Elderly slave disposal services in the late second century

[bunn]

Average lifespan for people who made it to the age of 10 was 47.5 years.   Say you have a slave who is 45, and is therefore, presumably, something of a banger.

Suppose you are a bit of a bastard and also a tightwad, and  would prefer not to keep spending money on food, accommodation etc for a slave who was frankly always a bit of a lemon.

You aren't allowed to kill them, Hadrian outlawed that.   Your slave has no marketable value.

What do you do?

Comments

[ningloreth.livejournal.com]

Turn them out of doors but allow them to live in the pig sties and eat swill, maybe?

It must have been a common problem...

ETA I found this article, called Servi Senes. The Role of Old Slaves at Rome:

dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/148839.pdf

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Ah! That is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for! Thank you! (Why didn't I find that? My google skills have let me down!)

I love the phrase 'remarkable shortage of primary evidence'! There is nothing that lifts my heart more than an outbreak of We Don't Really Know. :-D

(Well, that or 'Weird Stuff Happened' but when you have 'Weird Stuff Happened' you sometimes have to defend yourself with references in the comments, which I always feel suggests that I didn't quite get there with the suspension of disbelief :-D)

Mr Wiedemann seems a tad didactic about things he thinks happened, for a man who started from a position of We Don't Really Know.

"it was not the case that slaves had normally become freedpersons by the time they reached oíd age." he says emphatically, having literally just told us that there is no evidence at all about the vast majority of old slaves.

I love historians.

[ningloreth.livejournal.com]

That passage caught my eye, too! 'It seems certain...' generally means 'I've given it a bit of thought and I've decided...' Then whatever they've decided gets quoted as fact by the next historian, LOL.

I imagine most people would have been in a sort of modified family relationship with household slaves, so a beloved slave might have been well treated (assuming the owner could afford it), and an unbeloved slave over worked, under fed, and neglected.

Non-household slaves, though, must have been treated like animals. Or machines...

I wonder if Claudius's ruling was a bit of a let them eat cake solution? What use would freedom have been to an abandoned slave?

I keep coming back to something I read about an elderly Anglo-Saxon woman who sold herself into slavery because her husband and children were dead and she had no other way of supporting herself. What work would she have done? Maybe there was something feudal going on, and 'slavery' in that context was like getting the dole, and you paid for it with a fall in status?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I think Claudius may have had an eye on slaves that got ill, then recovered, and were reclaimed. So the temple got the bill for feeding them while they were ill, but the masters got the benefit if they came back to working health!

But yes, if the slaves were not able to work again, I'm sure freedom was no great benefit to them!

I read that injured slaves were often given work as childminders, but surely there must be a limit to the number of people who could be reasonably employed doing that.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... the ages in that are really interesting: particularly the bit about how slave prices drop after the age of 60. I had assumed since the average lifespan was shorter, that slaves might be prematurely aged by modern standards, but that sounds like it was not particularly the case.

[natsuko1978.livejournal.com]

One thing that occurs to me is that average ages for "people" (as opposed to "men") will be skewed by deaths in child-birth of many mothers. I seem to recall reading somewhere, that if women survived to the menopause, on the other hand, their life expectancy could very well be into their 70s. (And even with arthritis, I'm sure most old women could still spin and weave on a domestic loom (thinking of the more modern tradition of grannies knitting and crotcheting etc) and even do the laundry, if they didn't have to go to the river and draw the water themselves or do the heavy lifting, don't you think?)

Even with the men, I think the skew to younger average ages had less to do with people being totally clapped out by the time they were 50, and more to do with young men being soldiers, apprentices, doing hard manual labour etc and being killed by what we'd call "industrial accidents" sort of thing, didn't it? The teenage boy learning how to use a scythe had more chance of doing himself a mischief than the guy who had been scything for 20 summers. (Even today, middle-aged men throwing their backs out tends to be more the result of 20 years of too little physical activity and sitting at desks, meaning their deep muscles are not as supportive as they should be - my physiotherapist always swore that most sports injuries were due to people using the wrong muscles and having weak core stability; he was also on the physio team for the local professional club and was always telling stories about how little core strength those supposedly fit young men had.)

Equally, I'd assume that the farm-labourers and industrial-workers you owned were far less likely to make it to "uselessness" than your house-slaves, and the slaves who did the accounts at your dock-warehouses etc who would also be *less* useless merely by reason of age than those who had to do heavy labour, though I guess presbyopia would become a problem for elderly scribes etc. Hmmm.

In general, I'm with you - why not free your useless slaves?