2014, Overlook press, NY, 216 pages

Jerry Toner does a devious disservice to his masters in the guise of Marcus Sidonious Falx, who is a well-balanced and realistic composite of an ethically grounded Roman of the upper class.

Falx reminds the reader that slaves must be maintained in their station through forethought, self-discipline, severity, and a commitment to count to ten before taking any action. This is good advice for a class of person who is in effect a god-on earth, a person with the power of life and death over two to 2,000 souls. Among other things he points out how unsettling it is to visit a friend who tortures his slaves at dinner time and who feeds them alive to giant lampreys in the fish pond.

The introduction pays homage to our feminized servility.

The text insists on using the modern term slave for the Roman term—which has now been assigned to voluntary employees of menial status—in this way waxing complicit in the massive cover-up of very recent, none race-based, chattel slavery in the modern world.

During the Falx passages Jerry lets himself shine as a free-thinker, constrained only by the fiction that slave was an ancient Roman term and that the ancient Roman term is not still alive in the form of its modern descendent, servant. In this reader’s opinion this seemingly small semantic point is a damning indictment of the faltering of the Western Mind and explains the fall of Europe to Islam—for at least the Islamist knows and declares that he is a slave or servant to his God, understanding this servile designation is his condition, as opposed to the dreaming fools of the West who insist that they are free from their ethical golem of a God.

At the end of each chapter Jerry puts on his scholarly hat and sources Falx’s statements.

Overall, The Guide to Roman Slave Management is an entertaining and informative book which will help discern some of the cracks in the false narrative of race-based human servitude that we lie beneath like opium addicts floating through a realm of delusion.

Jerry does mention that more slaves are held as unpaid, coerced property now, than in Rome at its height, although his warning is not free of the suggestion that they are but one step away from employee status.

Some readers might take note that the ancient pagans, Jews and Christians, and many barbarians recognized slavery as good and right, with the more materially advanced the society was the more it accepted the value of servitude. Some of the aspects of ancient Roman slavery that might surprise are:

1. That freemen—like freemen in the American Plantation Era—made the most brutal masters.

2. That Saint Paul turned in an escaped slave and encouraged Christians to be obedient slaves.

3. That Christians treated their slaves no differently than pagans, prefiguring the widespread Christian-based acceptance of chattel slavery in Colonial America.

4. That only barbarians, such as the Alans, believed that slavery was wrong on moral principal.

5. That Africans and Asians made better, more obedient slaves than Europeans, which also prefigured conditions of American slavery.

6. That the supposedly morally debased emperor Claudius passed laws barring the killing of slaves by the masters and for freeing grossly mistreated or abandoned slaves—exceeding any such legislation during the American Plantation Era.

7. That one of the most dreaded characteristics of the slave was a willingness or resolve to commit suicide rather than suffer for his master, which, ironically, was the keystone injunction against free will by the Catholic Church from its inception, that suffering was the mortal lot, paradise could wait and that suicide was a sin. From the Jews at Masada to the Saxons [who Charlemagne later had to execute in mass to effect their conversions] to the Iberian Celts, who all killed themselves when their bid for freedom failed, the Romans were mighty worried about the possibility of such tribal resolve catching hold as a general thing, which was one of Christianity’s major selling points to the ruling class.

Read Jerry Toner’s brutally entertaining book, and realize that he is tiptoeing as lightly round his masters as the slaves of Falx did.