Working paper – do not cite or distribute REDDE RATIONEM: HOLDING SLAVES TO ACCOUNT IN IMPERIAL ROME Egbert Koops 1. Introduction I am sure some of you will agree that few things are more interesting than the little lumps of metal that evoke the most profound and the very basest sentiments. Where else do trust and greed meet in equal degree, than money? Coins are produced, circulated, and validated; they travel from hand to hand, inside or beyond communities, in networks and circles; money is weighed, trusted and valued, mediated and authorised, both embodied and dematerialized. It is a medium that carries a message. So if we speak of cultural knowledge, then really, we ought to talk about money. But not today. Because some things trump even money in the context of cultural knowledge. And one of these things, I feel – though I am not so sure all of you will agree – one of the things that is even more interesting than money, is accounting. There is an old joke: “What is the difference between an accountant and a lawyer? – Answer: The accountant knows he is boring”. Which is why I would like to thank the organizers for giving a lawyer the opportunity to speak for 20 minutes about accountancy. But before you think you are listening to the next Wolf of Wall Street, pontificating that cupiditas bona est in a painfully sharp suit, I should point out that I will be speaking mostly about slavery and resistance, and at some point I will get so subversive that I might even metaphorically lose the tie. Without further ado, then: holding slaves to account. 2. The testament of Antonius Silvanus In 142 AD, in the early years of the reign of Antoninus Pius, the cavalry trooper Antonius Silvanus drew up his will at his legion’s winter camp at Alexandria. It resurfaced from the Egyptian sands in 1938 and has remained the completest surviving specimen of a Roman testament to date. Or so they say, because a photo is impossible to find. Silvanus instituted his son as heir, laid down terms for the acceptance of the inheritance, appointed an agent as guardian, and made out several generous legacies. The testament also provides for the manumission of a slave: “I wish my slave Cronion to be free after my death if he has done everything properly and gives [it] to my aforementioned heir or agent, and I wish the manumission tax for him to be paid from my estate.” This benevolent act, freeing a single named slave, cost Antonius Silvanus very little, since he could not take the slave with him into the afterlife. The profit was correspondingly small. The slave Cronion would take his manumittor’s name, and perhaps he would be grateful. But as a libertus 1 Working paper – do not cite or distribute orcinus, someone who had been freed by a master ‘beyond the grave’ (in Orco), his obligations to his patron’s son were very limited indeed, at least under classical Roman law. Essentially, the libertus orcinus was an “independent freedman” in Garnsey’s (1981) sense of the word, freed from the duty to perform operae, provide alimenta, and what have you. Thus, solicitude for the name and family reputation can hardly have been the reason to free Cronion. After all, Silvanus would not be around to see his generosity rewarded, while his son and only heir lost the value of a slave and most of the value of a freedman. In this case the heir was even burdened with the 5% manumission tax that he had to pay over the slave’s market value. So why was Cronion freed? In a discussion of the “ideal of regular manumission”, Wiedemann (1985:164) adduced this passage to show that the Romans freed few slaves but desperately wanted to believe that faithful slaves would be rewarded with freedom. Freeing Cronion allowed Silvanus to fashion himself as a benign master. To quote Wiedemann (1985:164), referring to the particular clause si recte tractaverit, “manumission is a just reward for faithful service”. Yet on consideration, the clause has a different legal meaning. Si recte tractaverit is not a throwaway remark by the testator about “faithful service” but a condition that should be read together with the obligation to surrender something (et tradiderit). The entire manumission depends on fulfilment of this condition. If Cronion did not handle things correctly or did not hand something over, he simply would not be freed. The will does not specify what Cronion was handling, presumably because the testator thought it obvious. Liebs (2000:125) assumes the slave should merely collect the personal belongings of the testator and deliver them to the heir. But in light of the legacies mentioned in the will, another explanation is possible. By way of vindication legacies, Silvanus left a total of 1,350 denarii in ready money to his friends and family, representing over four years’ of legionary wages at 300 denarii a year. Is that a lot? Well, yes, it is. Now, Roman slave prices are notoriously hard to compare. The documents rarely provide enough information about ability or appearance to make comparison possible, even without taking regional differences into account or the thorny problem of market integration. Guarantees and exonerations must have had an influence as well. And so these prices are merely mentioned to indicate that Silvanus’ legacies of 1,350 denarii represent a substantial amount of money, enough to buy two to six slaves, quite apart from the gift of freedom to Cronion. Presumably, Silvanus did not want to beggar his son and heir, and so the inheritance will have been bigger still, perhaps totalling close to 4,000 denarii if Champlain is to be believed (1991:184-­‐86). In other words, the simple cavalry soldier Antonius Silvanus appears to have been a moderately wealthy man. 2 Working paper – do not cite or distribute Now, someone must have tended this estate when Silvanus was away with the army, and it is quite possible that Cronion was a trusted slave of the testator who looked after his accounts. It is also possible that Cronion was engaged in some business on his own behalf out of his slave peculium. This, I guess I should explain. A peculium is a slave’s patrimony; his “pocket money”, if you will. Even though a slave had no legal personality and could hold no property of his own, his master could allow him to use certain assets as if they belonged to him, giving the slave a measure of autonomy and an incentive to increase his holdings by his labour. Peculia could be minute or gigantic, or anything in between. Pomponius mentions clothes, Varro livestock, Apuleius food stolen from the table. The vicarius or sub-­‐slave appears quite often in legal sources, and many inscriptions were bought de suo. As usual, Pliny goes all the way, up to the 13 million sesterces that one of Nero’s dispensatores allegedly paid for his freedom. 3. Dependency on slave accountants It is hardly worth repeating Finley’s observation that Roman slaves occupied “a spectrum of social positions”. Not every employee in a modern firm has access to the board of directors or the corporate bank account, and not every Roman slave had access to his master, let alone his master’s accounts. However, what interests me today is precisely the type of educated and skilled slave that worked in proximity to his master and was allowed, or tolerated, to put his hand in the cookie jar. The two job titles connected most clearly to this type of access are that of actor and dispensator, though specialist managers such as the vilicus, the insularius and the cellararius had similar privileges on a smaller scale. The actor and dispensator in particular stood a very good chance of being manumitted under the condition of rendering account, upon the death of their master. I will leave the “why” question open for now and return to that at the very end. Two connected problems are continually lurking in the background here. The first is that every paterfamilias was socially expected to have complete knowledge and a complete paper trail of the tiniest expenditure in his household, keeping immaculate records of every transaction. Every item was jotted down, to be transferred to the daily register, and then transferred to an income and expense ledger organized under several subheadings or rationes. No less than perfection was required, because the books could be requested and used as evidence in court. Incongruences or mistakes would leave one open to ridicule or, worse, liability. Cicero used bad accounting to great rhetorical effect, to destroy the reputations of Verres as governor, and Fannius 3 Working paper – do not cite or distribute Chaerea as a private person. A bad accountant is a bad paterfamilias. And a good paterfamilias checks the books daily. How absolutely impossible that is, considering the size of Roman elite households, is illustrated by a famous scene from the Satyricon. An actuarius enters to read a bulletin of daily events. When he comes to a fire in the gardens at Pompeii, Trimalchio interrupts him and asks when he bought those gardens. A year ago, the slave answers, and so they aren’t on the ratio yet. Trimalchio erupts in anger that he will not have any property entered on his accounts unless he hears of it within six months. The joke, of course, is that he is desperately trying to assert authority, but has absolutely no clue what is going on, because a good paterfamilias – which he is not – would have spotted the purchase of a set of gardens quite a bit sooner. Trimalchio refuses to take any active hand in the matter. Even if he hears about a purchase within six months, he will not be the one entering it on his own account. Compare that to the exhortations of the agronomists: the first thing you do when you arrive at the villa, says Cato, is check the rationes. If you don’t, says Columella, the slaves will embezzle all your produce by faking the accounts. Which is why you should never let your vilicus engage in trade, because he will never be able to pay you back what he owes for lack of ready money. Sound advice from surly Romans perhaps, but practice will have been quite different. And that inevitably leads to the second problem, namely that Roman masters had very little idea what their slaves were up to, yet had little choice but to trust them to keep their accounts in order. Even the notorious stickler Augustus, always distrustful of slaves and freedmen, left a note for his successor with the names of the freedmen and slaves, a quibus ratio exigi posset, from whom a reckoning could be demanded for the amount of money in the state coffers (Suet. Aug. 101,4). In a subversion of all normal relations, slave accountants held a major advantage over their masters. They produced and inscribed a type of knowledge that few outside their own class could review or validate, and even monopolized it in embodied form. Several jurists note, for instance, that a slave who has to render account should not only balance the books, making good the deficit out of his own pocket, but should also surrender the physical objects (D. 40,4,13,2). There is also a permanent danger that outsiders will bribe an accounting slave into defacing or destroying the ledgers (D. 1,18,21), and the provincial governors are enjoined to punish such corruption harshly. Both imply that the slave accountants themselves exercised physical control over the actual medium, the volumina and chartae, notwithstanding the social mores surrounding bookkeeping by the paterfamilias. In the legacy of an actor, for instance, his books are included as a matter of fact, because the original accounts as well as the actor himself are required to clarify future difficulties in 4 Working paper – do not cite or distribute his particular field (D. 10,2,8 pr.). New items or new debts may crop up, and so the books can never be closed, leading to a continuing dependency. Bookkeeping in antiquity is not an exact science, but rather more in the nature of an art. Ambitious slaves would train in that art in specialized schools, learning both literacy – the minimum requirement for a dispensator, according to Cicero (Rep. 5,3,5) – and more important, numeracy. Training raised a slave’s value, and so the schools were busy, or so Martial claims (10,62,4). Trimalchio himself is an example of a slave who first learned to count and keep accounts, and then became dispensator (Petr., Sat. 29,4). Without specialist skills and specialized knowledge, it is implied, the books mean very little. In such a setting, one may be forgiven the bad joke that there is always a danger of being possessed by your possessions. To meet their social obligation of presenting a balanced account, masters had to trust their slaves without reservation. Whether such trust was always merited, is another matter entirely. 4. Accounting for subversion Take the dispensator Calenus for instance. In an example that was probably drawn from an actual testament, Pomponius cites a clause from the writings of the late Republican jurist Labeo: “my accountant Calenus is to be free and to have all his goods and a legacy of a hundred, if it appears that the accounts have been kept diligently”. He then explains that a diligence is required that profits the master and not necessarily the slave, and not only in calculating the accounts, but also in paying over the balance (reliqua). That second part is revealing. Pomponius has a case in mind in which a slave receives his freedom together with his peculium, if he calculates and pays over in good faith the remainder of the accounts in his care. So Calenus had his own money as well as access to his master’s money, and inevitably the two would become confused. Now, the less reliqua there would be for the master, the more peculium there would be for the slave. The jurist thought it worth pointing out what seems fairly obvious, namely that the master’s interest should prevail when untangling these affairs. Fairly obvious indeed, but perhaps also a sign of a different underlying reality, or at least of an awareness that the interests of master and slave did not run parallel here, contrary to the Roman literary ideal. ‘Good faith’, bona fides, is legalese for: please behave, because we have very little way of auditing your actions. Let me give a few examples from the casebooks of the 2nd century jurist Quintus Cervidius Scaevola. He reports that he was consulted when two slaves had been released on the condition of rendering account. Should they pay back what they had willingly embezzled, consilio et fraude (D. 40,5,41,11)? Sure, as part of rendering account in full. And if the heirs are under a 5 Working paper – do not cite or distribute fideicommissum to release Stichus on condition of account, and Stichus has taken all the money, has failed to enter certain sums in the books, and has generally pillaged the inheritance? He can still gain his freedom as long as he pays back what he owes (D. 40,7,40 pr.). And if he has transferred all his own money, id est peculium, to some distant place before handing over the books? It doesn’t matter, as long as the account is rendered in good faith (D. 40,7,40,6). If the master has been too ill for years to sign the books regularly – but apparently well enough to sign his testament, Scaevola wryly remarks – then his actor Stichus can still render account ‘in good faith’, even if he is the only one who has any clue what the books contain (D. 40,7,40,3). When the time came to evaluate the reckoning – to validate knowledge, in other words – it was not up to the heir to decide what due diligence entailed. Roughly at the same time Silvanus made his will, Antoninus Pius issued a rescript stating that the consuls should appoint an arbiter to check the accounts of the slave Epaphroditus and establish what he must pay, and which books and documents he should deliver for inspection (D. 35,1,50). Slightly later, Marcus Aurelius decided in the case of the slave Trophimus that a similar rule applied to slaves released by fideicommissum, although he tasked the praetors with appointing an arbiter rather than the consuls (D. 40,5,37). The arbiter was a vir bonus, a man of good standing, and though that sounds impressive, one wonders how much experience with accounting such an arbiter would have had. There is no sign – or at least I have found none – that experienced freedmen were used for the task, which one would perhaps expect. Callistratus describes what the process entails (D. 35,1,82): it isn’t enough to offer a sum of money in a pouch (in folle) and be done with it, but the accounts should be offered for a reading and for calculations, and then every item should be explained to the heirs, who will finally sign in agreement. Since it is the slave who is doing the explaining and not an external auditor, it seems just possible that some obfuscation would perhaps be involved. To me, this sounds an awful lot like negotiations of the following type: “we know you cooked the books, we know you robbed us blind, but without your help we’re completely lost, and besides we can hardly prove it – so please give us what you think you owe us, and we’ll call it quits.” Pomponius, for instance, refers to a statement by the late first-­‐century jurists Neratius and Aristo that a slave can give security for the unclear (obscurius) part of the balance. Otherwise hardly any slave would ever become free, “owing to the uncertainty of the account and this type of affairs” (D. 40,7,5 pr.). Celsus, from the first half of the second century, also allows a glimpse of the unravelling of these relations. If a slave has been freed on condition of account, but the heir will not allow him to sell off his peculium to raise money to pay the reliqua, then the 6 Working paper – do not cite or distribute slave will be free as if the condition were fulfilled (D. 40,7,23,1). This is an extension of the general legal principle that a condition is automatically met if someone who stands to gain from its non-­‐fulfilment hinders or prevents its fulfilment. But if you think about it, what it means is that the slave is selling off his master’s goods to pay his master what he owes him, which his master cannot prevent, on pain of losing his slave. And this rule even holds when the peculium has not been granted to the slave as a legacy. In short, the Roman jurists consider it a near-­‐normal state of affairs that the accounts of master and slave become hopelessly entangled; they also consider it perfectly acceptable that a slave supplies from his ‘own’ money what went missing from his master’s accounts; and they consider this sufficient in all cases to fulfil the condition for manumission. Africanus, from the middle of the second century, is very clear on the point: “to give an accounting means no more than to pay the balance” (D. 35,1,32) and as long as this happens in good faith, the slave will be free. 5. Conclusion: redde rationem I come to my conclusion. It is fairly common in legal sources to find slaves accounting to their masters’ heirs in fulfilment of a condition for their release. The Digests contain roughly 70 examples, many of which are drawn from actual practice. The clause is usually that the slave shall be free if he has rendered account (si rationem reddidit or dederit). It is also interesting to note that we have a second testament, apart from that of Antonius Silvanus, which is quite a bit longer and quite a bit more incomplete, but which also contains such a clause. That is of course the so-­‐called ‘Dasumius’ testament. It is interesting to note that the two most complete Roman testaments in our possession both contain a conditional manumission clause of rendering account. Returning to the testament of Silvanus, finally, I hope the manumission of Cronion now appears in a different light. Si omnia recte tractaverit et tradiderit: not Wiedemann’s “faithful service” is the condition for freedom, but that he has accounted truthfully and has handed over the balance. We do not know the nature of Cronion’s job, but it is implied that he had access to his master’s accounts and, almost as a corollary, probably had a peculium. If so, it is not explicitly granted to him as a legacy and is therefore considered withdrawn, assuming there would be anything left after settling. In this light, the testamentary manumission of Cronion seems less like an act of benevolence and more like the winding-­‐up of a partnership. The slave’s help is indispensable to establish the contents of the inheritance, and manumission is a strong incentive to produce a truthful account. The legacies that are often coupled to this type of manumission only reinforce this view. They put a premium on a 7 Working paper – do not cite or distribute truthful account, while the penalty for a detected lie is slavery, tipping the scales in favour of truth. If you think back to Calenus, who would receive his peculium and 100 si rationes diligenter tractasse videbitur, he was given less incentive to commit fraud than if he had merely been released under the condition of account. Of course, any master such as Silvanus could have ordered his slave to render account prior to his death, and he could also have revoked Cronion’s privileges and peculium at any point in time. But even so, death is a natural moment to extricate the affairs of master and trusted slave, precisely because the heirs lack sufficient information about the inheritance if the slave bookkeeper does not cooperate. Put bluntly, upon the death of his master, the slave accountant has the heirs by the abacus. 8