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Slavery in ancient Rome | HearLore
Slavery in ancient Rome
A Roman mosaic from Dougga in Tunisia, dated to the second or third century AD, shows two large slaves carrying wine jars. Each wears an amulet against the evil eye on a necklace. One slave wears a loincloth while the other wears an exomis. The young slave on the left carries water and towels. The one on the right holds a bough and a basket of flowers. This image captures the reality that slavery played an important role in the society and economy of ancient Rome.
From Rome's earliest historical period, domestic slaves were part of a familia, the body of a household's dependents. Richard P. Saller notes that this word referred especially or sometimes limitedly to the slaves collectively. Pliny writing in the first century AD was nostalgic for a time when ancients lived more intimately in a household with no need for legions of slaves. Yet he 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. According to Seneca, early Romans coined paterfamilias as a euphemism for the relationship of a master to his slaves. The word for master was dominus, 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 asserted 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. Livy states that this attracted mostly former slaves, vagabonds, and runaways all looking for a fresh start as citizens of the new city. Servius Tullius, the semi-legendary sixth king of Rome, was said to have been the son of a slave woman. 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 or 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. These freedmen were referred to as cives Romani liberti, meaning freedmen who are Roman citizens. This indicates that as early as the fifth century BC, former slaves were a significant demographic that the law needed to address.
The Roman jurist Gaius described slavery as the state recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature. Ulpian in the second century AD also regarded slavery as an aspect of the ius gentium. This customary international law was held in common among all peoples. In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the ius gentium to enslave a defeated population.
What was the legal status of slaves in ancient Rome according to Roman law?
A slave in ancient Roman law lacked libertas, which is liberty defined as the absence of servitude. The common Latin word for slave was servus, but legally a slave was mancipium, meaning something taken in hand and subject to control.
How did Romans treat slave families and what was contubernium?
Contubernium was a quasi-marital union between two slaves within the same household that had legal implications addressed by jurists. Although masters could break up families, evidence suggests that formation of family units was supported within larger urban households and rural estates.
When were slaves released from their master's control through manumission?
Slaves were released from their master's control through the legal act of manumissio, with imperial household slaves routinely manumitted at ages 30 to 35. There were three kinds of legally binding manumission: by the rod, by the census, and by the terms of the owner's will.
Who became enslaved during the Great Jewish Revolt of AD 66 to 70?
The Jewish historian Josephus reports that the Great Jewish Revolt of AD 66 to 70 alone resulted in the enslavement of 97,000 people. The future emperor Vespasian sold 30,400 war captives from Tarichaea into slavery after executing those who were old or infirm.
What rights did slaves have regarding property and peculium in ancient Rome?
As a matter of law Roman slaves could not own property but could be allowed to hold and manage property called peculium which ultimately belonged to their master. A fund set aside for a slave's use included profits from business transactions conducted by the slave and could include other slaves put at the disposal of the holder.
From the sixth through the third centuries BC, Rome gradually became a slave society. The first two Punic Wars between 265 and 201 BC produced the most dramatic surge in the number of slaves. Slavery with the possibility of manumission became so embedded in Roman society that by the second century AD, most free citizens in the city of Rome likely had slaves somewhere in their ancestry.
In early Rome, the Twelve Tables permitted debt slavery under harsh terms. They made freeborn Romans subject to enslavement as a result of financial misfortune. A law in the late fourth 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.
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 in 217 BC, 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.
Hannibal then sold these prisoners of war to the Greeks. 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 also 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. They marched them 1,500 miles to Margiana in Bactria where their fate is unknown.
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 celebrate the victories of Shapur I and his successor over the Romans.
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 household his legal power over his dependents was suspended.
Legal Status And Personhood
Fundamentally, the slave in ancient Roman law was one who lacked libertas, liberty defined as the absence of servitude. Cicero asserted that liberty does not consist in having a just master but in having none. The common Latin word for slave was servus, but in Roman law, a slave as chattel was mancipium. This grammatically neuter word means something taken in hand, manus, a metaphor for possession and hence control and subordination.
Agricultural slaves, certain farmland within the Italian peninsula, and farm animals were all res mancipi, a category of property established in early Rome's rural economy. The exclusive right to trade in res mancipi was a defining aspect of Roman citizenship in the Republican era. Free noncitizen residents could not buy and sell this form of property without a special grant of commercial rights.
Owing to a growing body of laws, in the imperial period a master could face penalties for killing a slave without just cause. Claudius decreed that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. Under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide.
From the mid to late second century AD, slaves had more standing to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners. But since even in late antiquity slaves still could not file lawsuits, could not testify without first undergoing torture, and could be punished by being burnt alive for testifying against their masters, it is unclear how these offenses could be brought to court.
Lacking legal standing as a person, a slave could not enter into legal contracts on his own behalf. In effect, he remained a perpetual minor. A slave could not be sued or be the plaintiff in a lawsuit. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law unless the slave was tortured. This practice was based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs should be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced.
When a slave committed a crime, the punishment exacted was likely to be far more severe than for the same crime committed by a free person. Persona gradually became synonymous with the true nature of the individual in the Roman world. Yet servus non habet personae means a slave has no persona. He has no personality. He does not own his body; he has no ancestors, no name, no cognomen, no goods of his own.
Family Life And Contubernium
In Roman law, the slave had no kinship, no ancestral or paternal lineage, and no collateral relatives. The lack of legal personhood meant that slaves could not enter into forms of marriage recognized under Roman law. A male slave was not a father as a matter of law because he could not exercise patriarchal potestas.
However, slaves born into the familia and upwardly mobile slaves who held privileged positions might form a heterosexual union with a partner intended to be lasting or permanent. Within this union children might be reared. Such a union, either arranged or approved and recognized by the slave's owner, was called contubernium. Though not technically a marriage, it had legal implications addressed by Roman jurists in case law.
A contubernium was normally a cohabitation between two slaves within the same household. Contubernia were recorded along with births, deaths, and manumissions in large households concerned with lineage. Sometimes only one partner obtained free status before the death of the other, as commemorated in epitaphs. These quasi marital unions were especially common among imperial slaves.
The master had the legal right to break up or sell off family members, and it has sometimes been assumed that they did so arbitrarily. But because of the value Romans placed on home-reared slaves known as vernae in expanding their familia, there is more evidence that the formation of family units was supported within larger urban households and on rural estates.
Roman jurists who weigh in on actions that might break up slave families generally favored keeping them together. Protections for them appear several times in the compendium of Roman law known as the Digest. A master who left his rural estate to an heir often included the workforce of slaves, sometimes with express provisions that slave families be kept together.
The Peculium System
Because they were themselves property, as a matter of law Roman slaves could not own property. However, they could be allowed to hold and manage property which they could use as if it were their own, even though it ultimately belonged to their master. A fund or property set aside for a slave's use was called peculium. Isidore of Seville offered this definition: peculium is in the proper sense something which belongs to minors or slaves.
The practice of allowing the slave a peculium likely originated on agricultural estates in setting aside small parcels of land where slave families could grow some of their own food. The word peculium points to the addition of livestock. Any surplus could be sold at market. Like other practices that encouraged agency among slaves, this early form served an ethic of self-sufficiency.
Slaves within a wealthy household or country estate might be given a small monetary peculium as an allowance. The master's obligation to provide for the slave's subsistence was not counted as part of this discretionary peculium. Growth of the peculium came from the slave's own savings, including profits set aside from what was owed to the master as a result of sales or business transactions conducted by the slave.
In inscriptions slaves and freedpersons at times assert that they had paid for the dedication with their own money. The peculium in the form of property could include other slaves put at the disposal of the peculium-holder. In this sense, inscriptions not infrequently record that a slave belonged to another slave.
Slaves with the skills and opportunities to earn money might hope to save enough to buy their freedom. There was a risk to the still-enslaved person that the master would renege and take back the earnings. But one of the expanded protections for slaves in the Imperial era was that a manumission agreement between the slave and his master could be enforced.
Manumission And Freedmen
Slaves were released from their master's control through the legal act of manumissio, meaning literally a releasing from the hand. Slaves of the emperor's household were routinely manumitted at ages 30 to 35, an age that should not be taken as standard for other slaves. Within the familia Caesaris, a young woman in her reproductive years seems to have had the greatest chance for manumission.
A slave who had a large enough peculium might also buy the freedom of a fellow slave, a contubernalis with whom he had cohabited or a partner in business. Neither age nor length of service was automatic grounds for manumission. Masterly generosity was not the driving force behind the Romans' dealings with their slaves.
There were three kinds of legally binding manumission: by the rod, by the census, and by the terms of the owner's will. The public ceremony of manumissio vindicta was a fictitious trial performed before a magistrate. A Roman citizen declared the slave free, the owner did not contest it, the citizen touched the slave with a staff and pronounced a formula, and the magistrate confirmed it.
An edict in 118 BC stated that the freedman was legally responsible only for services or projects spelled out as stipulations or sworn to in advance. Money could not be demanded, and certain freedmen were exempt from any formal operae. The Lex Aelia Sentia of AD 4 allowed a patron to take his freedman to court for not carrying out his operae as outlined in their manumission agreement.
During the early Imperial period, some freedmen became very powerful. Those who were part of the emperor's household could become key functionaries in the government bureaucracy. Some rose to positions of great influence, such as Narcissus, a former slave of the emperor Claudius. Their influence grew to such an extent under the Julio-Claudian emperors that Hadrian limited their participation by law.
Sources Of Enslavement
In the ancient Roman world, people might become enslaved as a result of warfare, piracy and kidnapping, or child abandonment. A significant number of the enslaved population were vernae, born to a slave woman within a household or on a family farm. A few scholars have suggested that freeborn people selling themselves into slavery was a more frequent occurrence than literary sources alone would indicate.
Warfare was arguably the greatest source of slaves during the Republican era. A major battle might result in captives numbering in the hundreds to the tens of thousands. Once during the Gallic Wars, after his siege of the walled town of the Aduatuci, Julius Caesar sold the entire population, numbering 53,000 people, to slave dealers on the spot.
As an example of the impact on one community, it was during this period that the greatest numbers of slaves from the province of Judaea were traded. The Jewish historian Josephus reports that the Great Jewish Revolt of AD 66 to 70 alone resulted in the enslavement of 97,000 people. The future emperor Vespasian sold 30,400 war captives from Tarichaea into slavery after executing those who were old or infirm.
Systematic piracy for the purpose of human trafficking was most rampant in the second century BC when the city of Side in Pamphylia was a center of the trade. Pompey was credited with eradicating piracy from the Mediterranean in 67 BC. While large-scale piracy was more or less controlled during the Pax Romana, piratical kidnapping continued to contribute to the Roman slave supply into the later Imperial era.