Slaves and freedmen were a prominent feature of cities such as Rome in this period. Their numbers are difficult to estimate but must have been considerable—in Italy in the last century BC, there could have been as many as 2 million out of a total population of about 7 million. Italy and Sicily were at that time probably the regions with the highest numbers of slaves, since it was there that the landed property of the Roman elite was concentrated. In the Greek east, slaves presumably were a little less numerous. There, slavery was predominantly an urban phenomenon, whereas in the west it was both an urban and a rural phenomenon as a consequence of the use of slave labor on the latifundia. In the Hellenistic cities and in Rome, slaves were found in the households of the elite and were a luxury; they were present in many “middle-income” households as well, though in much fewer numbers. Also, slaves could be put to work outside the household, working alongside free laborers or practicing their crafts in workshops of their own (a situation also known from classical Athens); in both cases, they had to hand over part of their wages or their profits to their owner, for whom the slaves’ activities could thus be an attractive investment. For the slaves themselves, this arrangement could be profitable as well, since in this way they were often able to save some money, enabling them after some years to buy their own freedom. Greek and Roman law considered the slave as strictly speaking a “thing” and not as a person with certain rights, but in practice the money that a slave accumulated for himself was acknowledged as his own, so that he could use it in buying his freedom. The slave-owner could, of course, refuse the deal, but deliberately postponing it for years was generally frowned upon. Of their own accord, slave-owners very often freed their slaves, both male and female, either after some years during their own lifetime or else by a will and testament after their death. Various motivations played a role in this, ranging from the altruistic—the wish to reward a slave for years of service—to the egoistic, for the freed slave often had to go on paying his former master from the profits he earned, without the master having to pay for his livelihood; besides, the freedman generally stood to his former master (or his heir) as a cliens to his patronus, obliged to pay him respect and to help him materially or otherwise. In general, the more freedmen one had, the more prestige accrued, for their presence—sometimes literally following the patron whenever he appeared in public—lent some luster to their former owner, while their number testified to his wealth and magnanimity.
In Roman society, the freedmen were presumably more numerous, proportionately, than elsewhere. The freedman or libertus was automatically a Roman citizen. At the same time, he remained subservient to his former master, as indeed a cliens to his patronus, as long
As the latter lived and sometimes this relationship extended to his patron’s heir. A patron could thus materially profit from his freedmen but more important was the general renown and prestige derived from the act of manumission and the dedication the freedmen would subsequently show him. In the Greek world, such notions seem to have been less developed. There, the freed slaves did not automatically become citizens, and their presence did not lend their former owner the same measure of prestige as was normally the case in Rome. But it could be said that everywhere the presence of freedmen complicated social relations; for on the one hand, an ex-slave might attain considerable wealth, but on the other hand he remained a foreign resident in Greek eyes, or a citizen with less than full citizenship rights in Roman eyes, not to mention the “stain” of having once been un-free. Thus, the position of the freedmen was always ambiguous to some extent, and subject to social restrictions, irrespective of the wealth that some of them acquired. Only their sons, if born after their fathers’ manumission, could in Roman society exercise full citizenship rights and rise to local magistracies or even be admitted into the equestrian order, although formally that was only allowed for the grandsons of freedmen. In this manner, the institution of slavery coupled with the practice of manumission provided an important route for social mobility in the otherwise rather static society of the Roman world.
Household slaves in the cities could entertain the hope of more or less humane treatment coupled with a chance of manumission later on—although we should not forget that many of them were never freed and that the treatment even of slaves in daily contact with their master or mistress was often brutal, with whippings and torture being normal punishment. For their fellow slaves outside the cities, however, there was in general little hope of escaping their dismal fate. In the Hellenistic east, slaves were probably not much used in agriculture, since tenant-farmers and seasonal free laborers usually provided the workforce there. But slaves were put to work, chained like convicted criminals, in mines and quarries; especially notorious were those in Ptolemaic Egypt. Treated barbarously, the slaves often succumbed after a couple of years. In Italy and Sicily, it was the system of latifundia where a real “slave economy” developed. This type of agricultural organization was built on slave labor and was in most cases was probably profitable. It flourished in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC when the supply of slaves was abundant. They were treated hardly better than cattle, while the prospect of manumission was small; in fact, it was limited to those few individuals who were singled out to become overseers of groups of slaves or stewards of an entire villa (hence vilicus). It was the concentration of large numbers of slaves on these latifundia in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, combined with the fact that many ofthem came from the same ethnic background—Syrians, Thracians, Gauls—that explains the three unexpectedly large-scale and serious slave uprisings or slave wars that occurred during the late republic.
Rebelliousness among slaves was not uncommon in antiquity, but it had always been local, short-lived, limited in scope, and therefore not a threat to the existing order. That was certainly not true of the three massive uprisings in the years 135-71 BC. The first two rebellions took place in Sicily, and involved large numbers of slaves, mostly originating from Syria and Asia Minor, both times led by charismatic leaders who for a while had great success and in both cases managed to subdue much of the island, inaugurating short-lived kingdoms of ex-slaves. In the end, though, Roman armies entered
The scene and crushed these “slave kingdoms.” Typically, the rebels lacked any form of “ideology” that demanded an end to slavery; on the contrary, when they briefly enjoyed the upper hand, they in their turn enslaved their former masters or the population of cities overrun by them. The movements clearly originated with the desperate elements among the slaves, mostly those toiling at the latifundia; the household slaves in the cities were hardly involved, and certainly there was no fraternizing with the very poor but free proletariat. The third rebellion was the one already mentioned before, led by Spartacus in Italy in the years 73-71 BC. It showed in essence the same characteristics as the earlier rebellions, and broke out in a school for gladiators in Capua—for in this period, that too was a possible fate for slaves in the Roman world: to be sold or hired out to a gladiator school. The rebellion was led by the Thracian Spartacus. He turned out to be a leader with strategic insight who frequently defeated the Roman army corps sent out against him. In the end, however, he was no match for the armies of the ambitious Crassus and Pompey. The survivors of the last battle in the south of the peninsula were all crucified along the Via Appia, the traditional punishment for rebellious slaves. Since then, no more uprisings on such a scale occurred. That may have been the consequence of a deliberate policy of the large landowners to avoid grouping slaves of the same ethnic origin together, as they had become well aware of the risks; it certainly was in the end also a consequence of the gradually diminishing importance of the latifundia system, which in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD would slowly give way to a system of leasing out parcels of land to tenant-farmers.
World History
