Slavery in Ancient Rome
The barbaric institution that plagued ancient Roman civilization.
The Romans pioneered our understanding of law, justice, and human liberty. But in a most supreme irony of human history, those very same Romans were oppressors to millions. Like a cancerous tumor, the vile institution of slavery was deeply entrenched in the ancient civilization of Rome. Rome’s religious, cultural, and economic practices were all indelibly shaped by slavery. Forced laborers were found in farms, mines, mills, and even in high-skilled professions.
For the Romans, a slave was someone who lacked libertas, or “liberty,” which was understood to mean the absence of servitude. Cicero, writing in the 1st century BC, argued that liberty “does not consist in having a just master, but in having none.” Slavery was more formally defined by the Roman jurist Gaius as “the state that is recognized by the ius gentium [meaning “law of nations”] in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature.”
Under Roman law, slaves were considered Roman property. Varro called them a “speaking tool.” They had no legal rights. Most slaves were never freed, either. In contrast to a freeborn Roman citizen, a slave could be subjected to corporeal punishment, rape, torture, and execution without trial. Fortunately, the slaves of ancient Rome did manage to gain some rights over time, such as the right to file complaints against their masters.
Ancient vs. modern slavery
There are a few key differences between ancient and modern slavery. First, ancient Roman slavery had nothing to do with race. Men, women, children, and foreigners alike were enslaved. Second, the distinction between slaves and freed people was very loose and fluid. Many Roman slaves won their freedom, and many freedmen were later enslaved. Ultimately, slavery in ancient Rome was defined by the reduction of human beings into property. Slaves were just like any other item in the house. Runaway slaves were accused of theft under Roman law.
How many?
Slavery was rampant in ancient Rome. The numbers are truly horrifying. During the Middle Republic, tens of thousands of slaves were sold off each day on the island of Delos. After Rome’s third war with the Samnites, 55,000 people were sold into slavery. After Rome’s destruction of Carthage, a quarter of a million people were enslaved. Caesar’s legions in Gaul sold perhaps as high as a million people into slavery.
Causes
There were four main sources of Rome’s slave population: war captives, victims of piracy, abandoned orphans, and poor people.
One of the main sources of slavery was Rome’s expansionist wars. However, the Romans would suffer dearly for their reliance on foreign troops, who engaged in armed revolts against their oppressors. The most notable of these was the Third Servile War, led by the famous Spartacus.
During the Pax Romana, which took place over the first two centuries of the Common Era, the Roman Empire temporarily halted its aggressive expansion. The lack of new conquests dried up the Romans’ sinister supply of human trafficking. However, to maintain this unjust system of human bondage, Imperial Rome imposed new legal restrictions to discourage the freeing of slaves. Escaped slaves were ruthlessly hunted down and returned for a bounty.
Roman slavery worked as a hereditary institution. Children were born into slavery, inheriting their parents’ servile status. Other people fell into slavery because of their debts. Certain criminals were legally condemned to slavery. Abandoned children were often raised up as slaves. Free people, if they were desperate enough, could sell themselves off into voluntary servitude. Most slaves were purchased directly in markets. Some were rented off.
Slave markets
The slave trade existed across the borders of Rome’s vast Mediterranean empire. It went largely unregulated by any laws. Slave markets existed in most major cities. The biggest in the Italian peninsula could be found at the Eternal City itself. One of the most notorious slave trades existed right next to the Temple of Castor in the Roman Forum. Puteoli was the second-busiest. Human trafficking also occurred in Brundisium, Capua, and Pompeii. Slaves were imported across the Alps to the city of Aquileia. Outside of Italy, Ephesus was the largest center of Roman slavery. Other major areas for the Roman slave trade existed across the northern Aegean, Asia Minor, Syria, Alexandria, and Mauretania.
Lifestyle
The lifestyle of Roman slaves had a lot of variability. The main distinction was between urban and rural slaves.
Rural slaves were unskilled farmer laborers. Their lives were miserable. They were chained together, and spent their days in the fields during heavy manual labor, under the supervision of cruel overseers. At night, they were herded into small, underground jails. They were rarely freed by their masters, and had little to look forward to in life. Even the brilliant, enlightened mind of Cato the Elder had no qualms with this brutal form of enslavement.
Urban slavery was more variable. Some urban slaves enjoyed more comfortable lives than their rural counterparts. Some of these household slaves were raised with the children of their masters. They enjoyed high-class education, and lived nearly as well as their free masters. Many skilled professions, such as teachers, carpenters, doctors, and clerks, were filled by urban slaves. Rome’s government bureaucracy, especially later in Rome’s history, was filled with slaves.
Slaves had a number of tasks. They served as doormen, hairdressers, valets, personal doctors, tutors, porters, and kennel masters. Meals were served and cleaned by slaves. Slaves had specialized tasks, such as serving wine or slicing meat.
Brutality
Roman slavery was extremely cruel. They were whipped into their labor. Runaway slaves were branded on the face or head, and outfitted with dog collars. Slaves could not testify in court, except under torture.
Some individual Romans, however, were more compassionate and benign. The just and benevolent Seneca urged the humane treatment of slaves in his Moral Epistles. The great Pliny the Younger, a politician by profession, was deeply concerned with the well-being of his slaves. He bragged that he treated his slaves like free people, allowing them to write wills and distribute their possessions. Pliny greatly disliked the inequitable treatment of slaves, writing that while “slave and free persons differ not at all when they are in ill health, the free receive gentler and more merciful treatment” from Roman doctors.
Still, most Romans were paranoid of slave revolts, and they prevented this through the use of draconian laws. Cato the Elder, one of the most famous names in Roman history, was unusually harsh toward his slaves. Cato’s cruelty was egregious enough that the historian Plutarch explicitly condemned it.
Manumission
Many skilled slaves entertained the hope of buying their freedom. Slaves worked hard to earn a sum of money, called a peculium, to literally purchase their liberty. Slaves were able to purchase the freedom of their spouses and children as well. The peculium was seen by the Romans as an incentive for the slaves to work harder. Slaves were usually freed by a dead master’s will. Freed slaves wore a red liberty cap—a symbol that was appropriated by the French Revolution many centuries later.
Interesting.