Q- Analyse the role of Slavery in Ancient Rome

Q- Examine the main characteristics of Slavery in Ancient Rome

Q- Discuss the features and significance of slavery in Ancient Rome.
Introduction
Romans were a tightly knit society, willing to submit to the rule of law. This
roman discipline produced magnificent soldiers and the most effective armies
in the ancient world. Many western European countries today base their law
codes directly on earlier roman law codes. The romans were willing to adopted
other people’s ideas, advancing all aspects of their cultural life’s
The obligation of slavery is as old as the invention of agriculture. A hierarchy is
formed, and leaders are chosen by the group, laws are established, and people
begin to follow their chosen leaders. As people settle in their communities’
trade and commerce arise. Burrowing and debt now becomes a common place
within these communities. Land becomes a commodity that people are willing
to fight for.
All this occurs while government grow in power and privilege. Thus, the factors
have then created the means for slavery to develop.
In the following paragraph we’ll be discussing the characteristics, role, and
significance that slavery played in ancient Rome.
Ancient Rome was a kind of society where class structure not only existed but
was strictly enforced. The emperor was at the top of the hierarchy of ancient
roman class structure. Most crucial distinctions in the roman society were
between the patricians and the plebians. Women in these times were given
limited form of citizenship and did not have the right to vote or hold any public
office. Woman had certain legal rights such as the right to own property, the
right to obtain divorce, and the right to do business. Slaves of ancient Rome did
not have any legal rights. Freed slaves had limited rights and their children
were considered free citizens of Rome.
Composition of slaves
According to Hopkins (1978) seven processes affected the growth of slavery in
Rome; continuous war, the influx of booty, its investment in land, the formation
of large estates, the impoverishment of peasants, their emigration to towns or
provinces, and the growth of urban markets. All these processes were
interwoven. M.I. Finley (1980) holds the view that slavery becomes widespread
in the economy when two conditions are present. First, when the internal
supply of labour in a given society is severely deficient in relation to its demand
for labour. Secondly, when there is considerable landed property in the hands
of a small class.
The most common source of slaves in the roman world was military conquest.
When roman army took field, it was inevitably followed by a train of slave
dealers, soldiers caught people and sold them on the spot to slave dealers.
Rome’s destruction of Carthage in the third Punic war flooded the slave
markets with quarter of a million new slaves at once. As the empire stabilised
war was minimised, producing less slaves from Prisoner of war; so, people bred
slaves. Children slaves automatically inherited slave status so slave ‘marriages’
were arranged in order to maintain these supplies of human labour.
Other sources of slaves included; free people becoming slaves as a result of
legal action, when they fall into debt and were unable to pay it off, abandoned
children were picked up by slave dealers and raised as slaves, desperate free
people could voluntarily sell members of their family, or even themselves into
slavery. Slaves could be bought upright, which was most common. Some
dealers ran rental businesses in which a slave could be rented for a certain
period of time ranging from a few hours to an entire year. Sellers of slaves had
to ensure their chattels were in good health and were not guilty of any crimes
and weren’t runaway slaves.
Slaves were generally presented to prospective buyers naked, to see exactly
what was being purchased and these physical exams were known as catasta.
They also wore a sign hanging around their necks indicating their origins,
health, character, intelligence, education and other pertinent information
“generally a good slave was worth about twelve times as much as an untrained
slave” Enrico Laoli.
Role of slavery
According to Perry Anderson, the slave mode of production was the decisive
invention of the Graeco-Roman world. In Roman theory, the agricultural slave
was called ‘instrumentum vocale’, the speaking tool; one grade away from the
livestock that constituted an ‘instrumentum semi-locale’ and two from the
implement which was an ‘instrumentum mutum’. They became the standard
objects of sale and purchase in the metropolitan markets. They could be
shifted from one region to another and could be trained in a number of
different skills. As Perry Anderson suggests, the wealth and ease of the
propertied urban class of classical antiquity rested on the broad surplus
produced in the countryside by slave labour.
According to some critics, slavery hindered the growth of technology. The slave
had no incentive to innovate and could not be trusted with any expensive
implement. Slave relations of production ultimately tended to paralyse
productivity in both agriculture and industry. There were undoubtedly some
technical improvements in the slave economy. They included among others the
spread of more profitable wine and oil cultures (the cultivation of grapes and
olives); the introduction of rotary mills for the grinding of grain; the two-field
rotation system; botanical knowledge and field drainage also increased. There
was, thus, no complete halt to technological development
The roman empire relied of the institution of slavey. Slaves worked on the large
farming estates, extracted minerals from mines, did the day-to-day work in
public offices such as the mint and the archives, ran the large households of
the elites. Slaves were secretaries, tutors, aides, servants, hairdressers, cooks
and prostitutes. Most slaves were sold with a buy back guarantee within six
months.
Roman society was organised in hierarchy. They provided a ready source of
teachers; Paedagogus was an educated Greek slave who could give the boy his
preliminary instructions in Latin and Greek, main duty is to protect the child.
Litterator was a man who made individual contact with parent to instruct their
children in reading, writing and arithmetic. Grammaticus was a teacher of a
more advanced level.
Public slaves were those owned by the state and performed jobs such as
cleaning sewers, working in the public baths and maintaining roads. Rural
slaves had a much harder life than urban slaves, they worked on farms or large
estates and were owned by individuals; the forman was in charge of other
slaves but was himself a slave, the foreman chose the slaves clothing, took care
of them, he must also be skilled in agricultural operations.
Women of ancient Rome could become slaves in various ways. Occasionally a
seller of a female slave attached a ‘Ne Serva’ clause to the ownership papers;
this meant she could not be prostituted and if any owner in the future used her
as a prostitute she could be freed. If the man of the house went too far into
debt, he sold himself into slavery with the rest of his family in order to pay off
their debts. Slaves belonging to farmers of people of the working class were
expected to do everything. Female slaves were expected to appear orderly and
obedient. Women in slavery were expected to have union with another male
slave, slaves could not legally marry but masters with large holdings permitted
some to pair up.
Slave labour was used in all areas of Roman life except public office. In
addition, slaves were often mixed with free labour as employers used whatever
human resources were available and necessary to get a job done. If one could
not find enough slaves or skills were needed which only paid labour could
provide, then labourers and slaves would work together. In the agricultural
sector such a mix of labour was particularly common as the work was seasonal
so that at harvest time paid labour was brought in to supplement the slave staff
because to maintain such an extended work force year-round was not
economically viable.
Slaves, then, were employed by private individuals or the state and used in
agriculture especially the grain, vine and olive sectors, in mines especially for
gold and silver, manufacturing industries, transportation, education where they
brought their specialist knowledge of such topics as philosophy and medicine
to the Roman world, the military principally as baggage porters and camp
assistants, the service industries from food to accounting, in the private home,
in the construction industry, on road-building projects, in public baths, and
even to perform tasks in certain cult rituals.
The lot of agricultural slaves i.e., vincti was probably one of the worst as they
were usually housed in barrack buildings in poor, prison-like conditions and
often kept in chains. Pompeii has revealed such work gangs chained together in
death as they were in life. Other skeletal remains from Pompeii have also
revealed the chronic arthritis and distortion of limbs that could only have been
produced by extreme overwork and malnutrition.
conclusion
The entire Roman state and cultural apparatus was, then, built on the
exploitation of one part of the population to provide for the other part.
Regarded as no more than a commodity, any good treatment a slave received
was largely only to preserve their value as a worker and as an asset in the case
of future sale. No doubt, some slave owners were more generous than others
and there was, in a few cases, the possibility of earning one's freedom but the
harsh day-to-day reality of the vast majority of Roman slaves was certainly an
unenviable one.