Alex Cushing (University of Toronto)
Empathy for the Enslaved?: The Senatus Consultum Silanianum and Popular Protest in 61 CE
The public protests following the murder of Pedanius Secundus in 61 CE mark one of the only popular interventions on behalf of the enslaved recorded from the Ancient World. After Secundus was killed by an enslaved member of his household, the Senate decided to execute every other servus under his roof, approximately 400 in all. In response, a large crowd surrounded the curia. Nero issued a proclamation calling for order and lined the route to the executions with soldiers as people continued to try to intervene (Tac. Ann., XIV, 42-45).
Although popular demonstrations occurred during the Early Principate, protests rarely challenged basic elements of the social order (Nippel 1995, 88). More importantly, though, this marks perhaps the only time that members of the Roman public tried to prevent sovereign corporal punishment against enslaved persons in this way. There was never a push for anything resembling abolition, but the popular response to the Senate’s decision shows that some Romans recognized and tried to limit the most egregious cruelty of the upper-class ideology of violent control that underpinned large-scale slave-holding.
This paper will argue that the popular counterreaction was based first on the fact that these particular enslaved persons were socially and economically important members of the community and secondly on the sense of injustice at actions that were extreme in their inhumanity and benefited only a privileged slave-holding class. The SC Silanianum, the law mandating every enslaved person be slaughtered, was designed to indulge elite insecurities and fears of the uncontrollability of large enslaved familiae (Harries 2013). Tacitus acknowledges it was intended to be both avenging and precautionary (Tac. Ann., XIII, 32, 1) and Pliny makes it clear that, for most senators, cruelty in these matters was the point (Plin., Ep., VIII, 14, 24). The enactment of the law’s full severity only bolstered the remote, coercive threats of large-scale slavers, while potentially undermining the direct authority of small-scale slave-holders. Motivated by pragmatism and sympathy, the Roman public evidently had limits when it came to the brutality that the wealthy employed to keep large enslaved familiae fearful and pacified.