14.1 The distribution of slave-ownership in the census records of
Roman Egypt (first to third centuries ad) page 290
14.2
14.3
16.1
16.2
16.3
16.4
I6.5
18.1
18.2
18.3
18.4
18.5
18.6
18.7
18.8
18.9
Manumitted slaves in Delphi, by provenance (in per cent) Ratio of home-born to imported manumitted slaves in Delphi (total = 1)
Painting from a lararium from house 113.2 in Pompeii. Pompeii, Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompeii Tombstone from Emerita in Lusitania (Merida, Spain). Museo Nacional de Arte Romano, Merida Gold bracelet with an inscription from Moregine, near Pompeii. Soprintendenza Archeologica di Pompeii, inv. 81580 Painting of a banquet, from The House of the Triclinium, Pompeii. National Museum, Naples, inv. 120029. '© 1990. Photo Scala, Florence — courtesy of the Ministero di Beni e Att. Culturali
Toilette scene, from Neumagen, c. ad 235, now in Trier.
Trier, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, inv. Nr. NM 184. (© 2008. Photo Scala
Plan of the slave quarters, villa at Settefinestre
Plan of the House of Menander, Pompeii
Relief from Nickenich with chained captives. Bonn,
Rheinisches Landesmuseum, inv. Nr. 31. 86—87
Funerary stela of lulius Ingenius, ad 50-100, from Mainz.
Mainz, Landesmuseum, inv. Nr. S147
Pillar base with two captives chained at neck, ad 50—100,
From Mainz. Mainz, Landesmuseum, inv. Nr. S269
Column of Marcus Aurelius, Rome (detail) — woman and
Child, ad 180—192. DAI Rome. Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1980.2703
Toilette scene, from Neumagen, c. ad 235, now in Trier.
Trier, Rheinisches Landesmuseum, inv. Nr. NM 184 Child’s sarcophagus, Agrigento, with slave childminders. Agrigento, Soprintendenza per I Beni Culturali e Ambientali Frieze of breadmaking, Tomb of Eurysaces.
DAI Rome. Singer, Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1972.3827
305
305
345
348
352
355
357
387
389
393
398
401
402 404
406
X
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editors wish to thank the contributors to this volume for their willingness to participate in the project and for their patience while the volume was in press. They are grateful to staff members at Cambridge University Press, particularly Elizabeth Hanlon, for practical assistance during its production; and they wish to register special thanks to Michael Sharp, who both commissioned the volume and played an important role in bringing it to completion.
Xi
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011
The purpose of this volume, the first in a series of multi-authored works examining the institution of slavery throughout human history, is to survey the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world. It begins with an overview of slavery in the ancient Near East, then quickly moves to its principal concern, the history of slavery in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. In these societies slaves were regularly used as primary producers in the key economic activities of agriculture, mining and manufacturing. As domestic servants and administrators, they also provided their owners with a multitude of services. In competitive social and political contexts, they were sometimes simultaneously items of conspicuous display.
The scale of ancient slave-owning varied from period to period and from place to place. In certain instances, especially in classical Athens and in Roman Italy of the Late Republic and Principate, it became particularly prominent. But despite fluctuations of scale, slavery as a concept was never altogether absent from ancient Mediterranean life. Ideologically, members of society were divided into two broad categories: those who were free and those who were not. As the Roman jurist Gaius stated, attributing the coercive authority that slave-owners exercised in the second century ad to universal standards: ‘The principal distinction in the law of persons is this, that all human beings are either free men or slaves’ (Institutes 1.9). For Greeks and Romans throughout their history, slavery was a defining and distinctive element of culture.
Across time and place slavery, or ‘unfreedom’, took different forms. Debt-bondage, helotage, temple slavery and something akin to serfdom are all attested. But the form with which this volume is chiefly concerned is chattel slavery, the most extreme form of unfreedom in antiquity, in which the slave was conceptualised as a commodity, akin to livestock, and was owned by a master who had full capacity to alienate his human property, by sale, gift, bequest or other means. For the slave the result was a state of social death in which all rights and sense of personhood were denied. The appearance of this form of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean has led to the dominant modern view that Greece and Rome offer the first examples in world history of what can be called genuine slave societies. Precisely
How and when those societies arose, and how they should be understood to be genuine, are matters of ongoing debate, to which the contents of the volume contribute in various ways. But if a single origin for the practice and maintenance of chattel slavery in antiquity can be identified, it lies in the right of victors in warfare, endemic to the ancient world, to dispose of the defeated as they saw fit: to free, hold to ransom, or kill them; or to retain them in a state of servitude as long as they wished. Slavery in antiquity can be regarded accordingly as a cultural manifestation of the ubiquitous violence in society that incessant warfare typified, bringing into being social relationships in which absolute power was exercised by some over others whose lives had been spared after military conquest.
If the volume illustrates how deeply embedded slavery was in the life of the differing societies that made up the ancient Mediterranean world, over long intervals of time and across a vast geographical space, it equally makes clear that there was never any sustained opposition to slavery. The question may well have sometimes been asked whether slavery was justifiable; and some communities, that of the Essenes for instance, were said not to have practised slave-owning. But the question was academic only, and the communities concerned were few and exceptional. It remains a fact that as far as can be seen, no movement advocating an end to slavery ever appeared in the ancient world. To those today who live in societies that regard the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century as an integral element of a progressive democratic legacy, this may seem difficult to understand, especially in view of the rise in late antiquity of Christianity, a religion that was open to all members of society, slaves as well as free, and whose religiously levelling character could be assumed, in principle, to have had socially ameliorative consequences. In its Protestant forms in later history, Christianity was of course a mainstay of the modern abolitionist cause. But ideas of improving social change were not characteristic of the ancient world, and if the new religion had any effect at all, it was to reinforce, not to challenge, traditional social structures. Christianity did not make a difference to slavery in antiquity, and in the absence of any notion of universal freedom or of comparable rights and privileges as understood in the modern Western liberal tradition, slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world never became a problem.
The chapters that make up the volume are of two types. Some give chronological surveys of the development of slavery in particular periods or places. Others treat topics or themes. The overall organisational aim has been to allow the centrality of slavery in ancient Mediterranean life to emerge from diverse but interrelated perspectives: historical, cultural, legal, archaeological, demographic and, occasionally, comparative. Inevitably the conclusions reached are based on sources that represent almost exclusively the views and interests of the slave-owning sectors of ancient society, not of those who lived in slavery. Many slaves and former slaves in the ancient Mediterranean world were literate and may well have written about their experiences of life in slavery. But if so, nothing of substance has survived, and the emergence of a slave literature of the kind familiar from the history of New World slavery seems not to have been a prominent feature of the history of ancient slavery. Nor apparently were slave-owners much concerned to write works about slavery or individual slaves that would now allow direct views of the institution’s material conditions to be seen and a servile perspective perhaps to be glimpsed. There were occasional exceptions. Caecilius of Caleacte wrote a work on the history of slave rebellions in Sicily, and Hermippos of Berytus a work on slaves who achieved eminence in learning. Both authors had once perhaps been slaves themselves (RE iii, 1.1174—88; viii, 1.853—4). Again, however, their books have not survived, and altogether the slave’s view of slavery remains elusive. Each chapter in the volume includes a synthesis of modern research on its topic, but authors have been encouraged to present their own opinions and to write free from theoretical or ideological constraint. As in many multi-authored works, approaches and methods vary considerably, but the volume as a whole provides a comprehensive introduction to its principal subject. The Cambridge History of World Slavery is a response to the enormous interest scholars have shown in the history of slavery in the last generation. This volume reflects the attention to slavery paid by historians of the ancient Mediterranean world.
World History
