SLAVES

Today when we think of slavery, we tend to imagine the form of slavery practiced in the American South, but Roman slavery was a very different institution for a number of reasons. The first and by far the biggest difference is that Roman slavery was not racial slavery. There was absolutely no correlation between race and slavery. Slaves were any and all races, cultures, ages, and genders. A second major difference is that the line between slave and free person was not rigid. It was a permeable boundary through which large numbers of people passed in both directions. A great many slaves were eventually freed, and perhaps even greater numbers of free people became slaves.

The most common source of slaves in the Roman world was military conquest. Whenever a Roman army took the field, it was inevitably followed by a train of slave dealers. The soldiers caught people and sold them on the spot to the slave dealers, who in turn sent them to one of the great slave markets; for example, the markets of the strategically located island of Rhodes could process tens of thousands of slaves each day. The number of slaves generated by Rome's wars was truly astounding. Rome's destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War glutted the slave markets with a quarter million new slaves at once. In the course of Julius Caesar's campaigns in Gaul, his legions sold over a million people into slavery. Other sources of slaves included children born of slaves and free people becoming slaves as fhe result of legal action, most commonly when they fell into debt and were unable to pay it off. Sometimes abandoned children were picked up by slave dealers and raised as slaves. Finally, desperate free people could actually voluntarily sell members of their family, or even fhemselves, into slavery.

An unskilled, adult male slave might sell for around 2,000 sesterces, but obviously skilled slaves could sell for considerably more. Slaves could be

Bought outright, which was most common, but some (dealers ran rental businesses in which a slave could be rented for a certain period ranging from a few hours to an entire year.

Under law, slaves were regarded as property, just like any other object owned by their master. Thus, when a slave ran away, the actual crime he was committing in the Romans' eyes was theft because he had stolen himself from his master. Varro famously offered a classification of types of property one might find on a farm. To him, all objects used by the farmer were tools, of which there were three types: "dumb tools" were things like wagons or baskets; "semiarticulate tools" were animals, such as oxen; and, finally, there were the "articulate tools," slaves (Varro, On Agriculture 1.17.1).

The lifestyle of Roman slaves could vary enormously, and one significant distinction was between rural and urban slaves. Rural slaves were unskilled farm workers whose lives were often very harsh. They were frequently chained together or had their feet chained and spent their time doing heavy manual labor in the fields under the eyes of cruel overseers. At night, they were locked up in a jail-like enclosure known as an ergastu-lum. This type of slave was rarely freed by his master and had little to look forward to in life. Cato the Elder wrote down his advice for managing rural slaves, which included the callous suggestion that if a slave became too sick or too old to work, he should be sold so that the owner didn't have to waste any food on him (Cato the Elder, On Agriculture 2.7).

Urban slavery encompassed a much wider range of experiences. Some of these slaves, particularly family ones raised together with the master's children, were the confidantes and even friends of their masters and might receive educations, have their own families, and live nearly as well as the free members of the family. Many skilled professions, such as teacher, carpenter, doctor, and clerk, were often practiced by slaves who enjoyed, at least to some degree, the high standard of living and the respect due to one with their talents. The imperial bureaucracy included huge numbers of slaves as clerks and accountants, and public services such as aqueduct maintenance were conducted by slaves as well.

Many of these slaves cherished the hope that they might actually buy their freedom from their masters through an odd Roman institution known as the peculiitm. A peculium was a fund of money that the slave was allowed to save up, and once it reached his own value, he could give it to his master and literally buy his own way out of slavery. The peculium was viewed by the Romans as an incentive for slaves to work harder. Thus, a master might tell a slave who was a teacher that he could keep 5 percent of all the tuition money that he generated or a slave who worked as a salesman that he could keep 5 percent of the profits from the sales he generated. With this incentive, presumably the slave would work harder and generate more money for his master. Romans usually calculated that it would take a particularly industrious slave approximately seven years to

Build up his peculium to the level at which he could buy his freedom.

Many urban slaves were also freed outright by their masters. The act of freeing a slave was known as manumission. Manumission most commonly occurred either posthumously in a will or when a man became a paterfamilias and freed his childhood slave friends. So many Romans were freeing slaves in their wills that Augustus actually passed a law prohibiting anyone from freeing more than 100 slaves in a will. When a slave was freed, he was presented with a floppy, cone-shaped red hat that was known as the liberty cap, which he was supposed to wear to demonstrate his new status.

Because of the sheer number of slaves in Roman society, the Romans were extremely fearful—almost paranoid—that their slaves would turn against them. The most obvious example of this is a law stating that if a slave killed his master, then all the slaves owned by that person would be put to death. The harshness with which some Romans punished their children and each other for misbehavior was extended to their slaves, who might be whipped, beaten, and tortured for the slightest error.

Once, at a dinner party that Augustus attended, one of the slaves serving the meal dropped a glass and broke it. The master ordered that the slave be thrown into a pool of man-eating lampreys. Augustus intervened to save the slave, but this incident is representative of the sort of punishment meted out for even trivial offenses. Even normally humane slave owners might abuse their slaves in moments of anger, and again this illustrates how slaves were regarded as property more than as human beings. Augustus once had both legs broken of a slave who had annoyed him, and when another slave ate one of the emperor's fighting quails, Augustus had him nailed alive to the mast of a ship. Also, in a moment of annoyance, the culture-loving and enlightened emperor Hadrian stabbed one of his slaves in the eye with a stilus.

Urban slaves who misbehaved were threatened with being sent to the country to work on a farm. Slaves were often branded to mark them as such, and many times the branding was done on the face so that the slave could not hide the marks with clothing. Some masters outfitted their slaves with iron collars from which were hung tags inscribed with messages such as "If you find this slave, he has run away. Please return him to his owner at the following address." These were exactly the same as modern dog tags in both purpose and appearance. When slaves were summoned as witnesses in law cases, the only way their testimony was considered valid was if they had been tortured.

Despite such instances of cruelty, some masters treated their slaves with great kindness. Pliny the Younger, who owned 4,116 slaves, was very concerned about the health of his slaves and bragged that he did not place chains on his agricultural slaves. Once when a favorite slave contracted tuberculosis, Pliny sent him on a luxurious cruise up the Nile River in Egypt to recuperate.

Romans were always fearful that their slaves would band together against them. An indication of the depths of their fear can be seen in the fact that, despite their obsession with public pronouncements and indications of status, a proposal that all slaves should be made to wear some distinguishing item of clothing was rejected on the grounds that if slaves were able to recognize one another, they would realize how vast their numbers really were and be incited to rebellion.

During the republic, there were a number of times when groups of slaves rose in rebellion against their masters. The most famous of these slave revolts was led by Spartacus, a Thracian who had served as an auxiliary in the Roman army. Tater falling into slavery, he was sent to the gladiator school at Capua. In 73 bc, he led his fellow gladiators in slaughtering their overseers and then pillaging the countryside. He collected a huge army of 90,000 slaves, barbarians, and discontented people and defeated three Roman armies and two consuls as he marched up Italy. His army successfully reached the Alps, at which point Spartacus urged his followers to disband and escape back to their homes in the north. His army had developed a taste for plundering, however, and refused, so Spartacus led them back down into Italy. Eventually he was cornered near the heel of Italy by three Roman armies. Spartacus negotiated with several pirate fleets to transport his army away, but at the last moment they deserted him, and Spartacus and most of his followers were killed in a battle. The 6,000 who were captured were crucified on the Appian Way, so for hundreds of miles along this main road there was a constant row of crucified slaves serving as a warning to any others who might revolt. Indeed, after this, there were no other major slave revolts.

During the Roman Empire, laws were gradually changed to ensure more humane treatment of slaves, and once Christianity became a dominant force, it also caused slaves to be endowed with more rights and receive better treatment. Roman slax'ery was a curious mixture of brutality and kindness, oppression and hope. The most famous stories are those of the lucky slaves who obtained their freedom and went on to experience success. At the time of his death, one ex-slave owned 7,200 oxen, had a net worth of 60 million sesterces, and himself owned 4,000 slaves. Such stories, though, represent the exception, and a more typical attitude can perhaps be summed up in the words of a slave in a Roman play by Plautus: "Being a slave, you have to suffer many injustices. It's a hard burden to bear" {Flautus, Amphitryon 174-5).