text | Historical anecdotes
editor | Historical anecdotes
Slavery has always been a disturbingly normal part of human history. As an institution, slavery appears to be as old as civilization itself, with images and documents dating back to the third millennium BC attesting to its antiquity, and the vast majority of historical societies permitting its practice.
As residents of liberal, Enlightenment postmodernity, we have a hard time understanding how acceptable slavery was for much of the human past.
It is a huge tragedy that slavery – or “human trafficking” in current parlance (see ungift.org for more information) – still exists, but almost where it does exist it is a “black market” institution that operates without state sanction.
But until the nineteenth century, slavery was permitted everywhere. The abolitionist movement was an aberration of history, and we are the heirs to its great triumphs.
Throughout the long history of slavery, a few civilizations have stood out for the important role that slavery played in their social and economic structures.
Moses Finley, the greatest modern historian of ancient slavery, called these societies truly "slave societies" rather than "society with slaves," and these labels help us understand the history of slavery.
In a real slave society , the number of slaves is very large. They play a fundamental role in the economic organization of society, and the practice of controlling slaves has a significant impact on the value of culture.
Few societies in history have qualified as true slave societies, and premodern examples are extremely rare. The discovery of the New World, the rise of the Atlantic trading system linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the development of modern capitalist trade that linked the production of agricultural "cash crops" such as sugar and coffee, tobacco, and cotton to markets—all contributed to the expansion of slavery in the modern world.
However, the classical civilizations of Greece and especially Rome are truly ancient examples of slave societies.
It is a paradox of history that an institution as objectionable and unjust as slavery seems to thrive in otherwise advanced societies, and is even progressive in some respects.
Slavery tarnishes the reputation of a culture whose literature we can frankly admire, its architecture, its legal system. Various attempts have been made to explain this apparent separation.
Some people believe that slave labor gave the master the necessary leisure time to pursue philosophical reflection and artistic expression; the great historical sociologist Max Weber (Max Weber) emphasized that slavery was the foundation of the urban economy and urban culture of the classical world.
Others claim that the presence of slaves heightened the idea of freedom; contemporary sociologist of slavery Orlando Patterson points out that the "freedom" of the Greeks and Romans was developed in response to the unfreedom of slaves.
There may be some truth to all of these arguments, but the fundamental reason why slavery and civilization seemed to develop in tandem is that slavery was closely tied to the deeper forces that we think of as the drivers of progress over the long course of human history - forces like law and trade.
In order to understand this, we need to ask ourselves a basic question, what is slavery? This is a simple question and a fundamental one.
Slavery is the practice of treating people as property, as commodities that can be bought and sold. When ancient philosophers reflected on ancient slavery, they acknowledged that this was the essence of slavery.
In the words of the late Roman rhetorician Libanius, “A slave is a person who at some point will be owned by someone else and whose body can be sold.
What could be more embarrassing than having the old owner take the money and the new owner giving it? Wasn't this body dismembered and this soul completely destroyed?
Slaves know what it's like to sit on the block and watch themselves being auctioned for a price. The slave had to live in fear that he or she could be sold again at any time.
At any time, slave families could be torn apart by sale. Furthermore, if the owner died, the slaves were part of the estate; if the owner went bankrupt, the slaves were part of the collateral. "The soul of a slave cannot rest in peace because of the uncertainty of its future master."
Roman slavery law emphasized the status of slaves as property. Roman law was one of the greatest products of Roman civilization, yet slave law was crucial to the Roman legal system.
In the words of early twentieth-century legal scholars, Roman slavery law was the most distinctive part of Rome's most distinctive achievements, and slavery was a status.
"The highest division of human law is that all persons are slaves or freemen. The great consequence of slavery was that the slave fell under the dominion of his master. Dominion - cognate with our word dominion - was a fundamental concept in Roman property law, signifying the almost unlimited power to use and sell objects of ownership.
Roman law also tells us that the Romans believed in a close connection between war and slavery; they believed that, broadly speaking, their slaves were captured in war and subjected to slavery.
In fact, one of the ways they defended slavery was by claiming that slaves were exempt from capture in war and that their alternative fate was death; slaves were therefore a kind of living dead who were given the "merciful" option of enslaving in war rather than being killed.
But Roman law recognized another way to become a slave: giving birth to a slave Belong to mother. Children born to female slaves followed their mothers into slavery. It's easy to see why this rule is useful to masters: it eliminates the need to ask any questions about paternity, avoids ambiguity, and allows masters to sexually exploit slaves.
Despite the ideology of war and conquest, one of the most important advances of the past two decades has been the growing recognition that most slaves in Roman society were, in fact, born into slavery.
Although many ancient Sources emphasize the role of war in supplying slaves to the market, but in fact natural reproduction was the main source of new slaves.
This shift in our understanding has a number of important consequences. First, it highlights the importance of female slaves, whereas previous generations of research focused on male slaves.
Historians now believe that slave "families" were actually common. Of course, slave families had no validity in Roman law ("there were no legal marriages between slaves") and were dangerously exposed to the dangers of the institution of slavery, but slaves The slave family was undoubtedly the primary way in which slaves dealt with and resisted the dehumanization of their slave status on a daily basis.
It is frustrating that we know so little about the reality of slave families, even though compelling evidence of slave families is quite common.
Some of this evidence is "new" - such as a recently discovered inscription recorded on a stone that lists the names and ages of 152 slaves on an estate, clearly divided into smaller family structures.
The most profound consequence of our better understanding of the slave supply and the key role of natural reproduction in it is that it changes the way we understand what "led to" slavery.
In other words, it helps us reassess the old question of why slavery became so unusually prominent in Rome.
Scholars have long believed that Roman slavery was part of Roman imperialism and that the institution was created by the Roman war machine.
Obviously, there is some truth to the history of this version.We just need to remember that Caesar was said to have killed a million of his enemies and sold another million into slavery when he conquered Gaul; while these numbers are not even credible, they truly reflect the spectacular violence and horrific displacement that 's Roman armies was capable of causing.
However, in reality, Roman slavery expanded in the late Republic as Roman legions were busy conquering the Mediterranean world, not because the conquests brought millions of captured slaves, but because in the aftermath of the conquests, Rome achieved a level of prosperity and development that had never been seen by any civilization.
It is clear that trade and economic development accelerated in the late Roman Republic and early empire. Slavery developed in tandem with Roman progress, as Rome's economic system created a huge demand for slave labor. Urban populations—and especially the vast capital itself—created markets for the products produced by slave labor.
For example, the main cash crop in the ancient world was wine. In Roman civilization, wine was consumed on a large scale.
The great wealth of the Senate and the equestrian class was based on slave labor, and wine was the royal road to wealth.
Nonetheless, one of the most striking facts about Roman slavery is the diversity of occupations in which slaves were engaged.
Slaves played a prominent role in the production of wine, wheat, oil and other agricultural products. But slaves also served as textile workers and domestic servants, doctors and scribes, educators and business agents.
In fact, there were many highly educated slaves in Roman society, many of whom had a Greek background and were proficient in the classics of Greek culture. Perhaps the greatest philosopher of the Roman Empire was Epictetus, a slave who won his freedom and became an influential teacher of Stoic teachings (including its core tenet that true freedom is internal and moral, not external and legal: "Every good man is free").
The example of Epictetus reminds us that there are fundamental differences between ancient and modern slavery, three of which are particularly important.
First, to an unusual extent, the Romans allowed manuscripts, acts of freeing slaves, and unusually generous conditions that could lead to full citizenship.
The hope of freedom - used as a powerful motivator to gain cooperation from slaves - colored Roman slavery as a whole. Second, ancient slavery was not based on race. The sinister connection between skin color and slave status is a pure modern invention.
The ancient Romans had Mediterranean skin color, and their slaves were whiter and darker than them.
Apparently blond northern people ended up as Roman slaves, as did sub-Saharan Africans.
Although sexual exploitation was a part of every known slave system, in the modern world, Christian culture at least nominally discouraged this aspect of the abuse of slaves.
By contrast, in the ancient world, masters were expected, and in some quarters deliberately encouraged, to use slaves' bodies as sex objects. To an extraordinary extent, sexual exploitation was a regular part of the slave experience in ancient Rome.
It is clear from the haunting portrait of a freed slave in Petronius' Ribald Satyrica that the trauma of sexual exploitation was central to the slave experience.
Unlike modern slavery, ancient slavery never sparked an abolitionist movement. Even an educated former slave like Epictetus could not imagine a world without slavery (although apparently a radical Jewish sect called the Essenes did, and in the fourth century a lone Christian voice came close by arguing that slavery was inherently unjust).
The more enlightened observers of Roman slavery recognized the humanity of the slaves and advocated mitigating the worst effects of slavery - unbridled violence, rampant abuse - but did not advocate the overthrow of the system.
Roman slavery was both "ancient" and "modern," but above all it was a unique historical structure that lasted for some five or six centuries - from the conquest of the empire in the late Republic to its demise in the fifth century - and ultimately victimized hundreds of millions of souls.
The historian's first task is to understand the past, but this search for understanding does not mean that we must suspend our ability to judge the past and its complexities with due humility. Slavery was a pervasive part of Roman society and an integral part of Rome's achievements.
