Slaves will be Slaves

Petronius Arbiter, in Trimalchio's Dinner Party, the third chapter of his book Satyricon, mocks the nature of slaves. He was a top official in Rome, namely the "Judge of Taste" in Nero's court (129). Regardless of the responsibilities he had, he was an aristocrat. The history of Rome was written from an aristocratic perspective because they were the ones who had the money, ambition and free time to document history. Petronius believed that slaves are low class, and that a slave that has been set free, id est a freedmen, is still a slave at heart, ergo worthless. Not with all the money in the world could he develop the taste of the upper class. In ancient and modern times alike, money cannot buy a good personality or social sophistication.

While the freeborn Roman boy went to school to learn rhetoric, math, et cetera, the slave boy worked from a very young age. Whether they worked physically, mathematically or sexually, they still worked, which is a prime difference between them and the freeborn (although the poor freeborn worked, they often were displaced by slaves because slaves were free labor). Sarah Ruden, the translator of this edition of Satyricon, comments that freedmen were like immigrants in America today. Only the particularly ambitious won their freedom. This process has a modern equivalent in which only the most ambitious immigrants tend to make it to American soil. This process of "self-selection" weeds out the lazy (155). Slaves that had won their freedom had worked very hard from a very early age and thus had the experience needed to be successful and amass fortunes. However, what the freedmen could not possibly have learned from that kind of experience is the behavior and manners of a respectful Roman aristocrat. Personality is naturally instilled by living among others in your social class. One cannot completely learn a foreign culture unless he is adopted at an early age by a family in that culture. Although slaves lived with families, they performed completely different functions ergo had completely difference experiences and upbringings. Unfortunately for the freedmen who that made it and became rich, they were still socially inferior to the freeborn.

Petronius shows that the host of the dinner party, Trimalchio is a crude freedman. He has no respectable virtues. He is cruel to his slaves despite the fact that he was ...

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...laying in the funeral procession were too loud and it sounded like a fire alarm. The commotion is taken advantage of and they make their escape (60).

At Trimalchio's dinner party the theme was drunk and disorderly as opposed to relaxed and enjoyable, the nature of the traditional Roman dinner parties (166). It is though this story that Petronius tells us the aristocracy's views on uneducated slaves and freedmen. Comparisons can be drawn to its modern equivalent of ‘new money.’ Exempli gratia, when the latest rap artist from a ghetto makes an album and subsequently gets rich, there is no moral improvement. Money cannot buy character change. It cannot change behavior, improve social skills or refine the personality. Lacking a warm childhood upbringing to set in good manners, as well as protection from sexual predators, slaves never came close to matching the behavior, values, virtues, morals and decency of the "Good Roman Citizen." In this ancient equivalent to the verse from a Snoop Dogg song, “You can take the boy out [of] the ‘hood,’ but you can’t take the ‘hood’ out [of] the ‘Homeboy,’” no matter how much money and freedom slaves gained, they still are slaves at heart.