Commenting ‘with morals and reflexions’ on the
Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists, English author, pamphleteer and defender of royalist views Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–1704) explained that a servant beating his master’s dog to the point of making it run away was ‘the Master’s Instrument’ ‘as the Cudgel [was] the Servant’s’.
1 Roger L’Estrange, Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists: With Morals and Reflexions, 2nd ed. (London, 1694), p. 205. Such a representation of a servant goes back to Aristotle, who argued that the
doulos (servant/slave) is a living tool of his master, even though he is not excluded from mankind. He does not belong to himself but to his master; he has no will and no individual identity.
2 Aristotle, Politics, Book 1 (A), 1255b. On this issue there is a huge literature that cannot be addressed here. Only the master is the active subject; the slave acts as his tool.
3 Aristotle also wrote that ‘How slaves should be employed, and why it is advantageous that all slaves should have their freedom set before them as a reward, we will say later’, but he never explained it. Aristotle, Politics, Book 7, 1330a.Such a representation of the slave as a master’s tool was highly ideological: social history has shown that slaves (in Ancient Greece and elsewhere) had some agency.
4 See Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London, 1980) and a reappraisal by Kostas Vlassopoulos, ‘Slavery, Freedom and Citizenship in Classical Athens: Beyond a Legalistic Approach’, European Review of History, 16 (2009), 347–63. Nonetheless, it was reproduced for over 2,000 years in dozens of texts very different in content, aim and audience.
5 Sarti, Servo e padrone, pp. 37–40. For instance, early modern directions on household management, which inevitably dealt with servants’ government, often described servants as living tools. ‘Servants are living rational tools owned mainly for the service and utility of their own masters’,
6 Pompeo Vizani, Breve trattato del governo famigliare (Bologna, 1609), pp. 36–7. states, for instance, a short book that took this sentence almost literally from the Senese author Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–1578).
7 Alessandro Piccolomini, Della institution morale (Venice, 1575), p. 524, revised edition of the book De la institutione di tutta la vita de l’homo nato nobile e in città libera (Venice, 1542). Piccolomini associated servants and tools to the point of maintaining that servants would rust if they spent time without working.
8 Piccolomini, De la institutione, p. 231; Piccolomini, Della institution morale, p. 547. See also Silvano Razzi, Economica christiana, e civile (Florence, 1568), p. 244. The poet and writer Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) also argued that servants were tools,
9 Torquato Tasso, Il padre di famiglia, in Ettore Mazzali (ed.), Torquato Tasso. Opere, vol. 2 (Naples, 1969), pp. 503–66, at p. 537. as did the French Jesuit Jean Cordier (1599–1673): he explained that Aristotle defined servants as
instruments animez [sic], clarifying that, if they were as they should be, they would act only according to their master’s will.
10 Jean Cordier, La famille saincte (Lyon, 1662), p. 847.Aristotle’s position was also mentioned, to quote another genre, in the eighteenth-century edition of the well-known
Iconologia by Cesare Ripa (1555/1560–1622), expanded by Cesare Orlandi. Servitude (
Servitù) is represented as a poor, dishevelled young woman with a yoke or a big stone on her shoulders. She is dishevelled – the author explained – because servants, who are ‘an active living tool provided with reason’, are prevented from caring for themselves by having to care for their masters.
11 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (…) notabilmente accresciuta (…) dall’abate Cesare Orlandi, vol. 5 (Perugia, 1767), pp. 102–3. Eighteenth-century books on trade, to mention another example, normally considered colonial slaves ‘in the manner of Aristotle, as
living tools or instruments’: ‘their humanity is invisible: they are not subjects but objects, tools or instruments of production’, Catherine Larrère explained.
12 Catherine Larrère, ‘Économie politique et esclavage au XVIIIe siècle, une rencontre tardive et ambiguë’, in Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau (ed.), Abolir l’esclavage. Un réformisme à l’épreuve (France, Portugal, Suisse, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles) (Rennes, 2008), pp. 209–23 (215, emphasis in the original); see also pp. 211, 214, 216.These examples show the long-term persistence of the representation of servants as living tools, still attested in the nineteenth century,
13 Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, Filosofia del diritto, vol. 2 (Milan, 1843), p. 296, note 1. its presence in texts different in content and purpose, and its use in different cultures and countries. Such definitions were used not only to refer to chattel slaves but also while speaking of servants’ management in Western Europe, when most servants were no longer slaves, as recognised by some writers. The first-mentioned booklet spoke of servants who served out of personal choice, unlike oxen and horses, which were irrational living tools.
14 Vizani, Breve trattato, p. 36. The recourse to the tool metaphor and the simultaneous recognition of the servants’ freedom appears confusing to us, as in the case of Cordier, who, after approvingly mentioning Aristotle’s definition of servants as living instruments, argued that servants should not obey masters who give them orders contrary to Christian ethics.
15 Cordier, La famille saincte, pp. [8]49–50.Some writers who used the tool metaphor admitted that it was no longer possible to follow Aristotle in every detail. Piccolomini, for instance, wrote that in Ancient Greece, according to the law, a master had total power over those who were bought or captured through a fair war, whereas in his own times such a custom was forbidden in Italy and masters were left with only limited power over servants – that is, as much power as servants freely accepted by agreeing to serve in exchange for wages, day by day.
16 Piccolomini, Della institution morale, p. 522. Similarly, Tasso argued that in ancient times servants were slaves captured in war, whereas in his times they were mainly free people, for whom rewards were necessary.
17 Tasso, Il padre di famiglia, p. 532. Nonetheless, they described servants as their masters’ tools: clearly, they did not consider being a tool and being free as contradictory conditions.