RECRUITMENT AND TRAINING OF ROMAN ESTATE MANAGERS IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE* JESPER CARLSEN ‘If there ever was or ever will be a calling in life as mean and contemptible as that of an overseer, I would be right down glad to know what it is, and where to be found. I am just tired, and will quit it, as soon as I can find a better business.” 1 This prefatory lamentation of an overseer in Georgia from around 1860 illustrates neatly the dilemma of middle managers regardless of time and space in the Antebellum South. They were considered as (un)necessary devils; on the one hand scapegoats suspected by their superiors of being either negligent or deceitful and on the other hand scorned and feared by their subordinates. Their range of duties encompassed the management of the labour force, the administering of the estate’s production and the maximising of its profit. Whilst white men took the place of middle managers – the overseers – in the plantation hierarchy in the Antebellum South, the foremen of the slave gangs, the slave drivers, were normally black men. The managerial duties were thus split, at the least theoretically speaking, between the free overseers and ‘the men between’ – to use Eugene Genovese’s exact description of the black slave drivers; but despite this split, the importance of both groups can hardly be overestimated and has long been duly recognised by modern scholarship. 2 Agricultural estate management and managers in other pre-industrial societies, too, have quite rightly been the focus of several studies over the last few decades: modern scholars have generally recognised the managers as central figures in maximising production, and their role as crucial for the provisioning of the elite with income from their estates. 3 It goes without saying that there were very significant differences between both the social * I am grateful to Jesper Majbom Madsen, Birte Poulsen and Ulrike Roth for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Unless otherwise stated, texts and translations of classical authors are taken from the Loeb Classical Library. 1 Quoted from W. K. Scarborough, The Overseer. Plantation Management in the Old South (Louisiana 1966), 104. 2 E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York 1974), 365-88. 3 W. L. Van Deburg, The Slave Drivers. Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the Antebellum South (Westport 1979); J.-J. Aubert, Business Managers in Ancient Rome. A Social and Economic Study of Institores, 200 B.C. – A.D. 250 (Leiden 1994); J. Carlsen, Vilici and Roman Estate Managers until AD 284 (Rome 1995); C. Schäfer, Spitzenmanagement in Republik und Kaiserzeit. Die Prokuratoren von Privatpersonen im Imperium Romanum vom 2. Jh. v.Chr. bis zum 3 Jh. n.Chr. (St. Katharinen 1998); T. K. Dennison, ‘Did serfdom matter? Russian rural society 1750-1860’, Historical Research 79 (2006), 74-89; W. E. Wiethoff, Crafting the Overseer’s Image (Columbia 2006). 75 Offprint from BICS Supplement-109 Copyright The Institute of Classical Studies University of London 2010