Slavery in ancient Rome
played an important role in the society and economy of ancient Rome. Unskilled or low-skill slaves labored in the fields, mines, and mills with few opportunities for advancement and little chance of freedom. Skilled and educated slaves—including artisans, chefs, domestic staff and personal attendants, [|entertainers], business managers, accountants and bankers, educators at all levels, secretaries and librarians, civil servants, and physicians—occupied a more privileged tier of servitude and could hope to obtain freedom through one of several well-defined paths with protections under the law. The possibility of [|manumission] and subsequent citizenship was a distinguishing feature of Rome's system of slavery, resulting in a significant and influential number of freedpersons in Roman society.
At all levels of employment, free working people, former slaves, and the enslaved mostly did the same kinds of jobs. Elite Romans whose wealth came from property ownership saw little difference between slavery and a dependence on earning wages from labor. Slaves were themselves considered property under Roman law and had no rights of legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, by law they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation, torture, and summary execution. The most brutal forms of punishment were reserved for slaves. The adequacy of their diet, shelter, clothing, and healthcare was dependent on their perceived utility to owners whose impulses might be cruel or situationally humane.
Some people were born into slavery as the child of an enslaved mother. Others became slaves. War captives were considered legally enslaved, and Roman military expansion during the Republican era was a major source of slaves. From the 2nd century BC through late antiquity, kidnapping and piracy put freeborn people all around the Mediterranean at risk of illegal enslavement, to which the children of poor families were especially vulnerable. Although a law was passed to ban [|debt slavery] quite early in Rome's history, some people sold themselves into [|contractual slavery] to escape poverty. The slave trade, lightly taxed and regulated, flourished in all reaches of the Roman Empire and across borders.
In antiquity, slavery was seen as the political consequence of one group dominating another, and people of any race, ethnicity, or place of origin might become slaves, including freeborn Romans. Slavery was practiced within all communities of the Roman Empire, including among Jews and Christians. Even modest households might expect to have two or three slaves.
A period of [|slave rebellions] ended with the defeat of Spartacus in 71 BC; slave uprisings grew rare in the Imperial era, when individual escape was a more persistent form of resistance. Fugitive slave-hunting was the most concerted form of policing in the Roman Empire.
Moral discourse on slavery was concerned with the treatment of slaves, and abolitionist views were almost nonexistent. Inscriptions set up by slaves and freedpersons and the art and decoration of their houses offer glimpses of how they saw themselves. A few writers and philosophers of the Roman era were former slaves or the sons of freed slaves. Some scholars have made efforts to imagine more deeply the lived experiences of slaves in the Roman world through comparisons to the Atlantic slave trade, but no portrait of the "typical" Roman slave emerges from the wide range of work performed by slaves and freedmen and the complex distinctions among their social and legal statuses.
Origins
From Rome's earliest historical period, domestic slaves were part of a familia, the body of a household's dependents—a word especially, or sometimes limited to, referring to the slaves collectively. Pliny was nostalgic for a time when "the ancients" lived more intimately in a household with no need for "legions of slaves"—but still imagined this simpler domestic life as supported by the possession of a slave.All those belonging to the familia were subject to the paterfamilias, the "father" or head of household and more precisely the estate owner. According to Seneca, the early Romans coined paterfamilias as a euphemism for the relationship of a master to his slaves. The word for "master" was dominus as the one who controlled the domain of the domus ; dominium was the word for his control over the slaves. The paterfamilias held the power of life and death over the dependents of his household, including his sons and daughters as well as slaves. The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus asserts that this right dated back to the legendary time of Romulus.
In contrast to Greek city-states, Rome was an ethnically diverse population and incorporated former slaves as citizens. Dionysius found it remarkable that when Romans manumitted their slaves, they gave them Roman citizenship as well. Myths of Rome's founding sought to account for both this heterogeneity and the role of freedmen in Roman society. The legendary founding by Romulus began with his establishment of a place of refuge that, according to the Augustan-era historian Livy, attracted "mostly former slaves, vagabonds, and runaways all looking for a fresh start" as citizens of the new city, which Livy considers a source of Rome's strength. Servius Tullius, the semi-legendary sixth king of Rome, was said to have been the son of a slave woman, and the cultural role of slavery is embedded in some [|religious festivals and temples] that the Romans associated with his reign.
Some legal and religious developments pertaining to slavery thus can be discerned even in Rome's earliest institutions. The Twelve Tables, the earliest Roman legal code, dated traditionally to 451/450 BC, do not contain law defining slavery, the existence of which is taken as a given. But there are mentions of manumission and the status of freedmen, who are referred to as cives Romani liberti, "freedmen who are Roman citizens", indicating that as early as the 5th century BC, former slaves were a significant demographic that the law needed to address, with a legal path to freedom and the opportunity to participate in the legal and political system.
The Roman jurist Gaius described slavery as "the state that is recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature". Ulpian also regarded slavery as an aspect of the ius gentium, the customary international law held in common among all peoples. In Ulpian's tripartite division of law, the "law of nations" was considered neither natural law, thought to exist in nature and govern animals as well as humans, nor civil law, the legal code particular to a people or nation. All human beings are born free under natural law, but since slavery was held to be a universal practice, individual nations would develop their own civil laws pertaining to slaves.
In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the ius gentium to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. The ius gentium was not a legal code, and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct".
Although Rome's earliest wars were defensive, a Roman victory would still result in the enslavement of the defeated under these circumstances, as is recorded at the conclusion of the war with the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC. Defensive wars also drained manpower for agriculture, increasing the demand for labor—a demand that could be met by the availability of war captives. From the sixth through the third centuries BC, Rome gradually became a "slave society", with the first two Punic Wars producing the most dramatic surge in the number of slaves.
Slavery with the possibility of manumission became so embedded in Roman society that by the 2nd century AD, most free citizens in the city of Rome are likely to have had slaves "somewhere in their ancestry".
Enslavement of Roman citizens
In early Rome, the Twelve Tables permitted debt slavery under harsh terms and made freeborn Romans subject to enslavement as a result of financial misfortune. A law in the late 4th century BC put a stop to creditors enslaving a defaulting debtor as a private action, though a debtor could still be compelled by a legal judgment to work off his debt. Otherwise, the only means of enslaving a freeborn citizen that the Romans of the Republican era recognized as lawful was military defeat and capture under the ius gentium.The Carthaginian leader Hannibal enslaved Roman war captives in large numbers during the Second Punic War. Following the Roman defeat at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, the treaty included terms for ransoming prisoners of war. The Roman senate declined to do so, and their commander ended up paying the ransom himself. After the disastrous Battle of Cannae the following year, Hannibal again stipulated a redemption of captives, but the senate after debate again voted not to pay, preferring to send a message that soldiers should fight to victory or die. Hannibal then sold these prisoners of war to the Greeks, and they remained slaves until the Second Macedonian War, when Flamininus recovered 1,200 men who had survived some twenty years of slavery after Cannae. The war that most dramatically escalated the number of slaves brought into Roman society at the same time had exposed an unprecedented number of Roman citizens to enslavement.
In the later Republic and during the Imperial period, thousands of soldiers, citizens, and their slaves in the Roman East were taken captive and enslaved by the Parthians or later within the Sasanian Empire. The Parthians captured 10,000 survivors after the defeat of Marcus Crassus at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, and marched them 1,500 miles to Margiana in Bactria, where their fate is unknown. While thoughts of returning the Roman military standards lost at Carrhae motivated military minds for decades, "considerably less official concern was expressed about the liberation of Roman prisoners". Writing about thirty years after the battle, the Augustan poet Horace imagined them married to "barbarian" women and serving the Parthian army, too dishonored to be restored to Rome.
Valerian became the first emperor to be held captive after his defeat by Shapur I at the Battle of Edessa in AD 260. According to hostile Christian sources, the aging emperor was treated as a slave and subjected to a grotesque array of humiliations. Reliefs and inscriptions located at the sacred Zoroastrian site of Naqsh-e Rostam, southwest Iran, celebrate the victories of Shapur I and his successor over the Romans, with emperors in subjection and legionaries paying tribute. Shapur's inscriptions record that the Roman troops he had enslaved came from all reaches of the empire.
A Roman enslaved in war under such circumstances lost his citizen rights at home. His right to own property was forfeited, his marriage was dissolved, and if he was head of a household his legal power ' over his dependents was suspended. If he was released from slavery, his citizen status might be restored along with his property and potestas. His marriage, however, was not automatically renewed; another agreement of consent by both parties had to be arranged. The loss of citizenship was a consequence of submitting to an enemy sovereign state; freeborn people kidnapped by bandits or pirates were regarded as seized illegally, and therefore they could be ransomed, or their sale into slavery rendered void, without compromising their citizen status. This contrast between the consequences for status from war ' and from banditry ' may be reflected in the similar Jewish distinction between a "captive of a kingdom" and a "captive of banditry", in what would be a rare example of Roman law influencing the language and formulation of rabbinic law.
The legal process originally developed for reintegrating war captives was postliminium, a return after passing out of Roman jurisdiction and then crossing back over one's own "threshold" '. Not all war captives were eligible for reintegration; the terms of a treaty might permit the other side to retain captives as servi hostium, "slaves of the enemy". A ransom could be paid to redeem a captive individually or as a group; an individual ransomed by someone outside his family was required to pay back the money before his full rights could be restored, and although he was a freeborn person, his status was ambiguous until the lien was lifted.
An investigative procedure was put in place under the emperor Hadrian to determine whether returned soldiers had been captured or surrendered willingly. Traitors, deserters, and those who had a chance to escape but made no attempt were not eligible for postliminium restoration of their citizenship.
Because postliminium law also applied to enemy seizure of mobile property, it was the means by which military-support slaves taken by the enemy were brought back into possession and restored to their former slave status under their Roman owners.