Having spent most of his life managing his servants―many of them prisoners from Rome’s military conquests―he decided to write a kind of owner’s manual for his friends and countrymen. The result, The Roman Guide to Slave Management, is a sly, subversive guide to the realities of servitude in ancient Rome. Cambridge scholar Jerry Toner uses Falx, his fictional but true-to-life creation, to describe where and how to Romans bought slaves, how they could tell an obedient worker from a troublemaker, and even how the ruling class reacted to the inevitable slave revolts. Toner also adds commentary throughout, analyzing the callous words and casual brutality of Falx and his compatriots and putting it all in context for the modern reader. Written with a deep knowledge of ancient culture―and the depths of its cruelty―this is the Roman Empire as you’ve never seen it before. “Thought provoking . . . written in a tone that feels both educated and archaically brutal . . .  [Toner’s] history and commentary provides context for the dirty institution upon which modern civilization is built.” — Publishers Weekly “By turns charming, haughty, and brutal . . . Toner, a classicist, comes up with an ingenious device.  He creates Marcus Sidonius Falx, an ancient-Roman nobleman and the imagined author of a treatise on how to buy, breed, and train a slave."  — The New Yorker “Captivating . . . Toner draws on Seneca, Pliny the Younger and various Roman chroniclers to create in Falx a credible portrait of the affluent slaveholder—smug, smart, sardonic.” —Bloomberg.com  Jerry Toner is Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Churchill College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Roman Guide to Slave Management. Copyright FOREWORD I HAVE NEVER COME ACROSS Marcus Sidonius Falx before, but I know his type. The Roman world had plenty of people just like him who owned huge numbers of slaves and who, for most of the time, did not give slavery a second thought. It was completely normal, a natural part of the social order. But the Romans did think about slaves in their own way: how they could control them, and how best to show them off to their friends. And the smarter ones (and that might include Falx here) could actually be a bit scared. They worried about what the slaves were up to behind their backs, and where the battle lines of ancient Roman culture were drawn. ‘All slaves are enemies’ ran one famous Roman slogan, well known to Falx. And on a notorious occasion in the reign of the emperor Nero, a Roman plutocrat was murdered by one of his 400 household slaves. It didn’t, as you will see, make Falx rest entirely easy in his bed, but the whole household was put to death as punishment. I am a bit surprised that Falx and Toner got on so well. Falx is an aristocrat whereas Toner’s family – so he assures me – has its roots in those classes oppressed by the British elite (‘from an Irish potato field’ I’m told). But it is to the credit of both of them, I guess, that they seem to have hit it off, despite their political differences. Of course, there were slave owners of a very different sort from Falx, There were thousands of small traders and craftsmen who owned just one or two slaves. And very many of them were freed – and actually married those who had once been there owners, both male and female. Even in Falx’s league, there were a few favored slave secretaries and PA’s who lived better than poor free Romans trying to make a living on day labour at the docks, or selling cheap flowers in the Forum. Interestingly some of the free poor got onto the streets to demonstrate, unsuccessfully, against the (strictly legal) punishment of those 400 slaves. But Falx is talking about the use of mass slave labour. It is hard for us now to understand all the dimensions of the relations between free, and slave, and ex-slave (and it was hard then). But we do have a few glimpses of what the rich Romans thought of their ordinary slave-workers; and Falx is one of the most reliable guides we have to what Romans would have seen as a proud tradition of ‘slave management’. He is trying to help everyone share the benefits of his wisdom, and he is a good place to learn. Thankfully the world has moved on. But his text offers an authentic insight – as authentic as you can get – into a fundamental aspect of life in Rome and its empire. If it had been published 2,000 years ago it would have topped the management charts. Modern readers may have trouble mastering their prejudices; but underneath the buoyant rhetoric, they’ll maybe find Falx not a wholly bad man, by the standards of his day at least. And Falx points the finger at us too. Do some of his insights still help us manage our own ‘staff’. For are we sure that ‘wage-slaves’ are really so much different from ‘slaves’? How different are we from the Romans? Mary Beard Cambridge, April 2014 AUTHOR’S NOTE MY NAME IS MARCUS SIDONIUS FALX, of noble birth, whose great-great-grandfather held a consulship, and whos