Slavery In Ancient Rome

Slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the economy. Besides manual labour, slaves performed many domestic services and might be employed at highly skilled jobs and professions. Accountants and physicians were often slaves. Slaves of Greek origin in particular might be highly educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills.

Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Most slaves would never be freed. Unlike Roman citizens, they could legally be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture and summary execution. Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters.

One major source of slaves had been Roman military expansion during the Republic. The use of former enemy soldiers as slaves led perhaps inevitably to a series of ''en masse'' armed rebellions, the Servile Wars, the last of which was led by Spartacus. During the ''Pax Romana'' of the early Roman Empire (1st–2nd centuries AD), the emphasis was placed on maintaining stability, and the lack of new territorial conquests dried up this supply line of human trafficking. To maintain an enslaved workforce, increased legal restrictions on freeing slaves were put into place. Escaped slaves would be hunted down and returned (often for a reward).

Origins

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" ('' Institutiones'' 1.3.2, 161 AD).Fields, Nic. ''Spartacus and the Slave War 73–71 BC: A Gladiator Rebels against Rome.'' (Osprey 2009) p. 17–18. Ulpian (2nd century AD) also regarded slavery as an aspect of the ''ius gentium'', the customary international law held in common among all peoples (''gentes'').

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.Brian Tierney, ''The Idea of Natural Rights'' (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002, originally published 1997 by Scholars Press for Emory University), p. 136. All human beings are born free (''liberi'') 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 (265–201 BC) producing the most dramatic surge in the number of slaves.

Some legal and religious developments pertaining to slavery can be discerned even in Rome's earliest institutions. The growing role of slavery in Roman society was reflected in the earliest Roman legal code, the Twelve Tables, dated traditionally to 451/450 BC. The Tables do not contain law defining or pertaining to slavery as such. Specific provisions apply to 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 fifth 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.

In contrast to Greek city-states, Rome was an ethnically diverse population and incorporated former slaves as citizens. 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.

From the 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 (2nd century AD) 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'' (household); ''dominium'' was the word for his control over the slaves. The ''paterfamilias'' held the power of life and death ''(vitae necisque potestas)'' over all members of the extended household except his wife, the ''materfamilias'', including his sons and daughters as well as slaves.

The Greek historian Dionysius (1st century AD) asserts that this right dated back to the legendary time of Romulus, but historically, the right of the father to kill or sell his offspring was moderated by both laws and social censure. The exercise of this power over the ''familia'' was expected ideally to be just and occasioned by an extreme offense; those who killed a member of the household arbitrarily were criticized as acting without self-discipline. However, the legal right of the master to kill his slave at will remained in effect into the late Republic and began to be mitigated only in the imperial era. In consolidating his powers as the first Roman emperor, Augustus styled himself the father of the Roman people and subsumed the power of life and death, with the whole of the Roman state as his ''domus''; the senatorial order resented being placed in a servile role, with slaves and freedmen of the imperial house enjoying expanded privileges.

Throughout the Roman world, slave ownership was most widespread from the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) to the 4th century AD. Slavery with the possibility of manumission was 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."

Legal status

The general Latin word for "slave" was ''servus''. In Roman law, the far more common term for the slave as chattel was ''mancipium'' ("one held in hand", from which derives the word ''emancipatio'' as the opposite condition). Other words used in Roman law to refer to the slave include ''homo'' (human being of any gender), ''famulus'' (referring to the slave's role within the ''familia''), ''ancilla'' (a female slave; ''serva'' was less common), and ''puer'' (boy). Although the slave was a human being (''homo''), he was not considered a person (Latin ''persona)'' in the legal sense.Berger, entry on ''servus'', ''Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law'', p. 704 ''Persona'', in the observation of Marcel Mauss, gradually became "synonymous with the true nature of the individual" in the Roman world, but "''servus non habet personam'' ('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." He belonged to the master as a thing (''res''). In early Rome, the master was free to dispose of a slave as property as he saw fit, including killing him. Owing to a growing body of laws, in the imperial period a master could face penalties for killing a slave without just cause and could be compelled to sell a slave on grounds of mistreatment.

Because he lacked legal standing as a person, 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—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced. A slave was not permitted to testify against his master unless the charge was treason ('' crimen maiestatis)''. Slaves could not enter into legal forms of marriage ( ''matrimonium''), though some might be permitted to cohabit less formally in the arrangement known as ''contubernium''. 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.

Roman slaves could be allowed to hold property, which they could use as if it were their own, even though it belonged to their master. Skilled or educated slaves were sometimes allowed to earn their own money, and might hope to save enough to buy their freedom. Such slaves were often freed by the terms of their master's will, or for services rendered.

Legal protection of slaves grew as the empire expanded. Claudius announced 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. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century AD to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves.

Slavery was not abolished under the Christian emperors, but laws were passed limiting or regulating slavery. Under Constantine II, Jews were barred from owning Christian slaves, converting their slaves to Judaism, or circumcising their slaves. Laws in late antiquity discouraging the subjection of Christians to Jewish owners suggest that they were aimed at protecting Christian identity, since Christian households continued to have slaves who were Christian.

Enslavement of Roman citizens

The only means of enslaving a freeborn Roman citizen that the Romans recognized as legal 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 (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, 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 AD 9, when the Germans under Arminius captured Romans after the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, the terms of return were also politicized. Mistrusting the loyalty of the army of the Rhine, which would have preferred Germanicus as emperor, Tiberius permitted these prisoners of war to be ransomed, but with the unusual provision that they were banned from Italy.

In the Roman East, thousands of soldiers, citizens, and civilians already of slave status were 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 ''(potestas)'' 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 ''(bellum)'' and from banditry ''(latrocinium)'' 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” ''(limen)''. 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.

Manumission

''Manumissio'' ("manumission"), meaning "releasing from the hand", was the legal act of releasing a slave from his master's power. The English word "emancipation", in contrast, derives from the Latin legal term ''emancipatio'' for the releasing of a son or daughter from their father's legal power (''patria potestas)''. Manumission was sometimes a public ceremony, ''manumissio vindicta'', performed before a high-ranking 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. Other slaves were freed in their owner's will (''manumissio testamento''), sometimes on condition of service or payment before or after freedom. Informal manumission (''inter amicos'') became legal under Augustus; this might consist of the owner proclaiming a slave's freedom in front of friends and family, or just a simple invitation to recline with the family at dinner. A felt cap called the pileus was given to the former slave as symbol of manumission.

Scholars have differed on the rate of manumission. The hope was always greater than the reality, though it may have motivated some slaves to work harder and conform to the ideal of the "faithful servant." Dangling liberty as a reward, slaveholders could navigate the moral issues of enslaving people through placing the burden of merit on slaves—"good" slaves deserved freedom, and others did not.

Neither age nor length of service was automatic grounds for manumission. A young woman in her reproductive years seems to have had the greatest chance for manumission, allowing her to marry and bear legitimate, free children. Slaves were freed for a variety of reasons; for a particularly good deed toward the slave's owner, or out of friendship or respect. Sometimes, a slave who had enough money could buy his freedom and the freedom of a fellow slave, frequently a spouse. However, few slaves had enough money to do so, and many slaves were not allowed to hold money. Slaves were also freed through testamentary manumission, by a provision in an owner's will at his death.

In 2 BC, Augustus restricted the number of slaves that could be freed at once from a single household, depending on the number of slaves belonging to the household; in a household with three to ten slaves, no more than half could be freed; in a household with ten to thirty slaves, no more than a third could be freed; in a household with thirty to one hundred slaves, no more than a quarter could be freed; in a household with over one hundred slaves, no more than one-fifth could be freed, and under no circumstances was it permitted to free more than one hundred slaves at a time. In 4 AD, another law prohibited the manumission of slaves younger than thirty years of age, with some exceptions.

Slaves of the emperor's own household were among those most likely to receive manumission, and the usual legal requirements did not apply. Imperial slaves were routinely manumitted between the ages of 30 and 35—an age that should not be taken as standard for other slaves.

By the early 4th century AD, when the Empire was becoming Christianized, slaves could be freed by a ritual in a church, officiated by an ordained bishop or priest. Constantine I promulgated edicts authorizing ''manumissio in ecclesia'', manumission within a church, in AD 316 and 323, though the law was not put into effect in Africa till AD 401. Churches were allowed to manumit slaves among their membership, and clergy could free their own slaves by simple declaration without filing documents or the presence of witnesses. Laws such as the ''Novella 142'' of Justinian in the 6th century gave bishops the power to free slaves.

Freedmen

After manumission, a male slave who had belonged to a Roman citizen enjoyed not only passive freedom from ownership, but active political freedom (''libertas''), including the right to vote. A slave who had acquired ''libertas'' was thus a ''libertus'' ("freed person", feminine ''liberta'') in relation to his former master, who then became his patron ('' patronus''). Freedmen and patrons had mutual obligations to each other within the traditional patronage network, and freedmen also had the ability to “network” with other patrons as well.

As a social class, freed slaves were ''libertini'', though later writers used the terms ''libertus'' and ''libertinus'' interchangeably. ''Libertini'' were not entitled to hold public office or state priesthoods, nor could they achieve senatorial rank.Berger, entry on ''libertinus'', ''Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law'', p. 564. Among the laws Augustus issued pertaining to marriage and sexual morality was one permitting legal marriage between a freedwoman and a freeborn man of any rank below the senatorial, and legitimizing their heirs. Also by Augustus' legislation, a freedwoman could not refuse to marry her previous owner or divorce him.

During the early Imperial period, some freedmen became very powerful. Those who were part of the emperor's household ''(familia Caesaris)'' 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.

More typical among freedmen success stories would be the cloak dealership of Lucius Arlenus Demetrius, enslaved from Cilicia, and Lucius Arlenus Artemidorus, from Paphlagonia, whose shared family name suggests that their partnership toward a solid, profitable business began during enslavement. A few freedmen became very wealthy. The brothers who owned the House of the Vettii, one of the biggest and most magnificent houses in Pompeii, are thought to have been freedmen. Building impressive tombs and monuments for themselves and their families was another way for freedmen to demonstrate their achievements. Despite their wealth and influence, they might still be looked down on by the traditional aristocracy as a vulgar ''nouveau riche''. In the ''Satyricon'', the character Trimalchio is a caricature of such a freedman.

''Dediticii''

Although in general freed slaves could become citizens, those categorized as ''dediticii'' suffered permanent disbarment from citizenship. The ''dediticii'' were mainly slaves whose masters had punished them for serious misconduct by placing them in chains, branding them, torturing them to confess a crime, imprisoning them or sending them involuntarily to a gladiatorial school (''ludus''), or condemning them to fight with gladiators or wild beasts. ''Dediticii'' were regarded as a threat to society, regardless of whether their master's punishments had been justified, and if they came within a hundred miles of Rome, they were subject to reenslavement.

Enslavement

"Slaves are either born or made" ''(servi aut nascuntur aut fiunt)'': 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 (''domus'') or on a family farm or agricultural estate (''villa''). A few scholars have suggested that citizens selling themselves into slavery was a more frequent occurrence than literary sources alone would indicate. The relative proportion of these sources of enslavement within the slave population is hard to determine and remains a subject of scholarly debate.

War captives

The fear of falling into slavery as a result of war and piracy, expressed frequently in Roman literature, was not just rhetorical exaggeration. Captives were enslaved during every war the Romans engaged in from the Regal period to the Imperial period. Ancient sources record anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of captives resulting from each major battle. The newly enslaved were bought wholesale by dealers who followed the Roman armies. During the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar once sold the entire population of a conquered ''oppidum'' (walled town), numbering 53,000 people, to slave dealers on the spot. During the Republic, warfare was arguably the greatest source of slaves, and certainly accounted for the marked increase in the number of slaves held by Romans during the Middle and Late Republic.

Warfare continued to produce slaves for Rome throughout the Imperial period, though war captives arguably became less important as a source after the major campaigns of Augustus concluded later in his life. The market adjusted to meet demand from available sources, and the smaller-scale, less continual warfare of the so-called ''Pax Romana'' of the 1st and 2nd centuries still produced slaves “in more than trivial numbers.”

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, as a result of the Jewish–Roman wars (AD 66–135). Josephus reports that the first Jewish revolt of AD 66–70 alone resulted in the enslavement of 97,000 people. The future emperor Vespasian enslaved 30,000 in Tarichea after executing those who were old or infirm. When his son and future successor Titus captured the city of Japha, he killed all the males and sold 2,130 women and children into slavery. What appears to have been a unique instance of over-supply in the Roman market for slaves occurred in AD 137 after the Bar Kokhba revolt was quashed and more than 100,000 slaves were put on the market. A Jewish slave for a time could be bought at Hebron or Gaza for the same price as a horse.

The demand for slaves may account for some expansionist actions that seem to have no other profit or political motive—Britain, Mauretania, and Dacia may have been desirable conquests primarily as sources of manpower, and so too Roman campaigns across the frontiers of their African provinces.

The cultural assumption that enslavement was a natural result of defeat in war is reflected in the ubiquity of Imperial art depicting captives, an image that appears not only in public contexts that serve overt purposes of propaganda and triumphalism but also on objects that seem intended for household and personal display, such as figurines, lamps, Arretine pottery, and gems.

Piracy and kidnapping

Piracy has a long history in human trafficking. The primary goal of kidnapping was not enslavement but maximizing profit, as the relatives of captives were expected to pay ransom. If a slave was kidnapped, the owner might or might not decide that the amount of ransom was worthwhile. Although people who cared about getting the captive back were motivated to pay more than a stranger would for a slave at auction, where the captive’s individual qualities would determine pricing, they were sometimes unable to come up with the amount demanded. If multiple people from the same city were taken at the same time and demands for payment could not be met privately, the home city might try to pay the ransom from public funds, but these efforts too might come up short. The captive could then resort to borrowing the ransom money from profiteering lenders, in effect putting himself into debt bondage to them. Selling the kidnap victim on the open market was a last but not infrequent resort.

No traveler was safe; Julius Caesar himself was captured by Cilician pirates as a young man. When the pirates realized his high value, they set his ransom at twenty talents. As the story came to be told, Caesar insisted that they raise it to fifty. He spent thirty-eight days in captivity as they waited for the ransom to be delivered. Upon release, he is said to have returned and subjected his captors to the form of execution by custom reserved for slaves, crucifixion.

Within the Jewish community, rabbis usually encouraged buying back enslaved Jews, but advised that “one should not ransom captives for more than their value, for the good order of the world” because inflated ransoms would only “motivate Romans to enslave even more Jews”. In the early Church, ransoming captives was considered a work of charity ''(caritas)'', and after the Empire came under Christian rule, churches spent “enormous funds” to buy back Christian prisoners.

Systematic piracy for the purpose of human trafficking was most rampant in the 2nd century BC, when the city of Side in Pamphylia (present-day Turkey) was a center of the trade. Pompey was credited with eradicating piracy from the Mediterranean in 67 BC, but actions were taken against Illyrian pirates in 31 BC following Actium, and piracy was still a concern addressed during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. While large-scale piracy was largely controlled during the ''Pax Romana'', piratical kidnapping continued to contribute to the Roman slave supply into the later Imperial era, though it may not have been a major source of new slaves. In the early 5th century AD, Augustine of Hippo was still lamenting wide-scale kidnapping in North Africa. The Christian missionary Patricius, from Roman Britain, was kidnapped by pirates around AD 400 and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he continued work that eventually led to his canonization as Saint Patrick.

''Vernae''

''Vernae'' (singular ''verna'') were slaves born within a household (''familia'') or on a family farm or agricultural estate (''villa''). There was a stronger social obligation to care for ''vernae'', whose epitaphs sometimes identify them as such, and at times they would have been the biological children of free males of the household. Frequent mention of ''vernae'' in literary sources indicates that home-reared slaves not only were preferred to those obtained in slave markets but received preferential treatment. ''Vernae'' were more likely to be allowed to cohabit as a couple (''contubernium'') and rear their own children. A child ''verna'' might be reared alongside the owner's own child of the same age, even sharing the same wet-nurse. They had greater opportunities for education and might be educated along with the freeborn children of the household. A dedicatory inscription dating to AD 198 lists the names of twenty-four imperial freedmen who were teachers ''(paedagogi)''; six are identified as ''vernae''.

Some scholars think that the majority of slaves in the Imperial period were ''vernae'' or that domestic reproduction was the single most important source of slaves; modern estimates depend on the interpretation of often uncertain data, including the overall number of slaves.

Child abandonment, infant exposure, and the sale of children

Scholarly views vary on the extent to which child abandonment in its several forms was a significant source for potential slaves. The children of poor citizens who were left orphaned were vulnerable to enslavement, as there was a fine line between fosterage and slavery. These children may be referred to in inscriptions as ''alumni'' (plural; feminine ''alumnae''), "those who have been nurtured," a term that is not used to refer to infants or foundlings. Of attested ''alumni'', only about a quarter can be securely identified as slaves.

Child abandonment, whether through the death of family or intentionally, is to be distinguished from infant exposure, which the Romans seem to have practiced widely and which is embedded the founding myth of the exposed twins Romulus and Remus suckling at the she-wolf. At a time when infant mortality might have been as high as 40 percent, the newborn was thought in its first week of life to be in a perilous liminal state between biological existence and social birth. It was especially during this time that parents and midwives would make "heartrending decisions" about whether a child could or should be reared; a serious birth defect was considered grounds for exposure even among the upper classes. Families who could not afford to raise a child might expose an unwanted infant—abandon it under outdoor conditions that were likely to cause its death. One view is that healthy infants who survived exposure were usually enslaved and were a significant source of slaves.

A healthy exposed infant might be taken in for fosterage or adoption by a family, but even this practice could treat the child as an investment: if the birth family later wished to reclaim their offspring, they were entitled to do so but had to reimburse expenses for nurturance. Slave traders also could pick up surviving infants and rear them with training as slaves, but since children under the age of five are unlikely to provide much labor of value, it is unclear how investing the five years of adult labor in nurturing would be profitable. Child slaves often cost less than adults.

The Christianization of the later empire shifted priorities. Constantine, the first Christian emperor, legalized the buying and selling of newborn children in what has been interpreted as an effort to stop the practice of infant exposure, and later abolished the "power of life and death" the ''paterfamilias'' had held. The Constantinian law has also been called simply "an insurance policy on behalf of individual slave-owners" designed to protect the property of those who, unknowingly or not, had bought an infant later claimed or shown to have been born free.

Debt slavery

''Nexum'' was a debt bondage contract in the early Roman Republic. Within the Roman legal system, it was a form of ''mancipatio''. Though the terms of the contract would vary, essentially a free man pledged himself as a bond slave (''nexus'') as surety for a loan. He might also hand over his son as collateral. Although the bondsman could expect to face humiliation and some abuse, as a legal citizen he was supposed to be exempt from corporal punishment. ''Nexum'' was abolished by the ''Lex Poetelia Papiria'' in 326 BC.

Roman historians illuminated the abolition of ''nexum'' with a traditional story that varied in its particulars; basically, a ''nexus'' who was a handsome but upstanding youth suffered sexual harassment by the holder of the debt. The cautionary tale highlighted the incongruities of subjecting one free citizen to another's use, and the legal response was aimed at establishing the citizen's right to liberty (''libertas''), as distinguished from the slave or social outcast ('' infamis''). Cicero, however, considered the abolition of ''nexum'' primarily a political maneuver to appease the common people (''plebs''): the law was passed during the Conflict of the Orders, when plebeians were struggling to establish their rights in relation to the hereditary privileges of the patricians. Although ''nexum'' was abolished as a way to secure a loan, debt bondage might still result after a debtor defaulted.

Self-sales

The liberty of the Roman citizen was a “cornerstone” of Roman law, and therefore it was illegal for a freeborn person to sell himself—in theory. In practice, self-enslavement might be overlooked unless one of the parties took issue with the terms of the contract. "Self-sales" are not well represented in Roman literature, presumably because they were shameful and against the law. The limited evidence is primarily to be found in Imperial legal sources, which indicate that “self-sale” as a path to enslavement was as well recognized as being captured in war or being born to an enslaved mother.

Self-sales are in evidence mainly when challenged in court on grounds of fraud. A case for fraud could be made if the seller or the buyer knew that the enslaved person was freeborn (''ingenuus'') at the time of sale when the trafficked person himself did not. Fraud could also be alleged if the person sold had been under the age of twenty. Legal argumentation makes it clear that protecting the buyer’s investment was a priority, but if either of these circumstances was proved, the liberty of the enslaved person could be reclaimed.

Since it was difficult to prove who knew what when, the most solid evidence for voluntary enslavement was whether the formerly free person had consented by receiving a share of the proceeds from the sale. A person who knowingly surrendered the rights of Roman citizenship was thought unworthy of holding them, and permanent enslavement was thus considered an appropriate consequence.Rio, “Self-sale,” p. 664. A Roman soldier who sold himself as a slave faced execution. Enslaved Roman prisoners of war were similarly deemed ineligible to have their citizenship restored if they had surrendered their liberty without fighting hard enough to keep it (see the enslavement of Roman citizens above); as the Roman Republic devolved, political rhetoric feverishly urged citizens to resist the shame of falling into "slavery" under one-man rule.

However, self-sale cases that made it to the level of imperial appeal often resulted in voiding the contract, even if the enslaved person had consented, as a private contract did not override the state’s interest in regulating citizenship, which carried tax obligations.

The slave economy

During the period of Roman imperial expansion, the increase in wealth amongst the Roman elite and the substantial growth of slavery transformed the economy.Hopkins, Keith. ''Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History''. Cambridge University Press, New York. Pgs. 4–5 Although the economy was dependent on slavery, Rome was not the most slave-dependent culture in history. Among the Spartans, for instance, the slave class of helots outnumbered the free by about seven to one, according to Herodotus. Economic historian Peter Temin has argued that "Rome had a functioning labor market and a unified labor force" in which slavery played an integral role. The condition of mobility required for market dynamism was met by the number of free workers seeking wages and skilled slaves with an incentive to earn. Wages could be earned by both free and some enslaved workers, and fluctuated in response to labor shortages; Romans of the governing class regarded wage-earning as equivalent to slavery. In any case, scholars differ on how the particulars of Roman slavery as an institution can be framed within theories of labor markets in the overall economy.

Multitudes of slaves who were brought to Italy were purchased by wealthy landowners in need of large numbers of slaves to labour on their estates. Historian Keith Hopkins noted that it was land investment and agricultural production which generated great wealth in Italy, and considered that Rome's military conquests and the subsequent introduction of vast wealth and slaves into Italy had effects comparable to widespread and rapid technological innovations.Moya K. Mason
"Roman Slavery: The Social, Cultural, Political, and Demographic Consequences"
accessed 17 March 2021

The slave trade

What the Roman jurist Papinian referred to as "the regular, daily traffic in slaves" involved every part of the Roman Empire and occurred across borders as well. Slave markets seem to have existed in most cities of the Empire, but outside Rome the largest center was Ephesus. The major centers of the Imperial slave trade were in Italy, the north Aegean, Asia Minor, and Syria. Mauretania and Alexandria were also significant.

The largest market on the Italian peninsula, as might be expected, was the city of Rome; Puteoli may have been the second busiest. Trading also occurred at Brundisium, Capua, and Pompeii. Slaves were imported from across the Alps to Aquileia.

The rise and fall of Delos is an example of the volatility and disruptions of the slave trade. In the eastern Mediterranean, policing by the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Rhodes had kept some check on piratical kidnapping and illegal slave trading until Rome, on the wave of their unexpected success against Carthage, expanded trade and exerted dominance eastward. The long-established port of Rhodes, known as a "law and order" state, had legal and regulatory barriers to exploitation by the new Italian "entrepreneurs", who got a more porous reception in Delos as they set up shop in the latter 3rd century BC. To disadvantage Rhodes, and ultimately devastating its economy, in 166 BC the Romans declared Delos a free port, meaning that merchants there would no longer have to pay the 2 percent customs tax. The piratical slave trade then flooded into Delos "with no questions asked" about the source and status of captives. While the geographer Strabo's figure of 10,000 slaves traded daily is more hyperbole than statistic, slaves became the number one Delian commodity. The large commercial agricultural operations in Sicily ''(latifundia)'' likely received great numbers of Delian-traded Syrian and Cilician slaves, who went on to lead the years-long slave rebellions of 135 and 104 BC.

But as the Romans established better-located and more sophisticated trading centers in the East, Delos lost its privilege as a free port and was left to be sacked in 88 and 69 BC during the Mithridatic Wars, from which it never recovered. Other cities such as Mytilene may have taken up the slack. The Delian slave economy had been artificially exuberant, and by averting their gaze the Romans exacerbated the piracy problem that would vex them for centuries.

Major sources of slaves from the East include Lydia, Caria, Phrygia, Galatia, and Cappadocia, for which Ephesus was a center of trade. Aesop, the Phrygian writer of fables, was supposed to have been sold at Ephesus. Pergamum is likely to have had "regular and heavy" slave trading, as is the prosperous city of Acmonia in Phrygia. Strabo (1st century AD) describes Apameia in Phrygia as ranking second in trade only to Ephesus in the region, observing that it was “the common warehouse for those from Italy and from Greece”—a center for imports from the west, with slaves the most likely commodity for export trade. Markets are also likely to have existed in Syria and Judaea, though direct evidence is thin.

In the north Aegean, a large memorial to a slave trader in Amphipolis suggests that this might have been a location where Thracian slaves were traded. Byzantium was a market for slaves obtained along the coasts of the Black Sea. Slaves coming from Bithynia, Pontus, and Paphlagonia would have been traded in the cities of the Propontis.

Roman coin hoards dating from the 60s BC are found in unusual abundance in Dacia (present-day Romania), and have been interpreted as evidence that Pompey’s success in shutting down piracy caused an increase in the slave trade in the lower Danube basin to meet demand. The hoards drop off in frequency for the 50s BC, when Julius Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul were resulting in large lots of new slaves brought to market, and resurge in the 40s and 30s. Archaeology into the 21st century has continued to produce evidence of slave trafficking in parts of the Empire where it had been little attested, such as Roman London.

Slaves were traded from outside Roman borders at several points, as mentioned by literary sources such as Strabo and Tacitus and attested by epigraphical evidence in which slaves are listed among commodities subject to tariffs. Diodorus Siculus says that in pre-conquest Gaul, wine merchants could trade an amphora for a slave; Cicero mentions a slave trader from Gaul in 83 BC. Walter Scheidel conjectured that "enslavables" were traded across borders from present-day Ireland, Scotland, eastern Germany, southern Russia, the Caucasus, the Arab peninsula, and what used to be referred to as "the Sudan"; the Parthian Empire would have consumed most supply to the east.

Auctions and sales

William V. Harris outlines four market venues for slave trading:
*small-scale transactions owner-to-owner in which a single slave might be traded;
*the “opportunistic market”, such as the slave traders who followed the army and handled large numbers of slaves;
*fairs and markets in small towns, where slaves would’ve been among various goods exchanged;
*slave markets in major cities, where auctions were held on a regular basis.

Slaves who were purchased on the market were ''empticii'' ("purchased ones"), as distinguished from home-reared slaves born within the ''familia''. ''Empticii'' were most often bought cheap for everyday tasks or labor, but some were thought of as a kind of luxury good and brought high prices, if they possessed a sought-after, specialized skill or a special quality such as beauty.

Although race was not an indicator of whether someone was enslaved or a descendant of slaves, Roman law required that the slave's place of origin (''natio'') be declared at the time of sale. Slaves from certain "nations" were thought to perform better at tasks that might be of value to the prospective buyer.

Slaves for sale were often placed on a stand and a type of plaque hung on each one describing their origin, health, character, intelligence, education, and other information pertinent to purchasers. Prices varied with age and quality, with the most valuable slaves fetching high prices. Potential buyers could ask to have a slave undressed to make sure the dealer wasn't concealing a physical defect. Initially the buyer took all risks, unless the seller fraudulently concealed defects, but by the end of the republic, the dealer was required for six months to take a slave back and refund the price if the slave had defects that were not declared or manifest at the sale, or for twelve months to make a partial refund.Johnston, Mary. Roman Life. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1957, p. 158–177 Slaves to be sold with no guarantee were made to wear a cap at the sale.

Taxes and tariffs

During the Republic, the only regular revenue from slaveholding collected by the state was a tax placed on manumissions starting in 357 BC, amounting to 5 percent of the slave's estimated value. In 183 BC, Cato the Elder as censor placed a sumptuary tax on slaves that had cost 10,000 ''asses'' or more, calculated at a rate of 3 ''denarii'' per 1,000 ''asses'' on an assessed value ten times the purchase price. In 40 BC, the triumvirs attempted to impose a tax on slave ownership, which was squelched by "bitter opposition."

In AD 7, Augustus imposed the first tax on Roman citizens as purchasers of slaves, at a rate of 2 percent, estimated to generate annual revenues of about 5 million sesterces—a figure that may indicate some 250,000 sales. By comparison, the sales tax on slaves in Ptolemaic Egypt had been 20 percent. The slave-sales tax was increased under Nero to 4 percent, with a misguided attempt to divert the burden to the seller, which only increased prices.

Tariffs on slaves imported to or exported from Italy were taken at harbor customs, as they were all around the Empire. At Zaraï in Roman Numidia, for example, the tariff for a slave was the same as for a horse or mule.

Types of work

Slaves worked in a wide range of occupations that can be roughly divided into five categories: household or domestic, imperial or public, urban crafts and services, agriculture, and mining.

Household slaves

Epitaphs record at least 55 different jobs a household slave might have,"Slavery in Rome," in ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome'' (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 323. including barber, butler, cook, hairdresser, handmaid (''ancilla''), launderer, wet nurse or nursery attendant, teacher, secretary, seamstress, accountant, and physician. For large households, job descriptions indicate a high degree of specialization: handmaids might be assigned to the upkeep, storage, and readiness of the mistress's wardrobe or specifically mirrors or jewelry.

In Roman Egypt, papyri preserve apprenticeship contracts written in Greek that indicate the training a worker might require to become skilled, usually for a full year. A beautician ''(ornatrix)'' required a three-year apprenticeship; in one Roman legal case, it was ruled that a slave who had studied for only two months could not be considered an ''ornatrix'' as a matter of law.

In the Imperial era, a large elite household (a ''domus'' in town, or a ''villa'' in the countryside) might be supported by a staff of hundreds; or on the lower end of scholarly estimates, perhaps an average of 100 slaves per ''domus'' during the time of Augustus. Possibly half the slaves in the city of Rome served in the houses of the senatorial order and of the richer equestrians. The living conditions of the ''familia urbana''—slaves attached to a ''domus''—were sometimes superior to those of many free urban poor in Rome, though even in the grandest houses, they would have lived "packed in to basement rooms and odd crannies." Still, household slaves likely enjoyed the highest standard of living among Roman slaves, next to publicly owned slaves in administration, who were not subject to the whims of a single master.

Urban crafts and services

Of slaves in the city of Rome not attached to a ''domus'', most were engaged in trades and manufacturing. Occupations included fullers, engravers, shoemakers, bakers, and mule drivers. The Roman ''domus'' itself should not be thought of as a "private" home in the modern sense, as business was often conducted there, and even commerce—the first-floor rooms facing the street might be shops used or rented out as commercial spaces. The work done or the goods made and sold by enslaved labor from these storefronts complicates the distinction between household and general urban labor.

Through the end of the 2nd century BC, skilled labor throughout Italy, such as pottery design and manufacture, was still predominated by free workers, whose corporations or guilds ''( collegia)'' might own a few slaves. In the Imperial era, as many of 90 percent of workers in these areas might be slaves or former slaves.MacMullen, "The Unromanized in Rome," p. 51.

Training programs and apprenticeships are well if briefly documented. Slaves whose ability was noticed might be trained from a young age in trades requiring a high degree of artistry or expertise; for example, an epitaph mourns the premature death of a talented boy, only age 12, who was already apprenticing as a goldsmith. Girls might be apprenticed particularly in the textile industry; contracts specify apprenticeships of varying durations. One four-year contract from Roman Egypt that apprentices an underage girl to a master weaver shows how detailed terms could be. The owner is to feed and clothe the girl, who is to receive periodic pay raises from the weaver as her skills level up, along with eighteen holidays a year. Sick days are to be tacked onto her term of service, and the weaver is responsible for taxes. The contractual aspect of benefits and obligations seems "distinctly modern" and indicates that a slave on a skills track might have opportunities, bargaining power, and relative social security nearly on a par with or exceeding free but low-skill workers living at a subsistence level. The widely attested success of freedmen might have been one possible motivation for contractual self-sale, as a well-connected owner might be able to obtain training for the slave and market access later as a patron to the new freedman.

In the city of Rome, working people and their slaves lived in ''insulae'', multistory buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. Most apartments in Rome lacked proper kitchens and might have only a charcoal brazier. Food therefore was widely prepared and sold by free and slave labor at pubs and bars, inns, and food stalls ''(tabernae, cauponae, popinae, thermopolia)''. But carryout and dining-in establishments were for the lower classes; fine dining was offered in wealthy homes with an enslaved kitchen staff comprising a head chef ''(archimagirus)'', sous chef ''(vicarius supra cocos)'', and assistants ''(coci)''. Columella decries the extravagance of culinary workshops that produce chefs and professional servers when schools for agriculture don't exist. Seneca mentions the specialized training required for poultry-carving, and the habitually indignant Juvenal rails about a carver ''(cultellus)'' who rehearses dance-like moves and knife-wielding to meet the exacting standards of his teacher.

In the Roman world, architects were usually freeborn men for hire or freedmen, but the names of some high-profile enslaved architects are known, including Corumbus, the slave of Caesar's friend Balbus, and Tychicus, whom the emperor Domitian owned.

Agriculture

Farm slaves (''familia rustica'') may have lived in more healthful conditions than their urban counterparts in trade and manufacturing. Roman agricultural writers expect that the workforce of a farm will be mostly slaves, who are regarded as speaking versions of the animals they tend. Cato advises farm owners to dispose of old and sickly slaves just as they would worn-out oxen, and Columella finds it convenient to house slaves next to the cattle or sheep they tend. Roman law was explicit that farm slaves were to be equated with quadrupeds kept in herds. They were far less likely to be manumitted than either skilled urban or household slaves.

Large farms employing slaves for planting and harvesting are found in the eastern empire as well as Europe, and are alluded to in the Christian Gospels.

The ratio of male slaves to female on a farm was likely to be even more disproportionate than in a household (perhaps as high as 80 percent). The relatively few women would spin and weave wool, make clothes, and work in the kitchen. The slaves on a farm were managed by a ''vilicus'', who was often a slave himself. Male slaves who had proven their loyalty and ability to manage others might be allowed to form a long-term relationship with a female fellow slave ''(conserva)'' and have children. It was especially desirable for the ''vilicus'' to have a quasi marriage ''(contubernia)''. The ''vilica'' who supervised food preparation and textile production for the estate held her position on her own merit and only infrequently was the woman who lived with the ''vilicus'' as his wife.

From the Middle Republic on, unmanageable slaves might be punished by confinement to an '' ergastulum'', a work barracks for those subjected to chaining; Columella says every farm needs one.

Hard labor

In the Republican era, a punishment that slaves feared was hard labor in chains at mill and bakery operations ''(pistrina)'' or work farms ''(ergastula)''.

Prison sentences for citizens were not a part of the Roman criminal justice system; jails were meant for holding prisoners transitionally. Instead, in the Imperial era the convicted would be sentenced to hard labor and sent to camps where they would be put to work in the mines, quarries, and mills. ''Damnati in metallum'' ("those condemned to the mine", or ''metallici'') lost their freedom as citizens (''libertas''), forfeited their property (''bona'') to the state, and became ''servi poenae'', slaves as a legal penalty. Their status under the law differed from that of other slaves; they could not buy their freedom, be sold, or be set free. They were expected to live and often die in the mines. In the later Empire, the permanence of their status was indicated by a tattooing of the forehead.

Convicts numbering in the tens of thousands were condemned to enslavement in the mines or quarries, where conditions were notoriously brutal. Christians felt that their community was particularly subject to this penalty. The condemnation of free inhabitants of the Empire to conditions of slavery was among the punishments that degraded the citizenship status of the lower classes—the ''humiliores'' who had not held office at the level of deucurion or higher and were most of the populace—in ways that would have been intolerable during the Republic. Slaves could also end up in the mines as punishment, and even in the mines were subject to harsher discipline than the formerly free convicts. Women could be sentenced to lighter work at the mines. Some provinces did not have mines, so those condemned as ''metallici'' might have to be transported great distances to serve their sentence.

Convict labor played a role in public works in the municipalities; the quarrying of building stone and fine stone such as alabaster and porphyry; the mining of metals and minerals (such as lime and sulphur), and perhaps in salt works. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, convicts began to be sentenced to ''pistrina'' in Rome, a punishment formerly reserved for slaves, and to the new state-owned factories that made clothing for the military and imperial household. The Imperial novelty of sentencing free people to hard labor may have compensated for a declining supply of war captives to enslave, though ancient sources don't discuss the economic impact as such, which was secondary to demonstrating the "coercive capacities of the state"—the cruelty was the point.

Not all mining labor was unfree, as indicated for example by an employment contract dating to AD 164. The employee agrees to provide "healthy and vigorous labor" at a gold mine for wages of 70 denarii and a term of service from May to November; if he chooses to quit before that time, 5 sesterces for each day not worked will be deducted from the total. There is no evidence that convict labor was used in the major mining district in Lusitania, the Imperial gold mines in Dacia, or Imperial quarries in Phrygia; these would have employed the usual combination of free and slave labor. Mine administration and management was often handled by imperial slaves and freedmen of the ''familia Caesaris''.

Contrary to modern popular imagery, the Roman navy did not employ galley slaves except in wartime when there was a shortage of free oarsman. While it’s likely that merchants regularly used enslaved oarsmen for shipping, the practice is not well attested.

''Servus publicus''

A ''servus publicus'' (public slave) was a slave owned not by a private individual, but by the Roman people or by a municipality. Imperial slaves were those attached to the emperor's extended household, the ''familia Caesaris''. Imperial and municipal slaves are better documented than most slaves because their higher status prompted them to identify themselves as such in inscriptions.

Public slaves at Rome worked in temples and other public buildings. Most performed general, basic tasks as servants to the College of Pontiffs, magistrates, and other officials. Some well-qualified public slaves did skilled office work such as accounting and secretarial services. Often entrusted with managerial roles, they were permitted to earn money for their own use.Adolf Berger. 1991. ''Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law''. American Philosophical Society (reprint). p. 706.

Because they had an opportunity to prove their merit, public slaves could acquire a reputation and influence, and their chances for manumission were higher. During the Republic, a public slave could be freed by a magistrate's declaration, with the prior authorization of the senate; in the Imperial era, liberty would be granted by the emperor. Municipal public slaves could be freed by their municipal council. Vast numbers of imperial slaves helped drive the large-scale public works of the Roman Empire; for example, Frontinus (1st century AD) says that personnel for the city of Rome's aqueducts alone numbered 700.

Business managers and agents

A slave whose master gave him “free administration” ''(libera administratio)'' could travel and act independently on business. A slave entrusted in this way was given money or property which he controlled but did not technically own. It was through this mechanism, called ''peculium'', that slaves could earn profit accounted toward buying their freedom.

Isidore of Seville, looking back from the early 7th century, offered this definition: “''peculium'' is in the proper sense something which belongs to minors or slaves. For ''peculium'' is what a father or master allows his child or slave to manage as his own.” Property otherwise could not be owned by the dependents of a household, defined as someone subordinate to a father’s power, including adult sons and daughters as well as slaves; all wealth belonged to the ''paterfamilias''. The legal dodge of ''peculium'' enabled both adult unemancipated sons and capable slaves to manage property, turn a profit, and negotiate contracts. With this business acumen, certain freedmen went on to amass considerable fortunes.

There was a risk to the still-enslaved person who anticipated manumission 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.

In effect, the owner who set aside a ''peculium'' for the slave to manage had created a company with limited liability. But the agency of slaves in conducting business could raise complex legal issues, with hazards for the slave and potential blowback for the master. If a slave was accused of fraud, for example, or was sued in civil court, the master faced a dilemma: he could acknowledge his ownership and defend the slave, making himself liable for paying damages if they lost the case, or he could decline to defend the slave and transfer ownership to the party claiming injury. The slave was therefore vulnerable to the master’s calculations on the relative advantages of defending him or not. This situation was more than hypothetical; some local laws in the provinces seem aimed at dealing with the legal peculiarities of the relative freedom Romans gave slaves at this operational level. A city in Caria, for example, spelled out that if a Roman slave violated local banking regulations, the owner could either pay a fine or punish the slave; the punishment was specified as fifty blows and six months of prison.

Households that are settings for narratives in the Christian Gospels show privileged slaves acting as estate managers and agents, collecting rent and produce from tenant farmers, or investing money and conducting business on behalf of their master. They also serve as ''oikonomoi'' (household managers or "economists") in charge of allocating and disbursing food and funds to other members of the ''familia''.

Gladiators, entertainers, and prostitutes

Gladiators, entertainers such as actors and dancers, and prostitutes were among those persons in Rome who existed in the social limbo of ''infamia'' or disrepute, regardless of whether they were enslaved or technically free. Like slaves, they could not bring a case in court nor have someone represent them; like freedmen, they were not eligible to hold public office. In a legal sense, ''infamia'' was an official loss of standing for a freeborn person as a result of misconduct, and could be imposed by a censor or praetor as a legal penalty. Those who displayed themselves to entertain others had surrendered the right of citizens not to subject their body to use: "They lived by providing sex, violence, and laughter for the pleasure of the public."

Those deemed ''infames'' had few legal protections even if they were Roman citizens who were not subject to being traded as slaves. They were liable to corporal punishment of the kinds usually reserved for slaves. Their daily life probably differed little from that of a slave within the same area of employment, though they had control of their income and more freedom to make decisions about their living arrangements. Their lack of legal standing arose from the kind of work they did—perceived as a morally suspect manipulation of and simultaneous surrender to others' desires for pleasure—not the fact that they worked alongside slaves, since that would be true of nearly all forms of labor in Rome. ''Lenones'' (pimps) and ''lanistae'' (trainers or managers of gladiators) shared the disreputable status of their workers.

Actors were moreover subversive because the theatre was a place for free speech. Actors were known to mock politicians from the stage, and there was established law from the 4th century BC and into the late Republic that they could be subjected to physical punishment as slaves were. The comic playwright known in English as Terence was a slave who was manumitted because of his literary abilities.

In the Late Republic, about half the gladiators who fought in Roman arenas were slaves, though the most skilled were often free volunteers. Freeborn gladiators erased the distinction between citizen and slave by taking an oath to subject their bodies to physical abuse, including being branded and beaten, both marks of slavery. Enslaved gladiators who enjoyed success in the arena were occasionally rewarded with manumission but remained in a state of ''infamia''.

Most prostitutes were slaves or freedwomen; male prostitutes also existed. Prostitutes in the city of Rome were registered with the aediles, and prostitution was legal throughout the Roman Empire in all periods before Christian hegemony. Sexual slavery was forbidden by the Church, and Christian pressure curtailed or altogether ended traditional spectacles and games ''(ludi)'' such as gladiator matches and public theatrical performances.

Serfdom

By the 3rd century AD, the Roman Empire faced a labour shortage. Large Roman landowners increasingly relied on Roman freemen, acting as tenant farmers, instead of slaves to provide labour. The status of these tenant farmers ''( coloni)'', steadily eroded. Because the tax system implemented by Diocletian assessed taxes based on both land and the inhabitants of that land, it became administratively inconvenient for peasants to leave the land where they were counted in the census. In 332 AD Constantine issued legislation that greatly restricted the rights of the coloni and tied them to the land. Some see these laws as the beginning of medieval serfdom in Europe.

Demography

Estimates for the prevalence of slavery in the Roman Empire vary. Estimates of the percentage of the population of Italy who were slaves by the end of the 1st century BC range upwards of one to two million slaves in Italy, about 20% to 30% of Italy's population. One study estimated that for the empire as a whole during the period 260–425 AD, the slave population was just under five million, representing 10–15% of the total population of 50–60 million inhabitants. An estimated 49% of all slaves were owned by the elite, who made up less than 1.5% of the empire's population. About half of all slaves worked in the countryside where they were a small percentage of the population except on some large agricultural, especially imperial, estates; the remainder of the other half were a significant percentage – 25% or more – in towns and cities as domestics and workers in commercial enterprises and manufacturers.

Roman slavery was not based on ideas of race. Slaves were drawn from all over Europe and the Mediterranean, including but not limited to Gaul, Hispania, North Africa, Syria, Germany, Britannia, the Balkans, and Greece. Those from outside Europe were predominantly of Greek descent, while Jews never fully assimilated into Roman society, remaining an identifiable minority. The slaves (especially the foreigners) had higher mortality rates and lower birth rates than natives and were sometimes even subjected to mass expulsions. The average recorded age at death for the slaves of the city of Rome was extraordinarily low: seventeen and a half years (17.2 for males; 17.9 for females). By comparison, life expectancy at birth for the population as a whole was in the mid-twenties.

Treatment and daily life

The "gross power differential" inherent in slavery is not peculiar to Rome, but as a universal characteristic of the institution, it defines Roman practice as it does that of other slave cultures: "slaves stood powerless before their masters' or mistresses' whims and presumably remained in a perpetual state of unease, not necessarily able to anticipate when the next act of cruelty or degradation would come yet certain it would." Many if not most slaves could expect to be subjected to relentless labor; corporal punishment or physical abuse in varying degrees of severity; sexual exploitation; or the caprices of owners in selling or threatening to sell them. Cato the Elder was a particularly harsh "slave-driver" whose exploitation was "unmitigated by any consideration of the needs of the slave as a human being."

The enslaved who were traded on the open market might find themselves transported great distances across the empire: the epitaph of a slave woman in Roman Spain records her home as having been in Northern Italy; a Cretan woman was traded between two Romans in Dacia; a ten-year-old girl named Abaskantis, taken from Galatia, was sold to a buyer from Alexandria, Egypt, a destination about 1,500 miles from her home. The conditions experienced by the hundreds of thousands traded in Roman antiquity have been described as "personal degradation and humiliation, cultural disorientation, material deprivation, severance of familial bonds, emotional and psychological trauma."

Literary sources were written by or for slaveholders, and inscriptions set up by slaves and freedmen preserve only glimpses of how they saw themselves. Elite literature indicates that how a Roman treated a slave was viewed as evidence of the master's character. The type of the ''saeva domina'' (cruel slave mistress) emerges from Roman literature as the woman who flies into a rage at her handmaids' minor faults, stabbing them with pins or biting them and then punishing them with a beating. Plutarch writes approvingly that Cato bought slaves for their robust utility and never paid extra for mere good looks; but he finds fault with Cato for using his slaves like "beasts of burden" and then selling them off when they started to age "instead of feeding them when they were useless"—the implication being that a "good" master would provide care.Mellor, Ronald. ''The Historians of Ancient Rome.'' New York: Routledge, 1997. (467). In one of the ''Moral Epistles'', Seneca expressed the utilitarian view that a slave who was treated well would perform a better job than a poorly treated slave.

Healthcare

Mentions in ancient literature of medical care for slaves are infrequent. The medical writer Rufus of Ephesus has one title among his works that stands out as not self-evidently medical: ''On the Purchase of Slaves'', which presumably gave advice to the trade on assessing slave fitness and possibly their care, since health defects could invalidate a sale. Ongoing care would have depended on the utility of keeping workers healthy to maximize production, and at times on the owner’s humane impulses or attachment to a particular slave. Pliny the Younger indicates that slaves did receive care from ''medici'' (medical attendants or physicians), but he observes that while “slaves and free persons differ not at all when they are in ill health, the free receive gentler and more merciful treatment.”

Pliny himself had sent his slave Zosimus, for whom he expresses his affection and esteem at length, to Egypt to seek therapy for a lung disease that had him coughing up blood. Zosimus was restored to health and at some point was manumitted, but the symptoms later returned. Pliny then wrote to ask if he could send Zosimus for rehab in the more healthful climate of a friend’s country estate in the part of Gaul that is today the south of France.

Individual acts of compassion by slaveholders stand apart as exceptions. The practice of abandoning sick slaves on Rome's Tiber Island, where a temple to the healing god Aesculapius was located, led to such homelessness and contagion that the emperor Claudius decreed any slave who survived abandonment could not be reclaimed by his owner and was automatically free. Law was also enacted under Claudius that criminalized the killing of a sick or disabled slave as murder even by his owner.

Physicians

Medicine was held in higher regard in Greece as a ''technē'' (art or skill) than it was in Rome. The best Greek medical schools did not admit slaves, and some city-states restricted slaves to practicing medicine only on fellow slaves. Though denied advanced theoretical study, slaves were part of a two-tier system to deliver care to the lower classes, and could receive often extensive training as physicians' assistants, becoming well versed in practical medicine.

At Rome, medicine was considered an unsuitable occupation for the upper classes because it requires tending to the needs of another’s body. Elite households were attended by Greek physicians, either one of great prestige enticed to Rome with privileges and an offer of citizenship, or a staff of freedmen or enslaved ''medici''. The celebrated Publius Decimus Eros Merula, in Assisi, was an enslaved clinical physician, surgeon, and eye specialist in the time of Augustus who eventually bought his freedom for 50,000 sesterces and left a fortune of 800,000. There were also free itinerant doctors who could be hired to provide care to households that lacked the means or desire to have a full-time medical attendant. Some slaves might assist with healthcare as nurses, midwives, medics, or orderlies. During the Imperial era, the desire of freedmen to acquire medical training was such that it was exploited by scam medical schools.

The physician Galen, who came to Rome from Pergamum, developed his surgical techniques attending to the injuries of enslaved gladiators, and recorded a case study of one gladiator who had suffered a grievous wound to the abdomen but made a complete recovery after a high-risk omentectomy. From the perspective of the physician, the diversity of the city of Rome and its slave population made it an “exceptional field of observation”.

Cicero and Tiro

Among Cicero's collected letters are those he wrote to one of his administrative slaves, the well-educated Tiro. Cicero remarked that he wrote to Tiro "for the sake of keeping to isestablished practice" and occasionally revealed personal care and concern for his slave, whose education he had taken into his own hands. He sought Tiro's opinions and seems to have expected him to speak with exceptional freedom, though in collecting Cicero's papers for publication, Tiro chose not to publish his own replies along with those of other correspondents. While these letters suggest a personal connection between master and slave, each letter contains a direct command, suggesting that Cicero relied on familiarity to ensure performance and loyalty from Tiro.

As an administrative slave, Tiro enjoyed better living and working conditions than most slaves. He was freed before his master's death and was successful enough to retire on his own country estate, where he died at the age of 99.

Names

As a freedman, Cicero's slave Tiro became Marcus Tullius Tiro, adopting Cicero's family name. The use of a single male name in an inscription or legal document usually indicates that the person was a slave. By the Late Republic, the nomenclature of freeborn Roman men had become normalized as the ''tria nomina'': praenomen, first name; gentilicium, the name of the family or clan ''(gens)''; and cognomen, a distinguishing last name that originally was earned by an individual but then might be passed down, added to, or replaced. When a slave was manumitted, he was renamed as free by the use of the ''tria nomina'', most often appending his single name to the praenomen and gentilic name of his former master, now his patron.

For example, the silversmith Publius Curtilius Agatho (d. early 1st century AD), known from his funerary monument, would been called by his Greek name Agatho (“the Good”) as a slave. Upon manumission he appended his patron’s Latin names, Publius Curtilius, to create his full citizen name. Naturalized citizens followed this same convention, which might result in a ''tria nomina'' construction with two Latin names and a strikingly non-Latin cognomen.

Throughout the Republican era, slaves in the city of Rome might bear a name that was also in use by free Italians or was common as a Roman praenomen, such as ''Marcus'', or diminutives of the name (''Marcio'', ''Marcellus''). ''Salvius'', for example, was a very common name for slaves that was also in wide use as a free praenomen in Rome and throughout Italy during this time, morphing into names for freedpersons such as ''Salvianus'', ''Salvillus'' (feminine ''Salvilla''), and possibly ''Salvitto''.

Ancient Roman scholars thought that in earliest times slaves had been given the first name of their master suffixed with ''-por'', perhaps to be taken as a form of ''puer'', “boy.” Male slaves were often addressed as ''puer'' regardless of age; a slave was one who was never emancipated into adulthood and thus never allowed to become fully a man ''(vir)''. Names such as ''Marcipor'', sometimes contracted to ''Marpor'', are attested, but rather than being suffixed to the master’s name, the ''-por'' may have marked someone as a slave when his name was also in common use for free men.

In the Late Republic and Early Empire, more differentiation between slave and free names seems to have been desired. In Cicero’s day, Greek names were the trend. Fanciful Greek names such as Hermes, Narcissus, and Eros were popular among the Romans but had not been used among free Greeks for either themselves or their slaves. Several of Cicero’s slaves are known by name, mainly from the extensive collection of his letters; those with Greek names include the readers (''anagnostes'') Sositheus and Dionysius; Pollex, a footman; and Acastus. The slaves and freedmen Cicero mentions by name are most often his secretaries and literary assistants; he rarely refers by name to slaves whose duties were humbler.

Slave names at times may reflect ethnic origin; in the early Republic, Oscan names such as ''Paccius'' and ''Papus'' occur. But the distribution of slave names as recorded by inscriptions and papyri are cautions against assuming a slave’s ethnicity based on the linguistic origin of their name. The first-century BC scholar Varro noted that some slaves had geographical names, such as ''Iona'' from Ionia, and was likely right to think these names indicated places where they were traded and not their ethnic origin, which by law had to be stated separately in sales documents.

Among the mismatched appellations found in surviving documents are the Greek names ''Hermes'' for a German, ''Paramone'' for a Jewish woman whose child was named Jacob, ''Argoutis'' for a Gaul, and ''Aphrodisia'' for a Sarmatian woman. In late antiquity, Christians might bear Greek names expressing a willing servility as a religious value, such as ''Theodoulos'', “God’s slave” (''theos'', "god"; ''doulos'', "slave"). German slaves memorialized in the family tomb of the Statilii in Rome mostly have Latin names such as ''Felix'', ''Castus'', ''Clemens'', ''Urbanus'', and ''Strenuus''; two are named ''Nothus'' and ''Pothus'', Latinized forms of Greek names. Greek names became so common for slaves that they began to be regarded as inherently servile; this taint may be why home-reared ''vernae'', who generally had enhanced opportunities, are statistically more likely to have received a Latin name that would help them “pass” if they were manumitted.

Gladiators are sometimes memorialized by what appear to be “stage names,” such as Pardus ("the Leopard") or Smaragdus ("Emerald"). A slave who took a path other than citizen integration might also adopt a new name. The “Salvius” who was the first leader of the Sicilian slave revolt in 104 BC restyled himself as Tryphon.

In Latin epitaphs, a slave commemorating his deceased master sometimes refers to him as “our Marcus” (praenomen with the pronoun ''noster''). In speaking of himself to a person of higher status, a slave might identify by his role in relation to his master’s first name; Cicero records a conversation in which a slave owned by Mark Antony is asked “Who are you?” ''(Quis tu?)'' and replies “The tabellarius ourierfrom Marcus” ''(a Marco tabellarius)''. The enslaved potters who made the earliest Arretine ware signed their work with their name and the possessive form of their master’s name; for example, ''Cerdo M. Perenni'', “Marcus Perennius’s Cerdo”. A standard phrase in sales contracts refers to the slave “named so-and-so, or by whatever name he/she is called”—the slave's name was subject to the master’s whim.

Clothing

Certain items of clothing or adornment were restricted by law to freeborn people entitled to wear them as markers of high status; “slave clothing” ''(vestis servilis)'' was clothing of lesser quality that lacked distinguishing features—slaves did not wear clothing meant to identify them as such. The clothing of slaves was determined primarily by the kind of work they did and secondarily by the wealth of the household they belonged to.Rose, “The Construction of Mistress and Slave,” p. 43, with reference to George, “Slave Disguise,” p. 44. Most working slaves would have been given clothing that looked like that of free people who did similar work; Diocletian’s edict on price controls (301 AD) lists clothes for “common people or slaves” as a single category. In a crowd, slaves would not have been immediately legible as unfree, as the everyday attire of most people was a tunic. Men wore a shorter tunic, while the tunics of women covered the legs.

In depictions of domestic scenes, tunics of handmaids are sometimes shorter, reaching to mid-calf, while the mistress’s tunic falls to her feet. Ankle boots are worn by the handmaids in the “toilette” mosaic from Sidi Ghrib (see "Household slaves" above), and ancillary hairstyles are simpler than those of the centrally depicted mistress. Female slaves tucked in the loose fabric of their tunics under the bust and shaped the sleeves with belting to give themselves more freedom of movement for their tasks.

Domestic slaves who would be visible to the family and their guests were given garments that met their owners’ standards for pleasing appearance and quality. Presentability was desired for slaves who served as personal attendants. Slaves wore few accessories but were themselves an extension of their masters’ accessories. Because Roman clothing lacked structured pockets, the slaves who always accompanied the well-to-do on excursions carried anything needed. They might hold parasols or wield fans to shield the privileged from the heat. They went with them to the public baths to watch over their valuable clothing, since theft was common in the dressing areas. At dinner parties, guests took off their outdoor shoes and put on light house shoes ''(soleas)'', so a rich attendee would bring a slave to wrangle their footwear.

Clothing for laborers was meant to be economical, durable, and practical. A relief from Roman Germany shows mine workers wearing a tunic and an apron of leather “feathers” (pteruges). Columella recommended weather-resistant clothing of leather, patchwork, and “thick shoulder capes” for farm workers. A male farm slave working for the stern and frugal Cato could expect to be issued a tunic and a cloak ''(sagum'') every other year, and would have to turn in the old outfit so it could be recycled for patchwork. The fragility of textiles makes them rare in the archaeological record, but a store of regularly cut pieces measuring about 10 by 15 centimeters from Roman Egypt, found at the Mons Claudianus quarry, is evidence of organized patchworking.

One of the causes of the Sicilian slave rebellion of 135 BC, which broke out among rural workers, was the master’s refusal to accept responsibility for providing clothing. When the enslaved herdsmen came asking, the master, Damophilos, told them to get their own clothes, so they did—by banding together to raid small farms and waylay travelers. When violence escalated to full-scale insurrection, Damophilos was among the first to be killed.

At one point, the Roman senate debated whether to require slaves to wear a sort of uniform to distinguish them as such, but eventually decided that was a bad idea: it would make the enslaved more conscious of having a group identity, and they would see how strong their numbers were.

Resistance and control

Open rebellion and mass violence arose among the large population of the enslaved only sporadically across the millennium of ancient Roman history. A more persistent form of resistance was escape; as Moses Finley remarked, "Fugitive slaves are almost an obsession in the sources." Runaway slaves were considered criminals and were harshly punished.

Resistance might occur on a daily basis at a low-grade, even comic level. Plutarch tells the story of how one Pupius Piso, having ordered his slave not to speak unless spoken to, waited in embarrassment and in vain for the guest of honor to arrive at his dinner party. The slave had received the guest's regrets, but the master didn't ask him to speak, so he didn't.

Rebellions

The 1st century BC Greek historian Diodorus Siculus chronicled the three major slave rebellions of the Roman Republic known as the Servile Wars, the first two of which originated in Rome's first province, Sicily. Diodorus gives the total number of slaves participating in the first rebellion as 200,000 (elsewhere, the figure is given as 60,000–70,000), and 40,000 in the second. Some scholars question whether Sicilian grain production or ranching was extensive enough at this time to sustain such large-scale slaveholding, or the extent to which the rebellions might also have attracted poorer or disadvantaged free persons. While these large round numbers in ancient sources seem inflated, their significance here lies in indicating the scope of rebellion.

First Servile War (135–132 BC)

The First Servile War began as a protest by enslaved herdsmen against deprivation and mistreatment, localized on the "ranch" ''(latifundium)'' of Damophilos in Enna, but soon spread to include slaves in the thousands. They attained a major strategic objective in controlling both Enna and Agrigentum, two towns key to holding Sicily that Rome and Carthage had fought over repeatedly during the first two Punic Wars. To assure a food supply, they refrained from laying waste to the farms around their strongholds and did not target small farmers. They were militarily capable of mounting direct confrontations with Roman troops, which were brought to bear speedily.

The leader, Eunus, maintained communal cohesion and motivation on the model of the Hellenistic kings, even restyling himself by name as Antiochus and minting coins. Slave families formed a community at the stronghold of Tauromenium. The rebel slaves were able to sustain their movement within the difficult Sicilian environment for four years—eight or more, in some accounts—before Roman forces managed a decisive defeat, primarily by besieging and starving out Tauromenium.

Second Servile War (104–100 BC)

The Second Servile War had its roots in the piratical kidnapping that subjected freeborn people to random seizure and enslavement mostly in the eastern Mediterranean. People who had been enslaved illegally in this way had a right to reclaim their freedom under the recently passed ''Lex de Plagiariis'', a law concerning piracy and the slave trade associated with it. The praetor assigned to Sicily, Licinius Nerva, had been holding hearings and releasing the enslaved in numbers great enough to offend the privilege of the slaveholding landowners, who pressured him to desist—whereupon the slaves revolted. The rebellion started in two households and soon encompassed 22,000 slaves.

Their leader, whose slave name was Salvius, adopted the name Tryphon, perhaps in honor of Diodotus Tryphon to rally the many enslaved Cilicians among the rebels. He organized the slaves into cavalry and infantry units, besieged Morgantina, and along with the slave general Athenion had a string of early successes against Roman troops as the number of rebels grew to "immense proportions". Unlike the first rebellion, however, they were unable to hold towns or maintain supply lines, and seem to have lacked the long-term strategic objectives of Eunus; the less focused, at times incompetent Roman response enabled them to prolong the rebellion.

Eunus and Salvius each had held a privileged place in his household when enslaved; both Eunus and Athenion are noted as having been born into freedom. These experiences may have enhanced their ability to lead through articulating a vision of life beyond slavery.

Third Servile War (73–71 BC)

The so-called Third Servile War was briefer; the cause, "to break the bonds of their own grievous oppression". But its leader, Spartacus, arguably the most famous slave from all antiquity and idealized by Marxist historians and creative artists, has captured the popular imagination over the centuries to such an extent that an understanding of the rebellion beyond his tactical victories is hard to retrieve from the various ideologies it has served.

The rebellion broke out on a relatively trivial scale, only seventy-four gladiators from a training school in Capua. The two best-known leaders are the Thracian fighter Spartacus, who in some accounts is said to have served formerly in the Roman auxiliary troops, and the Gaul Crixus. They entrenched themselves at Vesuvius and quickly dispatched the forces of three successive praetors as the insurgency grew to 70,000 men "with alarming speed," both slaves and free herdsmen joining up, ultimately reaching a force of 120,000.

Spartacus's plan seems to have been to head to northern Italy, where the men could disperse and head to their countries of origin, free; but the Gauls were keen on plundering first and spent weeks ravaging southern Italy, giving the Romans a more urgent reason and time to make up for their "tardy and ineffective" initial response. Crixus and his Gauls were soon dealt with, but Spartacus got as far as north as Cisalpine Gaul before turning back for a possible assault on Rome, about which he then changed his mind. After more rebel military successes without clear objectives, the senate gave Marcus Crassus special command of the consular forces, and the tide of the war turned.

Spartacus headed south, hoping to cross to Sicily and "resuscitate the embers" of the slave rebellion three decades earlier; instead, the pirates who had accepted payment for transport set sail without him. After some weeks of increasingly successful fighting, Crassus obtained a victory in which Spartacus was said to have died, though his body was not identified; 5,000 fugitives fled north and ran into Pompey, who "annihilated" them; and Crassus concluded his victory by crucifying 6,000 captured rebels along the Appian Way. Crucifixion was the capital punishment meted out specifically to slaves, traitors, and bandits.

Later uprisings

The last slave rebellion of the Republic was put down at Thurii in southern Italy by Gaius Octavius, the father of the future emperor Augustus. In 60 BC, Octavius received a commission from the senate to hunt down fugitives who were alleged (emphasis on "alleged") to be the remnants of Spartacus's men and slaves who had been drawn into the Catilinarian conspiracy.

Though they failed, the Servile Wars left Romans with a deep-seated fear of slave uprisings that resulted in stricter laws regulating the keeping of slaves and harsher measures and punishments to keep enslaved people under control. In AD 10, the senate decreed that if a master was killed by one or a group of his slaves, all the slaves "under the same roof" were to be tortured and executed. In the early Imperial period, the slave uprisings against Lucius Pedanius Secundus, who was killed by one of his household slaves (all 400 were executed), and Larcius Maceo, a praetor who was murdered in his private bath, occasioned panic among slaveholders but failed to catch fire as the Sicilian rebellions had. None of the sporadic attempts at rebellion over the next centuries encompassed nearly as much territory as that led by Spartacus.

Fugitives

Fugitive slaves were considered criminals, whose crime was the stealing of the owner's property—themselves. The harboring of fugitive slaves was against the law, and professional slave-catchers ''(fugitivarii)'' were hired to hunt down runaways. Advertisements were posted with precise descriptions of escaped slaves, and offered rewards. Augustus himself boasted in his official record of achievements of having 30,000 fugitive slaves rounded up and returned for punishment to their owners.

Although the Apostle Paul expresses sympathy for runaway slaves, and some Christians seem to have taken in runaways, fugitives were still a concern as the Empire was Christianized. The Synod of Gangra in the mid-4th century placed any Christian who encouraged slaves to escape under anathema.

In a society where slavery was not based on race, a slave who escaped could hope to blend in and go unnoticed among the free. One of Cicero's slaves on his literary staff, named Dionysius, ran away and took several books with him. Although the eventual fate of this Dionysius is unknown, two years later he remained free.

Punishments

As the Romans increased the numbers of slaves they held, their fear of them grew, as did the severity of discipline. Cato the Elder whipped the household slaves for even small mistakes and kept his enslaved agricultural workers in chains during the winter. The physician Galen observed slaves being kicked, beaten with fists, and having their teeth knocked out or their eyes gouged out, witnessing the impromptu blinding of one slave by means of a reed pen. Galen himself had been taught not to strike a slave with his hand but always to use a reed whip or strap. The future emperor Commodus at age 12 is supposed to have ordered one of his bath attendants to be thrown into the furnace, though this order was not carried out.

These casual acts of cruelty are perhaps to be distinguished from the head of household’s ancient right to pass sentence on a dependent for perceived wrongdoing or penalties prescribed by law for actual crimes. But when slaves did commit a crime, the punishments inflicted on them by law were more severe than for free persons. For instance, the regular penalty for counterfeiting was deportation and confiscation of property, but a slave was put to death.

In Imperial Rome, the status of "convict" versus "slave" often becomes a distinction without a practical difference as free people of lower social status were increasingly subjected to more severe legal penalties once reserved for slaves.

Tattooing and branding

Fugitive slaves might be marked by letters tattooed on their forehead, called ''stigmata'' in Greek and Latin sources, a practice most attested as a consequence of condemnation to hard labor. The Romans picked up slave tattooing from the Greeks, who in turn had acquired it from the Persians. Attic comedy frequently mentions slave ''stigmata'', and the most notable passage in Latin literature comes in the ''Satyricon'' when Encolpius and Giton fake tattooing as an absurd form of disguise. Tattooing slaves with text to mark them as previous fugitives is most abundantly attested among the Greeks, and there is "no direct evidence for what was inscribed on runaways' foreheads in Rome," though criminals were labeled with the name of their crime. Literature alludes to the practice, as when the epigrammatist Martial satirizes a luxuriously attired freedman at the theater who keeps his inscribed forehead under wraps, and Libanius mentions a slave growing out bangs to cover his stigmata.

At the Temple of Asclepius in Ephesus, archeologists have found tablets from escaped slaves asking this Greek god of healing to make the tattoos on their foreheads disappear. Less miraculous means might also be sought, as sources record medical procedures for removing stigmata.

The evidence for Roman branding of slaves is less certain. The scars left by whipping might also mark slaves.

Collaring

What appears to be a distinctly Roman practice is the riveting of a humiliating metal collar around the former fugitive's neck. Because of the role the hope of manumission played in motivating the industry of slaves, the Romans may have preferred removable collars to permanent disfigurement, or for keeping open the possibility of resale.

Some forty-five examples of Roman slave collars have been documented, most found in Rome and central Italy, with three from cities in Roman North Africa. All date from the Christian era of the 4th and 5th centuries, and some have the Christian chi-rho symbol or a palm frond. Some were found still on the necks of human skeletons or with remains, suggesting that the collars might be worn for life and not just as a temporary ID tag; others seem to have been removed, lost, or discarded. In circumference, they are about the same size as Roman neck shackles (see relief under "Enslavement of war captives"), tight enough to keep them from slipping over the head but not so tight as to restrict breathing.

Fugitive slave collars have been found in urban environments rather than settings for hard labor. The tags are typically inscribed with the owner's name, status, and occupation, and the "address" to which the slave should be returned. The most common instructional text is ''tene me'' ("hold me") with either ''ne fugiam'' ("so I don't run away") or ''quia fugi'' ("because I've run away"). The tag on the most intact example of these collars reads "I have escaped, catch me; when you return me to my master Zoninus, you'll receive a gold coin."

Suicide

Reports of mass suicide or suicide by an individual to avoid enslavement or submission as a result of war are not rare in the Roman world. In one incident, a group of captive Germanic women told Caracalla that they would rather be executed than enslaved. When he ordered them sold anyway, they committed suicide en masse, some of them first killing their children.

Such an act could be considered honorable or rational in antiquity, and a slave might commit suicide for the same reasons a free person would, such as an agonizing health condition, religious fanaticism, or mental health crisis. But suicide among the enslaved might also be the ultimate way to resist and escape the master’s control or abuse. One of Cato’s slaves was so distraught after doing something he thought his master would disapprove of that he killed himself. An inscription from Moguntiacum records the killing of a freedman by one of his slaves, who then committed suicide by drowning himself in a river.

Roman law recognized that slaves might be driven to suicidal despair. A suicide attempt was one of the pieces of information about a slave that had to be disclosed on a bill of sale, indicating that such attempts occurred often enough to be of concern. However, the law did not always regard slaves as criminally fugitive if they ran away in despair and attempted suicide. The jurist Paulus wrote, “A slave acts to commit suicide when he seeks death out of wickedness or evil ways or because of some crime that he has committed, but not when he is able no longer to bear his bodily pain.”

Slavery and Roman religion

Slaves in classical Roman religion

Religious practices attest to the presence of slaves in Roman society from the earliest period. The Matralia was a women's festival held June 11 in connection with the goddess Mater Matuta, whose temple was among Rome's oldest. According to tradition, it was established in the sixth century BC by the slave-born king Servius Tullius. The observance featured the ceremonial beating of a slave girl by free women, who brought her into the temple and then drove her from it. Slave women were otherwise forbidden from participation. It has been conjectured that this scapegoat ritual reflected the wives' anxiety about the introduction of slave girls into the household as sexual usurpers.

Another slaves' holiday (''servorum dies festus'') was held August 13 in honor of Servius Tullius himself. Like the Saturnalia, the holiday involved a role reversal: the matron of the household washed the heads of her slaves, as well as her own. Following the Matronalia on March 1, matrons gave slaves of their household a feast, a custom that also evokes Saturnalian role reversal. Each matron feasted her own slaves in her capacity as ''domina'' or slave mistress. Both Solinus and Macrobius see the feast as a way to manipulate obedience, indicating that physical compulsion was not the only technique for domination; social theory suggests that the communal meal also promotes household cohesion and norms by articulating the hierarchy through its temporary subversion.

The temple of Feronia at Terracina in Latium was the site of special ceremonies pertaining to manumission. The goddess was identified with Libertas, the personification of liberty, and was a tutelary goddess of freedmen (''dea libertorum''). A stone at her temple was inscribed "let deserving slaves sit down so that they may stand up free."

But the Roman festival most famously celebrated by slaves was the Saturnalia, a December observance of role reversals during which time slaves enjoyed a rich banquet, gambling, free speech and other forms of license not normally available to them. To mark their temporary freedom, they wore the '' pilleus'', the cap of freedom, as did free citizens, who normally went about bareheaded. Some ancient sources suggest that master and slave dined together, while others indicate that the slaves feasted first, or that the masters actually served the food. The practice may have varied over time. Macrobius (5th century AD) describes the occasion thus:

Meanwhile, the head of the slave household, whose responsibility it was to offer sacrifice to the Penates, to manage the provisions and to direct the activities of the domestic servants, came to tell his master that the household had feasted according to the annual ritual custom. For at this festival, in houses that keep to proper religious usage, they first of all honor the slaves with a dinner prepared as if for the master; and only afterwards is the table set again for the head of the household. So, then, the chief slave came in to announce the time of dinner and to summon the masters to the table.

Saturnalian license also permitted slaves to enjoy a pretense of disrespect for their masters, and exempted them from punishment. The Augustan poet Horace calls their freedom of speech "December liberty" (''libertas Decembri''). In two satires set during the Saturnalia, Horace portrays a slave as offering sharp criticism to his master. But everyone knew that the leveling of the social hierarchy was temporary and had limits; no social norms were ultimately threatened, because the holiday would end.

The Festival of Handmaids

Slave women were honored at the ''Ancillarum Feriae'' on July 7. The holiday is explained as commemorating the service rendered to Rome by a group of ''ancillae'' (female slaves or "handmaids") during the war with the Fidenates in the late 4th century BC. Weakened by the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC, the Romans next had suffered a stinging defeat by the Fidenates, who demanded that they hand over their wives and virgin daughters as hostages to secure a peace. A handmaid named either Philotis or Tutula came up with a plan to deceive the enemy: the ''ancillae'' would put on the apparel of the free women, spend one night in the enemy camp, and send a signal to the Romans about the most advantageous time to launch a counterattack. Although the historicity of the underlying tale may be doubtful, it indicates that the Romans thought they had already had a significant slave population before the Punic Wars.

Temple slaves

Among the public slaves ''( servi publici)'' were those who served Rome's traditional religious practices. The cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima was transferred to the keeping of public slaves in 312 BC when the patrician families originally charged with its maintenance died out.

The ''calator'' was a public slave who assisted the flamens, the senior priests of the state, and carried out their day-to-day business. The ''popa'', depicted in sacrificial processions as carrying a mallet or axe with which to strike the sacrificial animal, is said in sources from late antiquity to have been a public slave.

In the East, especially during the first century BC, large numbers of “holy” slaves (Greek ''hierodouloi'') served in temples such as those of Ma in Comana, where 6,000 male and female slaves served, and a local Zeus in Morimene, both in Cappadocia; the Men of Pharnaces at Cabeira; Anaitis at Zela (modern-day Zile, Turkey); and especially the Great Mother at Pessinus in Galatia. These slaves were not treated as chattel, and the Romans, given their instinct for religion as a source of social order, tended not to capitalize on them as such. Strabo states that the chief priest of the Temple of Ma at Comana did not have the right to sell ''hierodouloi''; however, the sites of such temples are often associated with trading centers, and they appear to have played some role in the slave trade.

Mithraic cult

The Mithraic mysteries were open to slaves and freedmen, and at some cult sites most or all votive offerings are made by slaves, sometimes for the sake of their masters' wellbeing. The slave Vitalis is known from three inscriptions involving the cult of Mithras at Apulum (Alba Iulia in present-day Romania).The best preserved is the dedication of an altar to Sol Invictus for the wellbeing of a free man, possibly his master or a fellow Mithraic initiate. Vitalis was an ''arcarius'', a treasurer probably in the administration of imperial customs (''portorium''); his position gave him the opportunity to earn the wealth required for setting up stone monuments.

Numerous Mithraic inscriptions from the reaches of the empire record the names of both privately held slaves and imperial slaves, and even one Pylades in Roman Gaul who was the slave of an imperial slave. Mithraic cult, which valued submission to authority and promotion through a hierarchy, was in harmony with the structure of Roman society, and thus the participation of slaves posed no threat to social order.

Early Christian church

Christianity gave slaves an equal place within the religion, allowing them to participate in the liturgy. According to tradition, Pope Clement I (term c. 92–99), Pope Pius I (158–167), and Pope Callixtus I (c. 217–222) were former slaves.

Commemoration

Epitaphs are one of the most common forms of Roman writing to survive, arising from the intersection of two salient activities of Roman culture: the care of the dead and what Ramsay MacMullen called the “epigraphic habit.” One of the ways that Roman epitaphs differ from those of the Greeks is that the name of the commemorator is typically given along with that of the deceased. Commemorations are found both for slaves and by slaves.

Simple epitaphs for domestic slaves might be set up in the communal tomb of their household. This inclusion perpetuated the ''domus'' by enlarging the number of survivors and descendants who might carry out tomb maintenance and the many ritual observances for the dead on the Roman religious calendar.

The commemoration of slaves often included their job—cook, jeweler, hairdresser—or an emblem of their work such as tools. The funerary relief of the freed silversmith Publius Curtilius Agatho (see under “Naming” above) shows him in the process of working a cup that lies incomplete by his left hand. He holds a hammer in his right hand, and a punch or graver in his left. Despite these realistic details of his craft, Agatho is depicted wearing a toga—which Getty Museum curator Kenneth Lapatin compares to going to work in a tuxedo—that expresses his pride in his citizen status, just as the choice of marble as the medium rather than the more common limestone gives evidence of his level of success.

Although not required on tombstones, the deceased's status at times can be identified by Latin abbreviations such as ''SER'' for a slave; ''VERN'' or ''VER'' specifically for ''vernae'', slaves born into a ''familia'' (see funerary bust above); or ''LIB'' for a freedperson. This legal status is usually absent for gladiators, who were social outcasts regardless of having been freeborn, manumitted, or enslaved at the time of death; instead they were identified by their fighting specialty such as ''retiarius'' or ''murmillo'' or less often as a freeborn man, ''LIBER'', a status which was not typically asserted. Gladiators who had become celebrities might also be remembered by fans ''(amatores)'' in popular media—images of gladiators, sometimes labeled by name, appeared widely on everyday items such as oil lamps and vessels that could long survive them.

Epitaphs represent only slaves who were more highly favored or esteemed within their household or who belonged to communities or social organizations (such as ''collegia'') that offered care of the dead. Most slaves did not have the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with a free person or participate in social networking and were disposed of in mass graves along with "free" people who were destitute. The Augustan poet Horace, himself the son of a freedman, wrote of "a fellow slave contracted to transport the castaway corpses to narrow rooms on a cheap chest; here lay the common grave of the wretched masses."

Although slaves were denied the right to make contracts or conduct other legal matters in their own name, it was possible for a master to allow his slave to make less formal arrangements that functioned like a will. In a letter to a friend, Pliny said that he permitted his slaves to write up a “sort of will” (''quasi testamenta'') so that their last wishes could be carried out, including who should receive their possessions or other gifts and bequests. The beneficiaries have to be other members of the household (''domus''), which Pliny frames as the "republic" within which slaves hold a kind of citizenship (''quasi civitas'').

Slavery and Roman morality

Ancient authors rarely discussed slavery in terms of morals, because their society did not view slavery as a moral dilemma. But slaves and the treatment of slaves might be discussed in order to shed light on other topics—history, economy, an individual's character—or to entertain and amuse. Texts mentioning slaves include histories, personal letters, dramas, and satires, including Petronius

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases