chained together by their feet. All this looks draconian*, but we should remember that most factories in the world today enforce similar principles of labour control. Indeed, some industrial establishments in the empire enforced even tighter controls. The Elder Pliny described conditions in the frankincense** factories ( officinae ) of Alexandria, where, he tells us, no amount of supervision seemed to suffice.
‘A seal is put upon the workmen’s aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close mesh on their heads, and before they are allowed to leave the premises, they have to take off all their clothes.’ Agricultural labour must have been fatiguing and disliked, for a famous edict of the early third century refers to Egyptian peasants deserting their villages ‘in order not to engage in agricultural work’. The same was probably true of most factories and workshops. A law of referred to workers being branded so they could be recognised if and when they run away and try to hide. Many private employers cast their agreements with workers in the form of debt contracts to be able to claim that their employees were in debt to them and thus ensure tighter control over them.
An early, second-century writer tells us, ‘Thousands surrender themselves to work in servitude, although they are free. ’ In other words, a lot of the poorer families went into debt bondage in order to survive. From one of the recently discovered letters of Augustine we learn that parents sometimes sold their children into servitude for periods of years. Augustine asked a lawyer friend of his whether these children could be liberated once *Draconian: harsh (so-called because of an early sixth- century BCE Greek lawmaker called Draco, who prescribed death as the penalty for most crimes!).
**Frankincense – the European name for an aromatic resin used in incense and perfumes. It is tapped from Boswellia trees by slashing the bark and allowing the exuded resins to harden. The best- quality frankincense came from the Arabian peninsula. A N E MPIRE A CROSS T HREE C ONTINENTS