Empire: World History - 50. Rome: A Slave Society

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Was Rome a slave society? Did Caesar really take a million Gauls captive? And what is the real story of Spartacus? Listen as William and Anita are joined by Mary Beard to discuss slavery in Ancient Rome. ***Tickets for the live show can be bought at the following link from 9am on Wednesday 10th May: https://robomagiclive.com/empire-podcast-live/. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire. I am William Dalrymple. What? This is completely puzzling. I don't, yeah. I mean, the thing is, listen, Rome, Spartacus, you were meant to come in with, I am William Durham poor. And then I would have said, no, I am William Durham poor.

You're just muffed up. This is far too complicated for the beginning of these series. Thank you so much. I just thought you'd lean in, but it's okay. Listen, the reason, there was method in this madness. It's because we are discussing slavery during the time of the Romans. And with us, we have the most famous, most wonderful scholar of ancient Rome. Mary Beard is with a former professor of classics at Cambridge,

author of so many books, including the one that everybody had. as everyone has on their bookshop. I have it in my hands. SPQR, a history of ancient reign, which I gave a rave review when it came out to the New Statesman. Did it change your life that review? Was it? Was it the turning point in your career?

She's totally forgotten. I wrote it. I'm very unflagged. I thought it would be emblazoned all over her brain, back of her paperback. I have a terrible, terrible confession that I can't remember it. I'm actually going to have to send it to you afterwards. I'm so upset by this.

Anyway, I'm delighted to see you. Can we start with something? I think that sounds probably basic and probably a little stupid. I'd like to know. Can we legitimately just say very simply that Rome was a slave society? Yes, I think it's one culture that you can say absolutely, undoubtedly, Rome is a slave society. And you see that in two ways, I think. One is Roman production, Roman labour, Roman agriculture, Roman everything was dependent on slaves. You give in your book an extraordinary high figure for the number of slaves in Italy. You say in the middle of the first century BCE, slaves could make up perhaps 20% of the population

between 1.5 and 2 million slaves. Yeah, yeah. All these figures inevitably, they're guesswork because we don't actually have a census of slaves. But I think there is no doubt putting together bits of evidence that the Romans give us about the sort of numbers we're dealing with, you know, households with 400 slaves in the city of Rome, and thinking about the logic of Roman slavery and where the slaves come from and the idea of slavery as being or slaves being really a produce of conquest, that sort of number is really plausible. It's a kind of, it is the standard estimate. I think, though, what you do

when you say is Roma slave society? I think that most economic historians would go the route. I've just gone and they'd say, yes, because the Roman economy, Roman production, etc., was dependent on slave labour. I kind of think of it both like that, but also in a different way, that slavery and the language of slavery

and the imagery of slavery pervades the Roman world, it pervades literature, social interactions and so forth. If you go, for example, to Roman love poetry of the first century BC, first century AD, and you think about how the lover conceives of his relationship with his beloved, he conceives it often, he turns it into the language of slavery. It's the servitium, the slavery of love.

If you look at how rather posh Roman senators write letters to the Roman emperor, they regularly address him as dominus, which is the same word that you'd use for the master of a slave. Now, there's a bit of doubt about exactly how enslaved they felt. But you see that slavery just gets into all the cracks of Roman culture. provides a way of thinking about hierarchy, et cetera. And for me, it's kind of that sort of thing, as well as the economic dependence on slavery, that makes you say undeniably, Rome is one of the major slave societies the world has ever seen. Mary, in our last episode, we had David Wendro,

making the point that not all societies in the ancient world were slave societies, that some chose not to have slaves. Some were quite egalitarian. Some were not even particularly hierarchical. By the time we're talking about the early days of Rome, the early century BC, are there any egalitarian societies around in the Mediterranean at all? Or is everybody part of a slave world at this point? I wish that I had the optimism that Wengro has.

I think what you find in the ancient Mediterranean world, world and its vicinity. I'm not here talking about sub-Saharan Africa. What you find is, I think, no society that doesn't have some form of unfree labor, right? Now, whether you call that then a slave society, I think, is a very different question, and most people don't. I mean, yeah, I mean, is it a byproduct of conquest that, you know, unless if you have a power that is going to take over and either they can scorch the earth and kill everybody, or they say there's utility in taking these people and using them. I think in Rome's case, it's a byproduct of conquest. Before Rome was puzzlingly successful in conquering the Mediterranean world, starting from the third century BC,

they had unfree labour, that's for sure, but nobody would call them a slave society. The kind of unfree labour that they had was, I suppose, what is the standard form of unfree labor in most early societies, which is debt bondage. Those who fall into debt literally lose their freedom and they have to work short-term, long-term, for their creditor. They lose their right of self-determination. Which survives, of course, today in various parts of South Asia. I've written about about debt bonds in Pakistan and Sindh and so on. People fettered still. Yeah.

The idea that we don't have this kind of thing in the modern world is just wrong. It depends where you choose to use the word slavery and where you are more paraphrastic. So I think that empire is absolutely crucial. Conquest is crucial in this. And you get a change in Rome from the late. fourth, early third, particularly through into the time just before Julius Caesar, let's say, middle of the first century BC, when what you see is Rome becoming a slave society in the strong sense of the word. I've often wondered whether there's sort of a fiendish central

in early empires, which says, look, the only way that we can swallow this, that we're going to subjugate human beings who are like us, who have mothers and fathers and children, is that we have to think they are less than us. And is that the only way that we're, any writing that exists from this early Roman period where the dehumanisation of the Concord is expressed or discussed that justifies treating other human beings in this way? Yeah. I mean, I think that's in part true. I think that's in part true. And of course, you know, it's happening in different ways. You know, there are plenty examples you can find of Romans losing in some territorial dispute and themselves being enslaved. So, I mean, I think we have to get over the

the notion that somehow the Romans here were uniquely bad, they were uniquely successful in playing this particular game, but they weren't the only people playing that game. You often hear about the number of captives that Julius Caesar brings back from his Gallic wars. Can you put a number on them to give an idea of the sort of vast numbers of slaves? Over the first century BC, we're dealing with millions, right? When you add all the foreign conquests together. This is a huge influx. It's one of the biggest movements of population in the ancient world, probably the biggest movement of population in the ancient world that we have.

So how does that work? I mean, if you're Julius Caesar and you've just won a battle and you've surrounded thousands of goals on a hilltop and you have a choice of slaughtering them or enslaving them, how do you go about, I mean, do you come with thousands of fetters and what happens? $64,000 question, Willie. I mean, you know, what is the mechanism for getting these captives from the site of battle or the besieged town or whatever to Rome? Now, some of it, I think, has to be. Just they are loaded up on ships. But as you say, where does the security come from? You know,

these are the kind of big mysteries we have. There's the island of Delos. for a long time was a major slave trading centre. I mean, people now go and very much enjoy the sun and the sanctuary of the island of Delos. It's a glorious place for a bit of your holiday. It's one of the most kind of tainted places in the whole of the ancient world in terms of what actually happened there. It was the centre of the trade of human trafficking. But as soon as you start to push hard and say, well, so how did this guy or this woman get from X to Y and who was in charge of it?

And can we actually see that process? We only get the tiniest of glimpses. I mean, sometimes terror is a great power in rounding up people and keeping them well behaved and making them march hundreds of miles. And even in modern warfare, rape is often used as that instrument of terror. How much was it pivotal in. going into a place like Gaul and rounding up thousands of people? We assume so. There are some examples of rape in warfare that you can point to in the ancient Roman world. You often find them because they are related anecdotally to a woman bravely objecting. So you see it through unusual examples of this.

Such as Budaqa and her daughters. Yeah, exactly. I think it's the likelihood is that rape has been part of warfare from Bosnia and Ukraine right back as far as we can see any traces of warfare in the modern term or even just raiding. I mean, what do you raid? You raid and rape the women. Is it just the women or is it boys too? Because that's often associated with the early Roman Empire. It is probably boys too.

We hear much more about it in relation to women. And you get the kind of, in a sense, the bravery of the woman who stands up despite her sex to that imposition of power and exploitation. But it's, in ancient warfare was truly horrible, I think. And all the nasty bits that you can think of in modern warfare, you would find there, you know, minus the artillery. and with the added extra of the mass transplantation of peoples, who, as I say, it's not, you know, the Romans weren't uniquely wicked in devising that. That was, you find that in earlier, Greek warfare, and you find the Romans, you know, suffering that. You see it in those extraordinary Assyrian stele from Nimrod and Nineveh in the British Museum,

the whole populations of Lachmish and Elam. and all these early states being marched off to slavery with their goats, with their goods. And do you find occasional Roman literary references to people traveling, sort of exploring, and they come across Romans who had been enslaved or the sons of Romans who had been enslaved in previous conflicts. So I think it's, you know, warfare and slavery go hand in hand in the ancient world. And I think that if you wanted to say, if you look at what we would call the slave societies of the classical, the ancient Mediterranean world, as against those in which there were non-free people, and that's probably all of them, the slave societies become slave societies largely on the profits of warfare and empire. Persia being a very similar example, but where large numbers of Roman slaves are also rounded up and working on dam projects, including Roman emperors. Exactly, but those wonderful pictures of what happens to Roman emperors when they outreach themselves in the east.

End up and Nakhshirastam bowed down before Shapo. That's right. But the Athenian empire, you know, we tend to forget that the Athenian democracy that we so admire was also an Athenian empire, which we're a bit less comfortable with. And Athens was another culture in which imperial expansion led to essentially a slave society. But I think the thing that I want to add here, because it is important in giving another side to this. I think it's in some ways a more uncomfortable side. actually than what we've just mentioned, is that what is clear if you look at the development of these cultures in terms of political rights and developing questions and definitions about what is it to be a citizen, for example. I think you see it very clearly in ancient Athens, but you also see it in Rome that the more you define the privileges of a citizen, the more you create an excluded group of often the slave and the non-free. Right.

So, you know, in 4th century BC Rome, for example, just before the imperial expansion is really getting going, what they do is they abolish debt bondage for citizens. So there's a wedge gets put in between the citizen and at the other extreme, and there are people in the middle. the slave. So the citizen cannot become a slave in their home country. So as I say, this is kind of, and I find this in some way sort of as uncomfortable as the imperial violence, that what it does is it connects, I think, the growth and the definition of slavery with the growth and definition

of the free citizen. And we usually see the free citizen. And we usually see the free citizen side of that. We think, yes, in these ancient cultures, what we see growing up is this idea of the man, you know, never quite woman, but the man with citizen rights, the rights in law, protection in law. And that's all true, but it's always done, or almost always done, at the expense of defining, on the other hand, those people who don't have that. I think that's so interesting. But there's also sort of, you know, the definition of the citizen versus not. But there's also the redefinition of the captured people where they lose everything that makes them who they were to that point, even their names. I mean, just talk us

through the processing of this very successful machine. Yes, what do you lose? If you choose not to be crucified and killed and choose to go into slavery, what happens to you? Let's say we're a Gaul newly brought by Julius Caesar to Rome as a captive after the conquest of Gaul. Sure we start at the worst side of this, because there are many different versions of what might happen to you. I think the version which is both the nastiest and which, again, we don't tend to see is the use of mass kind of gangs, chained gangs of slaves who are working in the worst kind of proto-industrial complexes of the Roman. world. I remember in the Nero exhibition at the British Museum two years ago, there was that extraordinary display of slave fetters for exactly those sort of gangs, weren't they? From Anglesea working in the mines. And so if you say who by and large works the mines or is

the quarries. Mons Porphyritus and Egypt are the slaves hacking away all those nice sarcophagi. Mass slavery. And although I think it's quite hard to construct the precise route that they take to get there, those big the mines in Spain, for example, would be a good case from where most of the metal for Roman coinage came from. In some ways, that's a state operation and it's mass transport, low life expectancy. And they're anonymous. I mean, I think that there's a kind of question about whether the slaves working in those kind of mass operations, do they have names? Maybe ultimately that they lose everything right down to the marker of their individuality. Most slaves have some change of name that happens.

But I think that if we were to think of the bottom line at the bottom, it might well be that you are simply, you become nobody. Yeah. And if you went up a very little bit, you would come to big agricultural estates, which are reliant on large, manual, large forces of manual labour, probably mostly in this case, but not entirely private enterprise, mass working of the land of Italy and elsewhere. and there have been some excavations in big Italian sort of farmhouses, bailiffs houses and residences where you also find chains. And it looks as if there is not just an enslaved, but an enchained population.

Now, I think what's kind of very striking and what often skews people's image of Roman slavery is that it's quite hard to get a grip on those. We don't see, you know, part of the problem is that we don't see them. They were never visible. They were always nobody's. And they've left almost no record in archaeology. And so, in a sense, their lack of identity and their lack of personhood in their lives is mirrored by the fact we only very rarely seen them. And there's a kind of, again, this very uncomfortable bit of archaeological debate, which often happens.

when you find chains and fetters, like those ones in the Nero exhibition from Anglesea, there's almost always an archaeological argument about whether those are fetters for animals or whether they're fetters for slaves. And at a certain point, you want to say, well, that's the point. That's the problem. Right there is the problem. That is the point. You can't tell, right? And I think that that's, you know, that really is the nastiest bottom line, but very hard to, very hard to kind of get any detail about. The fact that they trod so lightly as to be invisible is just a horror upon a horror. But what we do have, we have vestiges of Roman law. And, you know, when we think of Rome, we think of law, we think of all of those things.

Was there anything in law or statutes? We don't think of democracy very much, do we? Well, the early thing of individuals having a voice in their own. future. I think absolutely protein democracy. It's not perfect. It's not at all perfect. But is there anything in those laws that stipulates the treatment that somebody must be able to meet out to a slave? Or was anything possible? You'd kill them. You could beat them. You could, you know, whatever. In the codification of Roman law, whether this had much effect on the ground is quite another matter. There are limits to what you can do to a slave. You cannot kill a slave and just say,

that was my property. And certainly you can't kill someone else's slave because that's theft. So there are limits, but most of what Roman law does is much more puzzles about the very nature of what could or should happen. You know, I don't, you know, how does a slave say, excuse me, that's against the law, actually. You're not allowed to do that. And there are a when certainly at the very top of Roman society, you see that powerlessness, that inability ever to fight back, no matter what the injustice, you see that turned into what for Rome is a kind of a story. And I think one of the best ones is told of the Emperor Hadrian, who gets very angry with a slave. And he stabs the slaves, I am.

out with his pen. And because Hadrian, as we know, is a nice guy, a bit later he thinks, oh, God, I feel so guilty. You know, talk about the privilege of the privilege. And he calls the slave back in and says, I'm terribly sorry. Can I get you a present? What would you like? And the slave turns around to him and says, my eye back, please. Wow, good on the slave.

And that somehow kind of gets written into. kind of the Roman imaginary, because it's probably a made-up story, about powerlessness, but also the slave seeing what the issue is, Hadrian feeling bad about it, but he's done it anyway. So you find quite a lot of that sense of a recognition of humanity at some level by the master, but so overlaid by power and exploitation that that only ever very rare, actually peaks through. But I think that, I mean, what's quite frustrating teaching students about this is that in the modern accounts of slavery, because those mass exploited industrial and agricultural slaves

are very rarely seen, what we focus on is the domestic slave. of the elite in the city of Rome. And we do this kind of merging between the domestic slavery of first century Rome and the nice kind of master of an English country house and his faithful retainers. So the bit that we see best, we sanitise. It's Downton Abbey in Toges, Mary, is what it is.

It is downtown abbey in Togas. That's what it is. That's what it is. In your book, Mary, you have a wonderful section on Cicero's librarian slaves, and he loses not one but two Greek librarians. Both of whom abscond, you thought that being Cicero's librarian on the relative scale of Roman slavery was probably one of the better perks. But two of them run off.

Tell us about those. Well, they're always being sent away by Cicero to kind of escort his wayward son or nephew or mates, you know, between Rome and some point east. Silicia. Yes, silicea. That's right when Cicero is the governor. And what happens is, as you say, really, on two occasions, the slave escort just buggers off.

Now, I think that what you said is a nice example of the way you can break through some of the euphemizing of this. Because, you know, as you say, you think, well, there's not much which could be cushier as a number for a slave than Cicero's slave librarian. They've even got names. One is Dionysius and the other is Chrysippus. Yes, that's right. Which sounds like they could be original names. Are those not Greek names? Yeah.

They say could be original names. It's very hard to know whether a slave is an original name or not an original name. When a slave is called whipping boy, you assume it's a name that's being used. given to him. Wow. So there were really names like that because we're reading a children's book. I've got a seven-year-old at the moment. It's sort of, you know, the seven-year-old's guide to ancient Rome. And the servants have names like put upon and things like that, but they were legitimate. Those were names were absolutely. Mastika. You might call one Mastika. You don't mean we're a whipping boy. Other times they have Greek names and you can say, all right, so they come from the Greek

East, and this might be their original name, you can't tell, because there's also a chance that you get a slave from, let's say, Gaw, you've been mentioning Gould. And somehow, the language of slavery is so bound up with the East that you call your Gaelic slave, Chrysippus, or something, because that's what slaves are called. It's very, very, very hard to know. But it is perhaps not entirely accidental, that. that Ciceroes, two librarians are both Greeks? They're educated. They know the classics, presumably.

I'm going to now sound like an appalling Roman slave owner. Forgive me. But if you want a good librarian for your excellent library in Rome, I don't think you choose a German in the first century in BC. Sorry, everybody. No, no, that's okay. The letters will come flooding in, but that's fine. Yes, I think.

But from Germans. The Rhine Liberation Front will be honest. Your point is that if even those guys want to scarper, and maybe they thought they could get back to where they came from, that's possible. But maybe they just kind of underground, take a new name. And Dionysus does get away, doesn't it? He does make it off back and disappear into his people. No, it does.

And he's seen some, you know, he shows up some time later. And so you think... That is something that punctures the slightly cozy view of, oh, what do you do? I'm Cicero's librarian. We're going to go to a break in a moment. And when we come back, we're going to talk about resistance, slave resistance. But just one thing, before we get to the break, you have a wonderful story. I mean, I say wonderful, but it's awful. And again, I'm falling back on my mother of a small child thing. But of Romans giving away, you know, we do party shavers and gift bags at the end of a party for a small child. I mean, the giving. a way of slaves as a party favour is a thing that I read and I was so shocked about that. That is actually for me, it's in that kind of real life example that I find it easier to understand the awfulness of this than in the horror that's so hard to take in. And I've just been finishing a book about what Roman emperors get up to.

And it's very much then at the top of the Roman social hierarchy. but one thing that happens is at the end of a party and I think very few modern historians looking at this are shocked enough by this, you find that you get given the slave that were serving you as a present and you take him home or sometimes he's conveniently delivered to you. You know, once you've got home and somebody knocks on the door

and says, oh, the emperor wanted to send you this present. Now, what I find that absolutely, shocking. And I know that it doesn't have the physical cruelty that we have to associate with what's going on in industry. The idea that you're a slave, you perhaps lived with the household for several years, you perhaps have a partner because slaves do appear to have partners. They have kids. And suddenly at the end of the dinner at which you've been serving, it's as if you were wrapped up in a party bag and sent off with somebody else. Yeah, it is exactly like that.

And I think, oh my goodness me. And I came across another one recently, who was a slave of a Roman emperor. And he had a quite complicated name. And I was quite shocked by the way people who wrote about him in modern history described it because he had two names and the last one was Herodianus. All the comments on this said, oh, that probably means he was given to the emperor as a present from King Herod. And you think, given to the emperor, okay, right? So there you are and you say, oh, would you have a present?

He has this rather lovely slave. And it's at that point of the commodification that I kind of really see it right up close. That's when I feel it. And obviously you deplore the exploitation, the looting, the violence and all that. But we're used to deploring that. I think what's very hard, but very just in your face is the idea of a human being as a birthday present. I mean, blimey. Exactly.

And it is exactly as you put it. It's like, where's mummy? You know, the children. Where's mommy? Oh, she's a gift. She's been sent over to somewhere else, Salisio now. Listen, we're going to take a break. Join us after the break where we come back with the gag that I tried to start this program off with.

Spartacus the most famous. but slave resistances. Back soon. Welcome back. We were talking before the break about Cicero's house slaves and his absconding librarians, his ability to lose Greek librarians who both successfully disappear off. But there's a third member of his household who we have a little biography, a little life for, who is this character Tiro.

and he appears not just in in in in Cicero's own letters but in some of his family's letters doesn't you and and that again looks rather more like kind of 18th century sort of favorite old retainer rather than the very unfamiliar figure of sort of crucified Gauls lining the Appian way and you know Taro has a has the big part in Robert Harris's trilogy about Cicero as being the person through whose eyes we see Cicero because he edits the letters at the end of the day doesn't he actually gets the power to determine what bit of Cicero we have. And some people have said that if he should have been stronger on the editing Cicero's jokes,

as he's put too many bad ones in, and tearing its blame. That is true. And of course, that raises the issue. And another way that's very difficult to understand Roman slavery is that, you know, I've gone on about the industrial use of slaves, and that's absolutely true. But many jobs in the Roman world that were done by slaves are jobs that we think of as rather high status. I mean, so there's librarians, doctors, personal aides, you know, PAs. So it's very hard to map that onto our own assumption about power influence and status.

Is that in sense closer to the Islamic model whereby slaves could rise to be very senior figures in state and could rise to generals and indeed to be sultans? And slaves were extremely important in the Roman imperial administration. And they were particularly important when they had been freed and become an ex-slave. And that is one of the things that happens to Taro. He's in the conventional view. He's a faithful retainer. And then he is given his freedom by Cicero.

Talk more about freedom, freeing slaves, because that is something that not all empires, that dehumanise ever get to doing. But the Romans do do this. The Romans do it in massive numbers, probably not in the minds, but in terms of domestic slavery or administrative slavery. They do it in vast numbers. And other cultures in the ancient world thought they were a bit odd at this, particularly because not only do they free slaves,

but if the slave is freed by a Roman citizen, the slave becomes a Roman citizen. So they gain almost all citizenly rights and their children gain all of them. Whereas you might be freed as a slave in Athens, in ancient Athens, but you just became a free not citizen. A free not citizen. Right.

In Rome, you become a citizen member of the community. And what is really extraordinary about Rome is not just the number of slaves, but then if you're doing a lot of freedom, manumission, they call it, what you're getting is an enormous number of the Roman population, certainly in the city of Rome, are descended from slaves. So there's another way that slavery has absolutely got its tentacles throughout Roman society. What happens to Tyro when he's freed? Well, he outlived Cicero. The freed slave, at least in a domestic or administrative context,

often goes on working in much the same job that they did when they were a slave. And Tara is reputed to have edited Cicero's letters. He goes on as a kind of author-come editor. He's supposed to have invented shorthand, his another strings to his bow. And so everything looks like he is actually part of the sobberlis. elite world as an ex-slave that he was when he was a slave. I've just been writing about the India-Roman trade along the Red Sea.

I mean, I'm in the New York Review. In the New York Review. And one of the people I came across in that is the freedman of a Roman wine exporter called Particius. And the Particius are from the Brutzi. And they're interesting because their crates of their wine have turned up all over the place. There have been some sunk in the Mediterranean. And this freedman scratches his name in a rock shelter in Egypt on the way to the Red Sea.

And so you get the impression this is actually someone who's leading a trail of camels, is being entrusted with a hugely valuable merchandise by his former master. It's very puzzling this category of freedmen because there's hundreds of them, thousands. We don't really understand why the Romans freed so many slaves. People often used to say it was because they were quite nice, and they said, okay, darling, you can have your freedom. I'm afraid I can think of rather nastier commodification reasons. I mean, if you think of slaves of commodities, what do you do when they get old? You get a new model. And I think that although it often gets dressed up, as it does with Cicero and Tyro as being about affection and probably that occasionally was true,

it's also hard-headed economic rationality. When a slave's old, he or she is more expensive to keep than the work they do. It's like a fridge. With Taru, you get Cicero's brother writing and sort of asking about his health and we're so worried that you've been ill and all that sort of thing. But you also get a sort of bad joke at one point where he says, if you didn't reply to my letter, I thought I'd thrash you. I wrote a whole article about that because when I discovered that, you know, again, when you start to look at this and you start to see, so what did you feel like getting that if you were Tyro? You know, you've just been freed, but they can still make jokes about thrashing you. And of course, what happens with the general freedman class is that Romans free these slaves in, you know, really in enormous numbers. But then they can continue. to be deeply snobbish about them.

And so one of the quotes, I've got to make a bad joke now, one of the whipping boys of Roman culture is the rich freed slave, the Nouveau-Rish, who gets above himself and has too much power. And so slavery is there, I think, kind of disrupting the Roman social hierarchy because ex-slave is kind of a mobile within a would-be static, system. And they're never good enough. They're never aristocratic enough. They're never, yeah. I think that's, can I invoke the Kirk Douglas card at this point? You've been wanting to invoke this. Look, if I were a Roman slave, I often like to think that I would have been one of those people

chasing after Kirk going, I'll come, I'll fight. What were the extent of the Uprising? I can see you in that role in the trial. I don't follow him. Yeah, no, really. Yeah. I'm going to be a party pooper here only time. I'm sorry, but Mary. But the image of the slave in the modern imagination is the slave rebel and it's Spartacus. Now, what is absolutely extraordinary, given all we've been saying about the exploitation, the cruelty, etc., etc. What is extraordinary is that there are so few slave rebellions, you know, in anything which is more than just a kind of handful. And that's always been one of the puzzles.

If this is so awful, why don't the slaves rebel? And I think that there's many answers to thou. One is actually horribly, I think, that there was probably a sense in which they resented their own slavery, but there was no ideological push against slavery itself. You can't find them people who want to abolish the slave system. You can find people who don't want to be slaves, but that's a bit different. And that, I think, takes the edge of it a little bit. But I think more, it's the question of who the slaves are and how they're held.

I mean, they come from many places. I've been talking vaguely about the East, but they come from different countries with different languages. And let's say they end up in Rome. They don't have a common culture. They don't perhaps can barely communicate in anything but Latin. And so they have no kind of leadership or structure that they can call their own and from which they can launch a rebellion. And what is really interesting is that there are three main slave rebellions, too, we

don't usually talk about, but they happen in Sicily a bit earlier than Spartacus. And those were rebellions of people who had been newly enslaved and all from one place. And so they, in a sense, claimed a sense of identity. There was a coherence. Spartacus, what's crucial is that they're in a gladiatorial training camp. And so that, in a sense, gives them a coherence and weapons. Yeah, they're fighting. They're fighting and they're brothers.

But when they first break out, they haven't got weapons. They take carving knives. No, though they have to take them, but, but, you know, they know what's what. They know about organisation. They know about fighting. And they have, presumably within a gladiatorial training camp, some sort of hierarchy. So Spartacus can take control. Even so, it looks like all they want to do is get back home.

Well, perfectly reasonable. Maybe that's what I would want to do. Mary, start at the beginning of the story. Who is Spartacus? Thracian, a Bulgarian in modern? I am spous. We know rather less than what Kirk Douglas would have liked us to imagine. He's probably a Thracian.

He's a slave. He is enslaved and made into, turned into a gladiator because most gladiators at this point, first century BC, most gladiators were slaves. And his wife, his pre-slavery wife was a priestess? He appears to have, this is where we. I think it all gets a bit shadowy. It's a good story, though. Well, of course, you would think that, Willie.

He's got this pre-slavery wife. And of course, as with the Sicilian rebellions, one of the things that often gets mobilised here is a kind of religious dynamic. You know, that one of the things, you know, a sense of divine power can help you get human power. And they break out of a gladiatorial training camp. They manage to defeat.

some of the first forces the Romans sent to them. With kitchen tools, is that right? I mean, with like knives and forks and things? They break out with knives and forks and then they go to the armoury and arm themselves. They catch more, right? They catch more, right? But some certainly, I think, get away because they're moving. They're wanting to get to the coast and get up back home from wherever they came.

But in the end, the Romans send a rather more efficient fighting force. And they totally defeat the slaves. But hang on, we've run through without mentioning the three great victories of Spartacus. He defeats a militia. I said he scored a couple of victories against the first forces. Stop him. There's one wonderful story where he goes down a cliff. He goes up Mount Vesuvius and he makes vines, ropes out of vines.

I buy all this stuff. You bought all this. And I was trying to kind of slightly deflect. you from this, because one of the reasons that we have these vivid details. I'm sailing down Mount Vesuvius on vines. I love it. Supposedly vivid details, is that actually, if we go back to these certainties and uncertainties about the Roman hierarchy, the one thing the Romans do not want to be defeated by is a load of slaves.

Sure. And so the embellishment of the bravery and the glamour of Spartacus, is absolutely crucial to the Romans' narrative of the eventual victory against Spartacus. It has to be dangerous, but sort of inspired. Now, underneath all this, there is more than meets the eye, and it's very hard to see it. But I think, rather than go for the vines... Well, I'm very sad to lose my vice. Well, it might have happened.

It might not have. If I wanted to add a bit to your story, I would say, say it looks as if some of the local people peasants living around about, because this is all happening in South Italy, it looks as if they join Spartacus. Now, if they do, that suggests, again, something we almost never see, which is that some of those at the bottom of the Roman social heap actually feel that they have. have something in common with the slaves. Now, normally, everything the Romans write tries to make that impossible for us to think. But on this case, we begin to see that Spartacus and the local

peasants might feel they can make a common cause. That is crucial. Well, I mean, that's really interesting. What we haven't talked about is the Roman poor. You know, we've just assumed, we've assumed that everyone's got, you know, these sort of lavish togas and lots of slaves. And that can't be right. Yeah, and libraries and librarians. Not everyone must have had that. Slaves go right through Roman society. I mean, I think, you know, it's generally well recognised.

If you're a carpenter in a family business, you might have one slave. But what we never think about, again, because they leave no trace, is the destitute. You know, occasionally some wonderful paintings from Pompeii, which shows a beggar. And we read in Roman law codes about people who are camping out in tombs. And you think actually, Roman society works horribly but efficiently for everybody who's part of the nexus of obligations that it involves right down to the slaves. If you're outside of that, you die, guys. And the destitute free are, I mean, it's hard to know here when you say who's in the worst position. but they are in a position no better than a slave.

And actually, nobody's interested in keeping them alive, so they die. One of the crucial villains in the Spartacus story, if you believe any of it, is the pirates. We even get pirates turning up. He's trying to get to Sicily. Is any of this true? He tries to get to Sicily, and they, having been defeated, and they're trying to cross over and join up with slaves there, and the pirates run off with their money. Do you buy this story?

I love this story. Yes. you're very skeptical, Mary. I can see this look of... You're going to make him cry, Mary. Mary, look at his little face. I mean, honestly, look at his little face. I'll tell you.

Okay, you can have it. But you have to see that pirates are there right in the middle of the slave story always. Because actually, we started off by saying, well, how do these people get transported? Across the Roman world. Well, pirates is probably a very misleading name. You know, these are. Militia, private militia in boats. And probably whether or not they're letting down Spartacus or telling him a thib or two,

slavery is deeply embedded and the provision of slaves is deeply embedded with what the Romans are we called pirates. And we then imagine a jolly roger. And that's quite wrong. This is Somalian pirates, not Captain Pugwash. Got you. Got you. Okay, but that very iconic moment in the film where that,

thousands of slaves are crucified on the Via Appia. Did that happen? Did it happen? Yes, I'm afraid. Oh, Mary, that was the one where you should have said no. Poor old Willie. I'm undermining. All the heroic stories are not true and the crucifixion is true. It's very, very likely that Crassus crucifies the commander.

How many? How many? We don't know. But hundreds, possibly hundreds. and it is a display 6,000 is the figure that's I said hundreds I said I said I don't know why you're disappointed with that

that's the only cheerful demystification I've been quite pleased by it It's an appalling display of Roman power but I want to tell you look because I know we've got to finish very soon but it wouldn't be right to finish without saying look you know Willie can kind of enjoy the heroics of Spartacus

It's all he likes. That's absolutely fine. Much of it not true. There aren't many rebellions. Does that mean that the slaves are just compliant? Do we imagine that everybody is just slightly judged, just saying, yes, I don't think we do. Spartacus is probably encourages to look in the wrong direction. We want the big rebellion. We want the glamorous hero. Actually, what's going on is like Cicero's librarians. They're just scarpering. Yeah. But an awful lot of them. You know, they're doing the ancient equivalent of spitting in the master's suit. Oh, I'm so glad. I'm so pleased. They're pilfering.

They're, you know, it's resistance. What slaves are doing constantly. And Romans know this because they're worried about their slaves. You know, the Romans don't sit there thinking we are naturally in command. Some of them try to think that that's the idea. but at the same time they're simultaneously anxious about their vulnerability to slaves. And that's because they're at slaves' mercy in minor ways. And so it's a real fault line at the heart of Roman culture.

When you say, though, at their mercy, something that struck me is that they would be the absolutely best spies. You know, families were against each other. That would be the currency more than, you know, they might leave me, and I won't have a clean toga tomorrow. Is that the case? Yes, no, that's right. It spies, it is, well, it's murder, actually.

It's spies, it's listening, slaves who listen from the rafters above the room to their master, who is plotting to overthrow the emperor and then dobb him in for room. It's the kind of sense that you're constantly watched. And there's a wonderful story from the first century AD about a proposal. And I think this gives everything away, really. Somebody comes up with a proposal that slaves should wear uniform, right? Because you go into the Roman street and you can't really tell a slave from anyone else. You know, slaves, you know, slaves are indistinguishable from the general populace.

Shouldn't we know who they were? That proposal is apparently rejected because, If we put slaves in uniform, they would know how many of them there were. Oh, that's so, isn't that brilliant? Isn't that? I mean, of course they would. Yes, yeah. Because they don't know who to trust or they don't know who is of them either.

That's right. That's right. There are so many, there's so many marvellous, marvelous things that you have written. The other one, and I think we're sort of circling back somewhat, but is this idea of the beneficent emperor who does these things which, you know, they could be nice or they could be just really shitty. I'm thinking of like Claudius, who takes all his sick slaves, he thought, okay, if you're sick, I'm going to put you on this island. If you get better, you're free. Then if you die, you die. It's not my problem. It's the capriciousness of it that I think is just so extraordinary. And I think also, I mean,

I don't want to defend Rome here because that'll be a bit of a losing game. But I think that the fact that you get all these stories about the slaves who don't do what they're told, et cetera, et cetera. I think there's a kind of culture at some level of recognition about the exploitation, the hierarchy, you know, that it is a power. You know, slavery is a powder keg. Now, it doesn't explode in the Spartacus-like way very often. But domestically, on the farm, I expect it's exploding all the time.

Yeah. We're going to conclude, and I've just loved our time with you, we both have. But this is the most important question I have for you today. And I want you to think about it really, very carefully. And I think a lot of people would judge you for your answer. Kirk Douglas or Russell Crowe. Oh, it has to be Russell Crow. Yes, I'm afraid it has to be Russell Crow. I've watched, I've taken the culture of Spartacus. I'm interested. I think. in some ways it's a great movie.

I went to Gladiator and I wet bucket. You did? I don't know whether I'm proud or ashamed to say that. I wet buckets. No, you can have it. I mean, I just think less of you, but it's okay.

It's all right, Mary. I loved you enough that I could afford to lose a bit of their love. I can't ditch Russell Crow off to that. You'll be so happy to hear this. Anyway, Mary Bit is an absolute delight to have you. You've been so interesting and so entertaining. you so much. Mary, you are very, very sweet. We're so grateful. Thank you as ever. Thank you both. Until the next time, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. A goodbye from me,

William Duremberg.