patient, and the irony is not lost on him.

The other crucial realtionship in this novel is that between Hana and Kip – the Canadian nurse caring for Almáshy and the Indian Sikh solider trying to clear the area in Italy where the Villa San Girolamo is situated of mines. Hana falls in love with the Sikh and seems fascinated in part with his otherness, the colour of his skin, the sing-song of his dialect, his long dark hair and so on. Hana has been a nurse all through the war and is described as having suffered shell-shock, not so much from the action as from the death of her father. She and Kip negotiate a complicated territory between them. She is scarred by the war and her own personal tragedies, Kip seems to distance himself from personal realtionships from the sheer need of distance. He is a sapper, after all. Death is just a step away for him at all times.

If you go at this book as a parable of love and indentity there are many interesting observations to make. Relationships are messy at best and fail, but for very different reasons. The landscape Almáshy has chosen to live in is the desert. His deep fascination with it seems to rub off on his charater. Catherine misses her green English gardens and never seems at home in the harsh dryness. Kip brings with him the fecundity of India and Hana speaks of the snow and lakes of Canada. It is more than just description of where the characters were born. It speaks instead of everyhting they are, to themselves and others.

On the level of language Ondaatje never disappoints. He delivers one magical image after another, replete with a deep afterthought on what these images will conjure up. One of my favourites is the description of the sand dunes as the corrugated surface of the roof of a dog’s mouth. And the idea that the desert explorer who is reported to have written this sentence was liked by his peers for having the kind of inquisitive curiosity that would stick his hand in the maw of a dog. Double and tripple meanings to everything. Beautiful, caustic at times, opulent at times.

Caravaggio, who has worked as a spy for the allies during the war has been caught and tortured by Nazi soliders who cut off his thumbs. He has since then been addicted to morphine and at one point he is described as wearing the false limbs that morphia promises. A beautiful summation of how damaged he is, and how addicted and scarred.

Ondaatje has done his homework and managed to write intelligently about WWII without falling into the typical genre traps and clichées. He takes hold of his subject and pours everything into it until the text is so rich and layered you can read and re-read his novel and still find more substance to it. The way he treats stories and timelines and subject matter always offers more than any paltry review can do justice to. This is not just another period piece love story. It has far more to offer.

MULE