This notion of exoticism provides a good transition to the question of barbarian slaves and captives of the Romans. Not surprisingly, the Romans felt the same titillation as Bleda and al-Walid at holding exotic barbarians in thrall. Julian, for example, selected as his prize from the prisoners of Maiozamalcha a single deaf mute Persian boy whose queer ability to express himself in graceful signs he found fascinating.618 For Romans, too, exoticism also was an important spur to eroticism. Ausonius’ prize slave mistress Bissula offers a star example. Captured as a girl during Valentinian’s Rhine expedition of 368, she was schooled in Latin under the tutelage of her owner and eventually freed by him. Ausonius’ fawning praise for her exotic beauty, her blond hair and blue eyes, her charming combination of German and Roman habits, leaves little doubt that he was himself enthralled by her enticements and surely took advantage of his master’s prerogative to taste their fruits. She was the perfect fetish, “rather terrifying to the unaccustomed, but charming to her lord.”619
Late Romans, no less than barbarians, counted on regular hauls of foreign captives to gain diplomatic and military advantage and feed their slave markets. Traditionally it has been assumed that slave supplies from the externae gentes dropped markedly with the end of the “wars of conquest” in the early first century CE. this assumption proves false under closer scrutiny, for while the frequency and scale of warfare certainly dropped off in the second century CE, it resumed with vigor in the third - and continued steady into the fourth century and beyond. A full catalog of the evidence is impossible, but a few examples can illustrate the point: Julian claimed to have taken thousands of captives in his four years in Gaul between 356 and 360;620 theodosius’ general Modares captured 4,000 wagonloads of Gothic women and children in 380; the general Sabinianus captured over 500 prisoners from Theodoric’s Gothic rearguard in 479; a passage of Orosius hints that the barbarian followers of Radagaisus were sold by the thousands at rock-bottom prices after their defeat in 406; a law of 409 advertises Huns and Scyri recently captured in battle who could be claimed for use on landed estates as coloni; and the magister militum Areobindus took 30,000 captives from Persarmenia during raids in 504.621 The Romans could thus still bring in massive hauls of prisoners.
For Romans, as for barbarians, the traffic in captives and slaves was very much a question of money. Though we have no good evidence that the Romans returned barbarian captives for ransoms, all along the frontier barbarians were readily available for sale, whether by Romans or by fellow barbarians who had captured or enslaved them. The fourth-century trader’s handbook Expositio totius mundi states explicitly that Pannonia and Numidia offered especially rich markets for slaves.622 In 393 or 394, Symmachus wrote to his friend Flavianus, then on the Rhine, to request the purchase and shipment of 20 male slaves for donation to the curule stables in Rome. His reason for looking so far afield was his awareness that “the location of slaves along the frontier is easy and the price is usually tolerable.”623 The traffic in barbarian captives was indeed so widespread that, when in 372 Valentinian 1 sent his general Severus on a secret mission into Alamannic territory to capture the king Macrianus, Severus happened upon some Roman slave traders and their captives, whom he was forced to kill in order to maintain his cover.624 Ultimately all Roman denizens of the frontier zone assumed that money was to be made from the traffic in barbarians. In point of fact, this mentality led to a breakdown in oversight during the fateful transfer of the Goths south of the Danube in 376. As Eunapius complains, because “each of the [soldiers] had decided that he would fill his house with domestics and his farm with herdsmen and sate his lust through the license that he enjoyed” rather than supervise the transfer, the Goths were able to foment a rebellion that provided the springboard to their victory at Adrianople.625
Little wonder, then, that synesius of Cyrene could assume: “every household has scythian [that is, Gothic] slaves if they have any money at all, whether as table-setters, or cooks, and all have Scythian amphora-bearers, attendants, and litter-bearers since they are best suited to serving Romans.”626 Working on similar assumptions, Julian dismissed the Goths as unworthy enemies, saying they were better suited to Galatian slave traders.627 In many ways this condescension was founded in fear, for the Goths were undeniably formidable foes. The Roman desire to hold them as slaves was thus in some sense an outward expression of their desire for dominion over a wild and very uncontrollable force. In this sense, their retention of enslaved barbarians served not only to supply labor for the Roman economy and to provide a productive outlet for captured enemies, but as a psychological reinforcement of the Roman desire for domination over barbarian antagonists. As if to prove the point, symmachus in his orations four times refers to Roman military victories over barbarians using the language of slavery, as when he describes the Neckar river as “rejoicing in its servitude, being known as a captive.”628
World History
