First management theorists or first recorded management theorists? I feel like there are similarly (or nearly as) advanced cultures in this approximate era for whom we unfortunately have significantly less recorded material - and often what we do have was created by other civilizations (such as Rome itself or Greek city-states) who interacted with said people. These persons surely had theories of management for their assets, which undoubtedly would include slaves and indentured servants.
A semantic pedantry argument could be made that recorded material is what separates the theorist from the practitioner. Easily countered of course by remarking that records getting lost over the course of a few millennia shouldn't make a theorist less of a theorist.
Personally, I'm fine with adding an implicit "that we know of" to every "first".
Thanks - I wanted to cite Xenophon but couldn't decide if it was Oeconomicus alone or whether one could argue that the Lacedaemonion Politeia includes an assessment of Spartan economic management with regards to their Helot-based economy.
Assuming Chanakya did write some version of the Arthashastra, it was roughly contemporaneous with Oeconomicus. I wonder if either of them reference any earlier related works.
Neolithic humans made constructions that took a staggering amount of manpower over a very prolonged time. The story of how such things come to be is complex and has many variations over place and time. There's no "first management theorists" just humans and human society learning and evolving as it has since before we were even human.
I find the concept of this article not just pointless but somewhat obnoxious in projecting a conceptual parallel between roman aristocratic slave holders and modern employment relations. Both have their pathologies but we shouldn't blend them into one category imo.
I'm really pretty sure they did. In fact I'd go one step further and say a lot of Old and Middle Kingdom society WAS a peculiar kind of management theory. Those pyramids weren't built by slaves either. There is plenty of managerial advice in their literature. They even invented the careers-advice text... (be a scribe, my son; it's indoor work with no heavy lifting)
You always need to assume “recorded”. Humans have been around for 300,000 years and evidence for more complex culture and technology goes back about 60,000.
People have always been as smart as they are, and getting other people to do work for you is probably the second or third oldest profession. I’m sure some ancient chieftain of a long forgotten tribe expounded on management theory eons ago.
Management theorists for managing slaves and servants. Take the lessons you want from that.
But, that’s why the majority of us are called “wage slaves”, I guess. Hoarding of wealth by the owning class helps keep everyone else needing to work for cheap, simpler economy to have workers take care of their own housing and food in exchange for the needed money.
I doubt they were the first. This is just history being written by those who write it down, pre-written-historic is not pre-social (though writing expanded the social groups you could theorize about.)
Putting the reader in the master's perspective certainly is a choice.
It fails to investigate that almost anyone in its ostensible audience of corporate managers is both a "master" and "slave" (mangers have managers).
An incredibly grim takeaway as well. It acknowledges the exploitation in both systems, but doesn't ask you to do anything about it or interrogate it deeper. There's no way that you're being exploited, just the poor saps that work for you. It's not wrong to exploit, just honest.
You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this.
I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need leadership skills.
If your mind is open and is able to understand nuance (able to keep similar concepts separate amid complexity) then you can learn from history and take lessons from the masters (bad joke).
Well, there was nothing contractual about this relationship: you have no contract with your property.
A related rant. Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant, as you can go wherever and leave your employer whenever you want; being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave, since you're not property, are tied to a place (and cannot be just moved wherever), have legal personhood and duties limited by public law. That people like to conflate all this muddles actual historical progress and also prevents people from real analysis and improvement of their situation. I don't think that the current situation of wage workers will be something accepted by people long term, assuming civilization progresses. But to deconstruct the bad parts of social machinery they need to understand it beyond slogans, otherwise they can be made content with different slogans. /rant
In a sense, the free person's (and therefore, often a master's) perspective is the only one relevant to the present inhabitants of First/Second World countries. You are emphatically not a slave, can have no remotely close experience and can only cultivate memories for ethical reasons. That being said, I don't think there is anything to "learn" from ancient managers of slaves either, because hopefully you can never be in that sort of situation. Romanticizing of slave and peasant relationships also exists, and is obviously BS, although not something that people are tending to push openly with the current swing of cultural pendulum.
> Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant... being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave
What's next? Shall we unite the concept of citizenship and the concept of economic freedom? Perhaps with something like a citizen's dividend? A freedom dividend you might say?
you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated
Close/open-mindedness isn't about being morally wrong/right. It's about holding a vile idea in your head long enough to see its various facets. To study it and understand it.
Openmindedness here means being able to understand that slavery is wrong at the same time you study what it reveals about the human condition. To be clear, no one in this thread has argued that slavery was good. If you think that, then maybe it's a sign that you're not separating subtle ideas well enough.
If you "[hold] a vile idea in your head" but only look at the aspects of the vile idea that would benefit you then you've chosen to ignore a pretty huge facet of the idea.
Yep. You got it. And I would go further - not just ignore but reject. That’s what is meant by separating ideas. You find what is orthogonal and keep what is useful.
All cultures have differing views on rights. So any culture will have elements that I see people whose rights are being violated. I guess I will have to avoid reading anything about them, unless the author takes an appropriately moralistic and judgmental tone, of course. I have to assume that I am right and everybody else is wrong. It's the only way to be open minded.
> you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated
People who agree with you are open-minded. People who don't agree with you are close-minded.
Think about the risks! Anything your slave does that damages other people's properties or causes them to lose life or limb is your responsibility.
Those poor masters.
Seriously, anything that attempts to be 'open minded' about slavery starts off on the wrong premise: that there are useful lessons to be learned there about human interaction. It's a well that is so thoroughly poisoned that it is probably better to stay away from it lest you be infected.
There is merely a step away from arguing for 'wrongthink' as a policy. Ideas should be examined, thoroughly and openly. Staying away does the opposite to the goal you may want to achieve.
Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
> Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
But they can.
Religion, racism, terrorism, fascism: they are all ideas that can corrupt, and some people are more susceptible to this than others. If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago I think you should simply stop looking because nothing good can come of that.
Ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a timeframe as well as what was considered locally acceptable and those conditions all but ensure that anything that you think you might learn is going to be very hard to apply.
We study history to avoid repetitions, not to see what particular item certain despicable people from the past had to say.
For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes.
> If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago
I think you've interpreted the article as some kind of prescriptive document modeled on slavery.
This isn't Business Insider. It's Aeon.
If anything the article comes across as critical of modern management by way of being too similar to Roman slave management.
But it's more interesting than that. It's a look at how Roman slavery was a very complex system, much different from the way we popularly imagine "Slavery" (with a capital "S")--AKA American chattel slavery.
I think that your revulsion is coming from a very beautiful place, and that you're a bit out of step here. We can rightly revile chattel slavery, and despise the thought of ancient slavery, and also be curious about it.
"For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes."
I understand that you wrote it in jest, but isn't Goebbels studied precisely due to the nature of marketing ( propaganda ) he employed? I personally find it interesting. Why does association work so well? Why does it automatically follow that if Hitler wrote an absolutely spectacular vegan recipe that basically cures cancer, it is automatically off limits to everyone?
Before you answer, note that Americans brought some actual Nazi scientists after WW2(operation paperclip). Should US have done without?
The US (and Russian, by the way) appropriation of German scientists and Nazi party members post WWII is certainly controversial and there are plenty of people who strongly believe that they should have stood trial in Nuremberg instead of being given a new job with plenty of perks.
As Tom Lehrer wrote:
"Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun."
The sarcasm dripping of those words is hard to replicate without hearing it sung, I recommend the original:
In contrast to the satirical lyric by Tom Lehrer, here's an actual quote attributed to von Braun:
“The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.“ — Wernher von Braun remark to a colleague after the first V-2 rocket hit London (September 1944), as quoted in Apollo in Perspective: Spaceflight Then and Now (1999) by Jonathan Allday, p. 85
I think it is safe to assume that Von Braun was never under any illusions as to on what planet his rockets were going to come down and what was going to be the result of that.
So even if Tom Lehrer took some artistic license I think he's on the money.
But, in your opinion, was it the right thing for US to do? Say you are Truman. You are responsible for US and how it fares on the world stage. What would be the right thing to do? Show trials in Nuremberg will satisfy the public. Useful heads and knowledge at the very least would be prevented from going to Russia, where who knows what they would work on. If Braun was truly apolitical, history timeline could have easily changed.
Utilitarian arguments and ethics rarely go together well, hence 'realpolitik'.
What my opinion is on the matter is irrelevant, history has run its course and here we are.
We're well into 'old man lost his horse' territory now, of course you never know what the utility of a particular event is in the longer term. The doctor that saves the baby's life may well have caused a mass murderer to live a long and productive life.
We are just two random people on the internet discussing things passed.
One never really knows what the action is going to ultimately accomplish, but if the opinion on that particular matter is irrelevant, why is the following opinion relevant:
"Those are books I can do without."?
If the history has ran its course, does it matter?
Why didn't you read it as implicitly critical of modern managment? since slavery is almost universally agreed-upon to be wrong, any comparison of an institution to it is more likely to be a scathing criticism against the institution than a praise for slavery or any of its practitioners.
Edit : Considering that the author has written a book called "How To Manage Your Slaves" about Roman slave managment satirically in the style of modern self-help books, it's almost certain my interpretation above is a more correct lens to view his comparisons.
I think your take on the article is interesting to me because it shows how timely your apperceptions are. I take for granted that everyone has encountered the riposte that the Bible nowhere gainsays the institution of slavery, and that slavery in the U.S. was legitimized, in part, on repulsive pseudo-Darwinian grounds and further misses the way in which the article is blandly suggesting that the institution of slavery (extant at some time in every culture) has merely become sublimated in our own.
Two things are of interest to me about the institution of slavery in republican (or later) Rome: chiefly the lack of racial rationalization for the institution, and that the institution itself probably retarded the industrial and scientific revolutions[1].
In Rome, the most prized slaves were Greeks, for whom the Romans had both admiration and a cultural inferiority complex. As Horace wrote:
> Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.
(Captured Greece captured her wild capturers and brought the arts to those agrarians Latins[1a].)
I mention this because I think it shows the opposite of U.S. rationalizations for slavery. Further, domestic slaves were called famulus -a; probably something on the order of "the lesser family" (more expendable were those working the fields or -- gods forefend -- the mines). Greeks enslaved Greeks, Latins enslaved Latins, Sumerians enslaved the nearby mountain-dwellers. As a species, we lack talons or fangs. Ours survival strategy depends upon cooperation. Cooperation can be willing, bargained, or forced.
I join company with the parent insofar as the choice of frame for this article is too untimely: perhaps better would have been Solzhenitsyn's chapter "The Trusty" from "The Gulag Archipelago". It provides a sort of fourth movement to a symphony of betrayal of serf to serf, peasant to peasant, Kulak to Kulak. Here, the damned betray the damned. But we must be upbeat! Life is getting better![2] Hence "la serva perdrona"!
[1] Hint: a Roman factory was merely a building filled with slaves "manufacturing" (making by hand) some good. See also the works of Vitruvius who describes (among other things) how an odometer should be made to accurately place mile-markers. They had the ingenuity and engineering capability, but not the economic incentives to birth both revolutions. The Romans were (like us) trapped in a local maximum.
[1a] a turn of phrase most worthy of his cultural ideal; not unlike (and also wildly dissimilar to) the way in which the only original American culture (pardon to those in the southern continent) is Black. One can't help but find patterns and anti-patterns.
>Rome: chiefly the lack of racial rationalization for the institution
Interesting thought indeed. If I were to settle into my historian armchair and speculate, I would say that it had to do with the following: In the Roman and many contemporary ethos, ruling based on strength was considered the natural order. Countries might war over competitive interests and by right of victory, gained the possessions of the conquered. Almost an ancient version of realpolitik. That is to say, human rights were not derived from an enlightenment idea of human quality. Roman's generally didn't need to resort to a racial justification because the power to do so was justification enough. That isn't to say Roman's weren't racist, they were. Interestingly, southern philosophy of slavery as a positive good was actually derived from Greek philosophy, and Aristotle specifically. However, Aristotle's argument that inferior humans benefit from slavery did not use race to define the inferior.
> ruling based on strength was considered the natural order.
Indeed. Athens vanquished Myteline in the Peloponnesian war and offered just this as justification. After Thuycidides, doubtless this was an increasingly bankrupt claim and so had to become more subtle.
> ... Roman's weren't racist, they were.
Were they? At base the poor modern idea of "race" is probably best rendered scientifically as "phenotype". In the classical world, new peoples could be still created (we call this ethnogenesis today -- we can read about it from classical sources). It was not larded with pseudo-Darwinistic conceits; some peoples spoke differently, appeared differently, had different customs, worshiped different gods (which Romans were keen to either adopt or accept as the same god by a different name, i.e. syncretism).
To your point, "might makes right" -- that's all there was too it to them. It is a little more complex though, in that the Romans felt themselves inferior to the Greeks culturally (probably also the Etruscans, who were in turn influenced by Greek colonists), and so had to contrive the idea of the genius of their ethnos being one of administration (probably the genesis of this article's conceit). I'd be much more interested in an article about how to be a better Greek in a Roman world, candidly.
> Almost an ancient version of realpolitik.
Well, exactly that, though it would have simply been regarded nakedly as Politik. I love the ancient world because they saw some things so much more clearly than we do (without the subtlety, probably because they still had to worry about the corn supply -- erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral). That we care not today for the ancient world serves us poorly, and only delivers us as prey to today's howlers.
> human rights were not derived from an enlightenment idea of human quality
In point of fact, the Enlightenment draws its origins to early humanists dredging up the wreckage of the ancient world. Timely controversies about whatever-the-fuck Joe Rogan said are drowned in a benighted sea of censorship lust, ignorant of the humanists' salvage and our universal birth-right. Give me your debunking of Voltaire or explain where Poggio went wrong, and I'll give you my earnest attention.
If you want to speak of Greek rationalizations for slavery, you may as well conduct a census of the Realpolitik of the region. A student of the hotchpotch of ancient tongues will be confronted with a hotchpotch of causes ranging from contesting neighbors to debt-bondage. Little different in Latium.
> However, Aristotle's argument that inferior humans benefit from slavery did not use race to define the inferior.
Right, and when you read the ethics and see what friendship is about -- you understand they saw relationships as being about mutual benefit between the superior and inferior. A couple millennia of Christianity haven't removed the question in the back of our minds, "but what's in it for me?" Again, they saw some things so much more clearly and without bullshit than we do today, and yet, yes, Aristotles' ideas about cuttlefish reproduction are sources of great mirth (and stuff like Plato's Timaeus great fodder for a thinking-man's Art Bell episode).
Again, at the risk of over-simplifying, slavery in the ancient world (and throughout history) was a quite different institution than what we think of today, thanks to the U.S.'s constitutional pusillanimity (wake me up when the U.K. abolishes the monarchy -- that's apparently harder to do than abolishing slavery; I guess it's easier to become a subject than a citizen under some empires).
> In the classical world, new peoples could be still created (we call this ethnogenesis today -- we can read about it from classical sources).
New peoples/ethnic groups basically sprung up from localized subcultures. But the whole process could easily take many generations. We read about it comfortably in the sources because oral history of that ethnogenesis ended up being recorded in myths, and we can factor out the commonalities. Really though, it was no quicker or easier back then than it would be today.
> was a quite different institution than what we think of today
I'm not sure I would agree about this. If you asked me about a significant difference, I would have to point to just how normalized it was within the ancient world. Pretty much every group practiced it. That's why the idea of a 'justification' of it from nature was probably not even taken all that seriously, even by those who thought about the issue. Ultimately, the Stoics were the most consistent in wanting to mitigate it, and their main concern was the slave's overall welfare within the arrangement, not necessarily some abstract idea of freedom. Naturally, increased freedom could be a side effect of such changes. (Of course, as is reasonably well known, there was no similar reforming impulse in the U.S. prior to abolition proper.)
> [the processes of ethnogenisis] could easily take many generations...
I grant you. In fact, it is the very subject of the Roman national epic. Oh, what a labor it was to found Rome, and all that. But we know that that peoples were never-the-less founded by virtue of the force of individuals. I don't think there were any rules about about how many saecula must be in favilla solvenda before you had a new nation, a new people.
> the idea of a 'justification' of it [slavery] from nature was probably not even taken all that seriously
We can say the same about atheism in the ancient world. Certainly by the time of Lucretius (if not much earlier), we can expect a world on the brink of de facto atheism, on the brink perhaps, of the scientific and industrial revolutions, but for the economic regime. First bread, then morality, then later aude sapere.
> Ultimately, the Stoics were the most consistent in wanting to mitigate it [slavery]
This, I think, is a misunderstanding, and why I mentioned the Bible had no reproach to slavery. Yes, the institution was mother's milk to everyone born of that time, but was much more a part of a client-patron relationship than ideas of racial superiority (which I have gone to pains to suggest are a fundamentally modern conception, stemming more from social contract theorists than pseudo-Darwinists, as I said earlier, beg my pardon -- in fact I think it comes even before that, as one can read in Montaigne's essay on cannibals). As I suggested earlier, our modern ideas about slavery are more informed by legitimization around savage and civilized which are merely sublimations about who can bring more power to bear and were lately made even more subtle with pseudo-Darwinist idea. All this is anachronism to the historical institution of slavery in the ancient world. That is the untimely and the timely at logger-heads.
When you speak of the stoics, you embrace both a crippled slave (later freed for his brilliance) and a staggeringly rich noble rhetorician. The fundamental dictum of stoicism (follow nature) suited Rome: accept your place in the nature of things. Epictetus addressed his students as "slave" and taught them to consider what is truly in their power and what isn't. Seneca wrote consolatory letters drawing on his struggles with asthma. The lessons were the same.
> was much more a part of a client-patron relationship
This is, AFAICT, taking a tiny minority of literate/skilled/highly trusted slaves and treating them as the norm. The slaves who were basically worked to death in the Roman mines were not meaningfully "clients" of their masters. They were very much seen as mere instruments, or chattels, even without a race-based justification. It's interesting that the most refined and perhaps benign forms of slavery could shade into patron/client (and the Romans would've known this - the freedman was literally a client of their former master) arrangements, but that was not the wnole institution.
>(Of course, as is reasonably well known, there was no similar reforming impulse in the U.S. prior to abolition proper.)
I think this is an overstatement. There was a reforming impulse within the US and within the south, it just didn't get much power by the time the issue came to war. Those invested in southern slavery were deathly afraid of the impulse spreading throughout the south, banning abolitionist literature and teaching. A number of noteworthy plantation owners who freed their slaves on ethical grounds.
I largely agree with most of what you said, and it sounds like you have a bigger historian armchair than I do, and thank you for your interesting insights about the ancient world.
>> ... Roman's weren't racist, they were.
>Were they?
My understanding is that they were, or at least would be considered so by modern definitions. Romans certainly held opinions that were biased, stereotyped, and judged others by their "phenotype" and cultural ancestry. That said, my impression was that Roman culture at large did not institutionalize racial opinion in the same way one might see in the antebellum south, or Indian caste system. A roman might despise and refuse to dine with a Gaul, but another might wed one.
>In point of fact, the Enlightenment draws its origins to early humanists dredging up the wreckage of the ancient world.
This is true, but they were also reinterpreted it through the lens of contemporary Christian philosophy and values. This certainly introduced a greater emphasis on fundamental human rights.
>I love the ancient world because they saw some things so much more clearly than we....That we care not today for the ancient world serves us poorly, and only delivers us as prey to today's howlers.
I think a lot of people long for the perceived simplicity of worlds closer to an animalistic natural order, with rules that from our perspective seem clear and internally consistent. The world we live in has complex challenges with ambiguous and continually changing rules and expectations. I think there is a big crossover the post-apocalyptical fantasy, where the burdens of society are lifted.
One of the challenges and intrigues of history, is trying to understand how much of that sentiment is accurate (if any). While the unintuitive complexity of modern life can be tiresome, it also enables social stability, freedoms, and collaboration impossible in the ancient world.
If I had any point, it was to suggest that our ideas of "race" are anachronistic to the ancient world (and not even really scientific today), being so burdened with post-enlightenment ideas of "savage" and cultured peoples (I've tried to keep religion out of this, but it is a critical through-line) and which later finds its most sublime form as pseudo-Darwinist notions about "race" which renders the U.S. institution of slavery (like our flavors of Christianity) quite something new and different.
> I think there is a big crossover the post-apocalyptical fantasy, where the burdens of society are lifted.
I agree with you on this. In fact, I've had a thesis (that is surely bogus and which no one believes) that the Godzilla movies are about the sublimated desire to see the whole facade held up against earthquake, tsunami, and atom bombs finally be done in by a monster who casually destroys Tokyo Tower. If you like coastlines, maybe that idea will give you a chuckle.
The value of the ancient world to me, however, is as a counter-balance to everything timely. Sometimes it shines a brilliant light on what is today obscured by our modern confusions, but more often a deep well of fascination over how we used to speak and what we used to think, however errant it was.
The dates here are far too late for the title to be accurate. Especially when they are talking about the 1st century BC. This after the end of the Warring States period in China, in 221 BC.
One reason that the Chin were able to win the Warring States period is because they invented the concept of "total war", including the concept of every aspect of the economy being maximized so as to maximize the output for the war effort. The rulers of Chin ended up nationalizing quite a bit of the productive land, and then pressuring the appointed managers to maximize output, and those managers, in turn, maximized pressure on the peasants to maximize output.
A difficult but fascinating book about the political debate of the Warring States period:
"And just as a household needed slaves, so companies need staff. Permanent employees, like slaves, are far more desirable than outsourcing to outsiders. The Romans thought external contractors could never be relied on like members of the primary social group. They failed to turn up when instructed to, took liberties with their fees and, taking little pride in their work, carried out their tasks shoddily. With slaves, however, who were stakeholders in the system, the Romans could be sure that work would be carried out as they wanted it."
I'm not sure this is a helpful paragraph for convincing people to learn from Roman management practices.
Slaves who worked in Roman households were effectively a highly-skilled and educated minority, who could indeed hope to earn enough to buy out their freedom. It goes without saying that this was not a meaningful possibility for the vast majority of slaves, who were forced to work under far more strenuous conditions.
Is this an attempt at humor? If so, it fell flat for me. Tech and finance workers are some of the most highly-compensated people in the world today. Comparing them to Roman slaves, who were considered property, had no freedom of movement, and were subject to brutal corporal punishment, shows a callous disregard for the real human suffering occurring around the world.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm making a relative comparison - tech and finance workers are to the average worker in the world what the intellectual or the higher household slaves in Rome were to the average. By the way, those slaves had freedom of movement and, especially later in Roman history, some legal protection, as well as in many cases the right to work for a wage outside of the purview of their masters.
I am trying to underlie the fact that we have many privileges and the ability to change social strata compared to the average working person, which is an interesting parallel. Of course even Roman slavery was horrible.
GPs point is that under "capitalism" everyone is effectively a slave - working on someone else's terms, and it's only a few elite jobs where you really make enough to potentially buy your way out of the system. It's an opportunity that people working in a coffee shop or something don't have.
(Edit- well nearly, the GP clarified his post in a sibling post)
A lot of the employer's benefit to hiring external contractors stems from the ability to sidestep labor laws (e.g. benefits, minimum wage, overtime, etc...). In a society where you're just allowed to own slaves that calculus looks a bit different.
Household slaves could buy their freedom from their masters. Then they became freedmen, still allied and somewhat subordinated to their former masters, but their children were already full Roman citizens.
The prospect of manumission was a huge incentive for the slave to work harder and smarter. Some freedmen became very rich. The slaveowners could theoretically renege on their promise, but rarely did so, because they would lose the profit of their slaves believing them and working harder.
Romans were pretty Machiavelistic when it came to incentives. Their methods usually worked, even though they could hardly be described as morally sound.
> Household slaves could buy their freedom from their masters. Then they became freedmen, still allied and somewhat subordinated to their former masters, but their children were already full Roman citizens.
And that may not have been the perk it's sometimes made out to be:
> However, the master could arrange that slaves would only have enough money to buy their freedom when they were too old to work. They could then use the money to buy a new young slave while the old slave, unable to work, would be forced to rely on charity to stay alive.[62]
Well it was kind of a social contract, and it was primarily the Greek slaves who achieved manumission, starting from a position of parity in cultural and racial perception (we're speaking purely in terms of their status in the Mediterranean as a people with greatness, with the legacy of a great history which in general is the consequence of being conquerors), and usually an advantage in most intellectual matters. In the intellectual the Roman shone in oratory, law, civil engineering, and others I forget. There are many where the Romans were considered the best. But Greek language was of greater prestige in the highest circles of Rome, for instance the last words of Gauis Julius Caesar were in Greek, tutors had to be Greek, and Greek slaves played, under working conditions enviable even by many Americans in the 21st century, an essential part in the production of the Aeneid, which was the equivalent of the time of a major motion picture, and which involved extensive cryptography. Cryptographic techniques of the time were used to conceal its true message for thousands of years, while ensuring there was enough fidelity in the whole work to ensure the message could be conveyed. What this meant in practice is the Greeks serving Virgil had to count sounds in verses by applying certain rules to the characters, and count with absolute certainty. Coming full circle, for such great undertakings that required such great secrecy to conceal the message from the Emperor the slave's loyalty could really only be bought with the sound promise of freedom.
"Skin in the game" though it might be, these enslaved individuals only became stakeholders by force, and not by choice. I think the analogy to business is still act, but with a bit more of a sinister connotation.
There was an advancement ladder, starting with individual contributor levels from junior to senior, moving on to roles with more responsibility starting with principal to senior principal. The last levels were the director and senior director levels, after which you crossed into the freedom levels with two letter titles. /s
Once I saw this great documentary called A funny thing happened on the way to the forum. It does a great job of explaining the system and structure, and with colorful characters at that!
You aren't the only person making this mistake but don't assume Roman slavery was like American chattel slavery. Roman slavery was still slavery and still had abuses but it was not "slavery till death, for all your generations". Nor were slaves mere physical labor. Slaves often ran businesses, engaged in basically white collar work, and often times were skilled craftsmen who exceeded their masters skill.
Some slaves were not mere physical labour. However, many famers and miners were still enslaved people, worked in far more brutal conditions without the hope of manumission.
> Some slaves were not mere physical labour. However, many famers and miners were still enslaved people, worked in far more brutal conditions without the hope of manumission.
Yes, exactly. For instance, slaves would be disfigured to prevent escape:
> As most slaves in the Roman world could easily blend into the population if they escaped, it was normal for the masters to discourage slaves from running away by putting a tattoo reading "Stop me! I am a runaway!" or "tax paid" if the slaves were owned by the Roman state on the foreheads of their slaves.[65] For this reason, slaves usually wore headbands to cover up their disfiguring tattoos and at the Temple of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, in Ephesus, archeologists have found thousands of tablets from escaped slaves asking Asclepius to make the tattoos on their foreheads disappear.[66]
I wonder about early bronze age (eg Egyptian old kingdom) "management theories."
IDK if I'm right, but I feel like the Roman era is not so different from the current era, or at least near-modern eras. They had accounting, greek philosophy, a legal system, insurance companies and a class hierarchy that was a lot like later periods...
In the early bronze age, money doesn't even exist. Many other social constructs that we take for granted were probably also missing. I feel the same way about pre-colonial mexico. Large, hyper-urban societies that were institutionally completely different from us. I suspect the "god king" thing might play roles that we have a hard time imagining.
You can drop in "staff" in place of "slaves" and this reads totally legibly to the modern mind. That's because the Romans were a lot like us. I don't think that means everyone was.
Slavery and "slaveowners" are such a loaded terms that it is almost impossible to have rational discussions about them. Many instantly equate "slave" to recent versions of slavery in US history. But the definitions used throughout history are remarkably varied. A Roman household slave was not the same as an African slave in a US cottonfield.
One very interesting line of thought is whether modern soldiers are enslaved. US caselaw has two exceptions for the 13th amendment: Prison labor and military service. Why are they not slaves? There is no logical reason beyond the courts says they aren't. The concept of forced labor by people who are not "free" remains a cornerstone of modern society. We are not as far away from the past as we sometimes like to think.
> Most Romans ... thought cruelty to slaves was shocking
but also
> did not hesitate to punish their slaves, and to punish brutally. Floggings, crucifixions, torture by means of the rack and breaking the legs with iron bars would all be carried out in public to maximise the impact on the observers. Or a slave’s children might be sold off, never to be seen again.
Cruelty that's pointless (as they saw it). The Romans had little issue with crucifying dissidents, torturing slaves, executing the innocent fellow comrades of deserting soldiers, and beating their children into compliance. But they saw such cruelty as useful, serving a higher purpose (social order and discipline, mostly).
If you want an analogy, today, most people have no problem farming animals to raise them for meat. There's a lot of cruelty inherent in the process, but we do try to take steps to reduce it. And if you outright enjoy the wails of pain from the cow as you beat it needlessly on the way to the slaughterhouse, there's something wrong with you. Just as to the Romans, beating your slaves and sometimes making an example might be necessary, but a slaveowner who took a little too much pleasure in it was morally suspect. It's telling that Roman histories are full of allegations of the capricious torture and rape of slaves by prominent figures. While some of these accusations are probably true, they are generally of a slanderous nature intended to tarnish the reputation of the accused.
For anything historical, you really need to objectively put yourself in the context of the people you're looking at.
Rome had cruelty laws for how to treat slaves. I'm not an expert but perhaps if the slave did their job then floggings, torture, and crucifixion were illegal, but were allowed if they broke the law.
People will look back and probably think US execution is terrible and cruel while currently, a large portion thinks its acceptable. Heck, they may think we're cruel for eating meat or running over crickets with our tractors. We just don't know what lense we'll be judged by yet. We should afford the same understanding for past peoples while not condoning it.
This works to an extent. You have to be careful to make sure you aren't just softening history with a "product of their time" argument.
A good example is US slavery. You might mistakenly fall under the understanding that slavery was just a common and well accepted practice. Yet, from the founding of the US and earlier it was HIGHLY controversial.
You can't just take the perspective of the slave owner, you must also consider that abolitionists have been around at the same time periods.
It's complicated and messy, but, IMO, entirely right to condemn slavery and slave owners as a modern reader. Just as you'd condemn someone running a con or a ponzi scheme in the same era.
It works the further out a historical event goes. US slavery is still very recent compared to Roman slavery. Once 1000 years has passed from the US slavery, historical takes will probably be different from what we have now.
I'm more advising caution due to my background as an exmormon. "Product of their time" is used frequently by mormon apologists to excuse the racist or predatory behaviors of the founders of the religion. I also see it used for excusing the actions of the founding fathers or confederate generals.
When I see someone say "we can't judge the romans for their actions" my mind instantly goes to thinking "Well, what are their peers saying?" I think it's fair to judge them based on how their peers judge them. Maybe that's completely missing from the historical record (again, not a roman historian), but something that I think everyone should keep before taking the mental shortcut of "product of their time".
> my mind instantly goes to thinking "Well, what are their peers saying?"
The classical Greek and Romans were incredibly civilized by the contemporary standards of their vicinity. Basically everyone was keeping slaves back then, but the Romans were pretty unique in not sacrificing infants to Baal or Moloch, and not collecting the severed heads of their enemies as trophies of mindless cruelty. And even the whole slave-holding thing was in the process of being slowly reformed over centuries, thanks to the ascendance of Stoic philosophy with its ideal of equal God-given dignity for all humans - which by the way was ultimately a key influence on Christianity, and an important contributor to its early spread within the Roman elite.
How is "product of their time" in any way softening it? If your life is short and brutal, odds are you will have niceness kicked out of you early on. And Roman life could be very brutish. One of the things we inherited from them was the word decimation, which came from a punishment of picking every tenth person to be put to death ( usually used for soldiers or uncooperative city ).
> How is "product of their time" in any way softening it? If your life is short and brutal, odds are you will have niceness kicked out of you early on.
I don't know enough Roman history to really say if "product of their time" works that way. But I do know enough about US history and figures where "product of their time" is meant solely to excuse horrendous behaviors.
That was more my point. You do have to be careful applying today's morality against yesterday's figures. However, you also have to be careful that you aren't using "it was a brutal time" as an excuse for yesterday's atrocities.
Was everyone calling for decimation or was this a tactic meant to shock the enemies? Did everyone agree with it or were there critics?
We know of the extremes of roman culture, but was that because historians needed to paint them as the extreme?
I had to think about it a little before I posted. Part of me is perfectly willing to superimpose my cultural norms ( how US dealt with 9/11 and integrated it into its history being an example of that ).
I am just interested in history of Rome. If a Roman expert could chime in, it would probably be best since it is just a speculation on my end. In other words, I am no expert.
That said, while I am willing to believe that propaganda effect alone was probably worth the trouble ( not to mention the unpractical nature of killing your own troops ), it is difficult for me to believe that the concept would have survived this long without..uhh.. reinforcing it.
I did find some interesting sources, but I think this conversation[1] covers it well from several angles including ones you suggested.
Slavery was not common. There were few slave owners and the populations of slavery states was minimal. Slavery was, by it's nature, very expensive. Only the very wealthy owned slaves. You had to be able to house the slaves and have work for them to be productive (or enough capital that productivity didn't matter).
In fact, before the cotton gin, slavery was on it's way out because not enough people could afford it. The gin made it possible to harvest and process mass amounts of cotton without specialized training.
> So, according to the Census of 1860, 30.8 percent of the free families in the confederacy owned slaves.
That means that every third white person in those states had a direct commitment to slavery.
This is probably quibbling over numbers, but I'd point out that we are talking about 30% of the white people in states that had slavery. Not 30% of the population at large.
The states with slavery were underpopulated. The total population of the US in the 1860 was 31 million and the slave states had a population of 12 million (most of those slaves).
300k out of 31 million is, IMO, a few. Even if they are highly concentrated in a few states.
None of this really negates what I was saying. Owning slaves was expensive and only the wealthy could afford them. The fact that 30% of white people in slave states were wealthy enough to own slavery isn't a contradiction.
It is an interesting point, but you also have to keep in mind that people at this time had vastly different experiences in terms of communication and travel. Abolitionist literature and advocates was banned in the south and a full third of whites were illiterate.
It is really hard to get away from the "product of their time" sentiment without a deep dive into nature vs nurture, determinism, and spirituality.
I am under no illusion that if you or I were white and born in the antebellum south, we would probably support slavery too. It can equally be said, that there almost assuredly were southerners that had moral reservations about slavery that failed to express themselves or take meaningful action.
For me, the interesting question is not how bad were they as people, but why they did or didn't act. By what factors did cultural support and tolerance for slavery perpetuate. What was life experience like for different people in that culture.
At any rate, I guess my sentiment is that the whole topic of trying to pass judgement on individuals out of the context of their time & place is a fools errand. If not time and place, what differentiates the future views of a child born to southern slave owners and northern abolitionists, or a child born today.
In the end, we can agree that we think slavery was an barbaric practice, and hopefully investigate more interesting questions about what can be learned from history. Perhaps we can learn something to better our own culture.
This brings the idea of modern work much closer to slavery, minus the physical cruelty. It also brings up uncomfortable taboo questions, like if some people actually desire to be the slaves of a benevolent master.
A thing we still need to work on when we tell history: We need to further distinguish Roman slavery from American Chattel slavery.
Roman slavery is more like a permanent version of "Indentured Servitude" that we learned here in the states, aka how poor white kids could make it in e.g. Revolutionary times.
And not much at all like the "Slavery" that looms bigger in our heads, primarily race-driven and -- this is perhaps the biggie -- "chattel oriented;" i.e. not only are you owned forever, so are your kids, who may be sold at will etc.
Not entirely true. If you were one of the unfortunate slaves to be sent to work in the mines, it was basically a death sentence. Also, the Romans had 3 different large scale slave rebellions (called the Servile wars of which Spartacus was among them) I'm imagining that there was a very small minority of the slave population could earn enough money to purchase their freedom.
There really weren't any practical differences between Roman and American slavery, at least from the slaves point of view. The owner had the absolute power of life or death over their slaves, and exercised it brutally (corporal punishment was common, as were family separations and executions). Few slaves in ancient times ever saw freedom except by escape, the same was true for those in the American South. The main difference is in where slaves came from. Most Roman slaves were the spoils of war, while American slaves were the spoils of criminal enterprise: although it could be argued that the Roman way of war _was_ criminal enterprise. Up into the late 19th century, peasants in feudal or emerging capitalist societies like Tsarist Russia or pre-unification Italy didn't have it much better. The estate owner had near absolute control over those who worked his land, and the owners wealth was in part measured by how many souls he had under the yoke: just as that of the Roman or Southern aristocrat had been.
> There really weren't any practical differences between Roman and American slavery, at least from the slaves point of view.
I really don't think that's true. Especially given that "Roman slavery" spans 1000+ years (ignoring the Eastern Roman Empire) and the legal situation was not static during that time.
> The owner had the absolute power of life or death over their slaves
If the owner was the paterfamilias, he also had that power over his children, including adult children. Legally, that is. It wasn't generally considered ok from a social point of view to kill your grown-up kids without provocation.
The paterfamilias also had the rights to any income earned by his kids (with the exception of military wages), etc, etc. But I would still have a hard time arguing that there was no difference between his kids and his slaves in practical terms, even though the legal structures were not as different as one might think.
Going back to that "change over time" bit, starting in the 2nd century CE killing a slave without a good reason would be tried as homicide, so even this "power of life and death" claim is not strictly true over what one would consider "Roman slavery".
> Few slaves in ancient times ever saw freedom except by escape,
I would actually love a good reference on this. My understanding is that manumission of household slaves was fairly common (double-digit percentages, and common enough in some periods that legislation got passed limiting how many slaves one could free), while manumission of agricultural/mining/gladiatorial slaves was nearly non-existent. So if you were an enslaved doctor or tutor or whatnot your chances at freedom were quite good. If you were a farmer, not so much. If you were a miner... well, you would be dead before it started to matter. But I have to admit I have not kept up with scholarship on this in the last 10-ish years.
In _practical_ terms, it's probably more correct to talk about "Roman slaveries", because the actual conditions of one's existence as a slave in Rome (the polity, not the city) depended heavily on time period, occupation, etc, etc.
This seems like a twisted sickened version of American exceptionalism to position American slavery as exceptional worse than all other slavery, to maintain a monopoly on injustice.
It would be abhorrent to imply that American slaves were privileged because they had enough stability to become married or have children, in contrast to victims of Siberian gulags or Roman slaves worked to death in mines.
Like all of history, some people may have had better conditions than others, but on the whole anyone who could be classified as a “slave” throughout history suffered atrocities.
Slavery in all forms is violation of human rights, regardless of how history views it.
I mean hey, look -- the history's there and I appreciate the discussions people are having. But what I've said about American Slavery is at least arguably true; and the fragility you're showing is a prime example of exactly why we need to get it right.
Didn't the Roman empire ultimately fall because of slavery? The article seems like it's trying to teach something about modern management through it though.
I'm also getting a real sarcastic vibe from the tone of the writing, so I can't tell if it's maybe meant to be satirical? Like what's up with this ending quote: Everyone knew where they stood then – even if, sometimes, that was in the line for crucifixion.
Egypt, Chinese, Phoenicians, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Ancient Israelites, Sumerians, Mayan, Incan and a host of others predated the Romans and documented the process only to be overtaken by the next civilization. The Romans were aggregators of ideas and took the tools from their conquered peoples using what worked and abandoning what didn't. It is highly doubtful as to the claim.
I was taught that management theory sprung from army management. These were the first organizations that required coordinating very large groups of people - in the life or death situations of war, and in the brutal monotony of peace.
I doubt that there were enough slaveowners or slaves in charge to contribute anything substantial to the management profession. It is an interesting tale in today's sentiment of antiwork.
I’m fairly certain that this kind of attitude, far from being an abberation, is exactly how the ruling class thinks of us. Jerry just feels secure enough to say it out loud. My guess is that we’ll get more and more open authoritarianism from the capitalist class as time goes on. They already refer to us as “human capital.”
What an elaborate essay, equating modern wage-earners with slaves and measuring them by utility. It seems to be recruiting the reader to the 'slave-master' mindset.
I also heard most of our concepts of property law were built of the Romans, in particular slave owning Romans who viewed people as property. Puts a pretty dark light on our whole system if you ask me, started form a bad seed.
I'm already looking at it that way. the concept of a company recruiting various agents under its name, the concept of managing cohorts of humans to extract most value from them, elaborating organisational structures with promotion/termination schemes, the whole thing is a form of modern slavery.
- We are born with a certain social position
- Many can't make ends meet
- We are talked into thinking each can escape his fate and rise, if he work hard at it
- Only a few get entirely liberated
- The liberated are examplified as role models
- Those are the top don't need to perform any work
- They spend a good chunk of their time making sure their position isn't threatened
- The owners are free to trade their ownership, and they often do
No need to be Marxist to view the system as inherently rigged and work out a way to escape it in favor of independent trading relationships with one another,with no agency as intermediary.
I’m no Toner but I hold a MA in Classics. I also have a management position in finance. Let me give 2 observations of the Ancient Roman world that counters two of Toner’s underlying assumptions. First, as with an leader, Romans needed to act in different ways depending on the circumstance. Caesar would eventually elevate himself above not just his own troops but all people as “Divus Caesar.” However, that came much later towards the end of his life. At the pinnacle of his military career, slutty Caesar was jeered as “every man’s girl and every woman’s boy.” And I suspect his well-known inspiration from Alexander the Great taught him the humility to eat and train alongside his troops to boost morale, as the old King of Macedon had famously done. Therefore, a Roman leader was not always trying distinguish his own behaviors from those of his followers, at least not in a way that demeaned the latter.
The second issue I find troubling is his generalizing of slaves’ lives and their owners’ treatment of them. The relationship of slave vs owner was not only different across locations, but also through time. The nature of slavery at Rome developed from being mostly the capture of regional enemies, to becoming a trans-Mediterranean industry in the Middle Republic (2nd century BC). Slaves could range from a farm hand born into slavery who had to suffer wearing an iron collar like a beast of burden (“The Zoninus Collar and the Archaeology of Slavery by Jennifer Trimble 2016); to a freshly enslaved Greek scholar who lived alongside a leading Roman and had great influence on that family (Polybius in the household of the Scipios); to a more run of the mill urban slave who may have had a constructive relationship with their master (consider Tiro, who by all counts was born into slavery, and became a most valued member of Cicero’s household and was ultimately freed upon his owner’s untimely death). All of these may be exceptional cases, and yet they are vastly different from one another. Most important of all, it’s unclear that any of these slaves’ lives would fit Toner’s paradigm.
Oh, actually, I have a third issue. Nowhere does Toner mention women. This in spite of the fact that women were as often as not put In in charge of managing the household’s affairs. They would also be in charge of various businesses, such as brickyards. Both at home and at work, women would have led slaves; and this means that Toner is blind to the differing managing skills between the two genders. This is something we see today in a world where men and women are thought of in a far more egalitarian way than even the most progressive of periods of Ancient Rome. Meaning, I suspect that if we can observe differences in leadership and management skills between men and women at a time when the two are on par, I would love to consider the differences observed back then when the two genders were considered practically different species.
Overall, this article has some serious omissions on both sides he's arguing (ie regarding the history of Roman slavery and the tactics of a modern manager)
It's yet another attempt to whitewash European human rights history and pretend it's the source of everything good, bet the author have positive opinions about Nazi Germany too.
Romans created their empire through genocide and slavery. It was so bad that multiple rebellions happened that were joined by hundreds of thousands of slaves, and those rebels preferred to kill themselves or starve to death than return to "nice" Roman slavery.
