gave their slaves or freedmen capital to run businesses on their behalf or even businesses of their own. The Roman agricultural writers paid a great deal of attention to the management of labour. Columella, a first-century writer who came from the south of Spain, recommended that landowners should keep a reserve stock of implements and tools, twice as many as they needed, so that production could be continuous, ‘for the loss in slave labour- time exceeds the cost of such items’. There was a general presumption *The practice of encouraging female slaves and their partners to have more children, who would of course also be slaves.
Opp page: Mosaic at Cherchel, Algeria, early third century CE , with agricultural scenes. Above: Ploughing and sowing. Below: Working in vineyards. On the Treatment of Slaves ‘Soon afterwards the City Prefect, Lucius Pedanius Secundus, was murdered by one of his slaves.
After the murder, ancient custom required that every slave residing under the same roof must be executed. But a crowd gathered, eager to save so many innocent lives; and rioting began. The senate-house was besieged. Inside, there was feeling against excessive severity, but the majority opposed any change (….) [The senators] favouring execution prevailed.
However, great crowds ready with stones and torches prevented the order from being carried out. Nero rebuked the population by edict, and lined with troops the whole route along which those condemned were taken for execution.’ – Tacitus ( - ), historian of the early empire. among employers that without supervision no work would ever get done, so supervision was paramount, for both free workers and slaves. To make supervision easier, workers were sometimes grouped into gangs or smaller teams.
Columella recommended squads of ten, claiming it was easier to tell who was putting in effort and who was not in work groups of this size. This shows a detailed consideration of the management of labour. Pliny the Elder, the author of a very famous ‘Natural History’, condemned the use of slave gangs as the worst method of organising production, mainly because slaves who worked in gangs were usually