In Our Time - Roman Slavery

Episode Date: April 5, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of slavery in the Roman world, from its early conquests to the fall of the Western Empire. The system became so entrenched that no-one appeared to question it, following Aristotle's view that slavery was a natural state. Whole populations could be marched into slavery after military conquests, and the freedom that Roman citizens prized for themselves, even in poverty, was partly defined by how it contrasted with enslavement. Slaves could be killed or tortured with impunity, yet they could be given great responsibility and, once freed, use their contacts to earn fortunes. The relationship between slave and master informed early Christian ideas of how the faithful related to God, informing debate for centuries.WithNeville Morley Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of ExeterUlrike Roth Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of EdinburghAndMyles Lavan Senior lecturer in Ancient History at the University of St AndrewsProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, for a civilisation that valued liberty so highly, Romans had a spectacular number of slaves. They captured them in their hundreds of thousands after victories.

They bred them, and they bought them without compunction. And to their minds, why shouldn't they? Aristotle thought slavery was a natural state and poorer Romans took comfort that no matter how bad their lot might be at least they weren't slaves. Yet some Romans also gave the supposedly inferior people the greatest responsibilities, trusting slaves to be loyal when citizens were not

and using them to raise their children. Sometimes they would set them free to have slaves of their own. The system persisted over a millennium informing the ideas that Roman Christians had about their relationship with God. With me to discuss Roman slavery are Neville Morley, Professor of Classics in Ancient History at the University of Exeter,

Ulrich O'Rot, senior lecturer in ancient history at the University of Edinburgh, and Miles Laughan, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. Neville Morley, how entrenched was slavery around the Mediterranean when the Romans start to increase their empire? There's certainly a lot of slavery. The Romans don't invent slavery. We can look back in sources for hundreds of years, back to Homer, back to Near Eastern texts, and find slaves.

What's different with the Romans is the number of slaves and the fact that they seem to use slaves in every part of their society and economy. So generally in earlier societies, we find slaves as personal attendance, domestic service, that sort of thing. and helping out on the farm or as part of a workshop. They're found everywhere in some places, in classical Athens, for example, they are found in substantial numbers, particularly down the silver mines. Not so much in the Western Mediterranean, but even there, there are certainly slaves. What changes with Rome is the sheer scale of the enterprise. And the one factor for that change is?

The main one appears to be simply that the Romans become enormously powerful. Military conquest, they capture hundreds of thousands of people. Now, of course, they don't have to turn them into slaves. There are other ways in which you could, well, realize the gains of your aggression. But slavery is the method they choose time and again. Does this become the expected thing? If you're captured by the Romans, you're going to be a slave? Yes.

Or you're going to get slaughtered, depending on how they feel. But generally, the majority of captives are then taken as slaves or sold into slavery. And, of course, it's one of the ways in which the Romans exert their power is with this sort of threat that when they're issuing an ultimatum, it is effectively surrender now, or we will. will slaughter you and sell you into slavery. You're going to lose either way. Sorry. When you say hundreds of thousands,

you're not just throwing the words away, but at least one example where 160,000 people were caught and marched from the heel of Italy up to Rome to be sold as slaves. That's right. I mean, the numbers are never exact. They are sort of very, very big, as tends to be the case with any numbers in ancient sources. But we have these sorts of accounts. We have Caesar's account of his activities in Gaul,

where if you add up the totals, you're looking towards a million people captured and sold into slavery. Really quite astonishing numbers, say, you know, when the Romans head off into Greece, there are tens of thousands of slaves from all walks of life, you know, not just kind of ordinary people, but, you know, philosophers, scholars, local politicians. And these, do they capture everybody because I'm read in the notes of some of you, that they take care to kill the able-bodied men who might revolt against them? They do that sometimes.

Yeah. It does seem to vary. I mean, I think it's one of the things we might be talking about a bit later. When the Romans face slave revolts, actually that's often because they captured too many able-bodied men and put them all in the same place, and they've then got a sort of, you know, potential opposition. but they do need able-bodied men.

It's one of the ways in which they use slaves. They want people who are capable of a lot of hard work. And as I understand it, one of the ways they got over that was by splitting up language groups so that you didn't have a great group of people speaking of the same language, and that helped to keep the slavery bills down to a very small number, but we'll come back to that later.

Ulrich O'Rodd, what applications did the Romans have by so many slaves? If suddenly they turned up with its hundreds of thousands of people, what were they going to do with them? Let me begin by saying the obvious to reiterate what Neville said in many ways. Slaves are omnipresent. They're everywhere. Wherever you look, whatever productive area you look into or service area, you can find the slave.

This does not mean that the slave will automatically undertake that task, but it's highly likely that you come across slaves when you look at anything in the economy from the basic service provider to a highly skilled craftsman. What dates are we talking about here? Well, okay, the evidence that we mainly look at is the early imperial period, the first, second, third century, AD, let's say. Also the late Republic.

The second, let's say, certainly the first century BC. For this period, we have very good evidence. So it's about 400 years roughly. Yes, which is say half the time we have for Roman history, really. We have about a millennium of Roman history. But where we start in the 7th, 6th century, it's very little that we really know that slaves did. This starts later.

So they capture these great number of slaves. and it coincides with an economic development. Yes. It's not just capture. We come back to that probably later as well. So the economy growth, and with that, we see a lot of different highly skilled functions coming out. We have textile producers. This is male and female.

We have pottery makers. We have crafts makers of any type that you can find of. We know this from the literary sources. We notice also from the epigraphic evidence, the inscriptional evidence, for instance, which is the only evidence really we have from the slaves themselves, which is one problem for us as scholars, because the literary evidence is primarily 99% produced by the masters.

And so it gives us quite a distorted view of where the slaves are actually put to work. We have very little evidence and the evidence is rather difficult to... Very little evidence from the slaves. From the slaves, yes. That really tells us what they did and how they undertook that task and what it meant to them. Now, however, we have a lot of funerary evidence where slaves record the job title.

And scholars have always argued, This means that labour means something to them. It's important for them to be seen in that role. It's very difficult to know, but to what it's then. When you say funeral evidence, you mean tombstone. That's right, correct. Tombstone says often the name and then the job title. But nothing else.

But these are the two things that often record. Maybe a family relation, the person who set it up, the father, the son, etc. Can we just hold for a second on this? The number, a million has been mentioned at the time of Caesar, still just the republic. we've said a few hundred thousand that are easy really so that's a massive

infusion into a quite small area, Rome and the West Coast there and so enormous boom time for industry rather like 18th century north of England really, wasn't it? They piled in and the economy was ready for that or the economy took off because of that? What's the relationship? If you like, there are two main markets

and they drive one another. One is the army itself. the army is a major market that needs supplies. So if you go and fight wars across the Mediterranean, you need a supplier that provides all this. So there is a vicious circle, if you like, in many ways, that goes with conquest. You capture people, you make them slaves and they're produced for the army. So that grows round. And we see at the same time the growth of towns from the second century BC onwards in Italy,

also in the provinces later on. And the towns, again, need supplies brought in from the hinterland. And so the idea is, which is already in the Roman sources, and which a lot of scholars believe, is that the slaves replace these peasants that used to be there that go into the towns and produce now the food and all the other stuff that the towns need.

So there's a circle, though, almost what they might call the virtuous circle, really. Was there any clear distinction between the way men, women and children were employed? The children were captured as well in numbers, yes. It's a good question, it's a difficult question. There are certainly roles that only women undertake. In some areas, I mentioned already text or production,

We only know women working, like spinning and woolmaking as such. Weaving can also be done by men. Personally, I don't believe that slave women worked in the fields. I believe they were put other tasks in the countryside, but some scholars hold the view that women and men were interchangeably used in the fields of the Romans. If you look, I give you one piece of evidence, an example, to give you an idea of how the Romans may have valued relatively the economic contribution of slaves. And this is an ascriptional piece of evidence from the,

4th century 80, the early 4th century 80, the so-called Prices Edict of Diacletian. In this Prices Edict, we have a list of slave prices. And what is very interesting to see is that women are valued below the price of men and that children in turn are valued below that of adults. Yet, the price of a child of 8 years to 15 years, that's the price range given, is up to 2.3rd to 4 fifths, that of the relevant adult male or female, which also means that children were clearly put to work because otherwise this doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

And they were trained to be slaves from the beginning, so they're more likely to thought to be accepting of it. Yes. Miles Laban, can you tell us, have you any idea how widespread slave ownership was? I'd love to be able to tell you what percentage of the population of Italy or the empire were slaves.

And we can guess at that, but we don't really know. The best evidence actually comes from the province of Egypt, where we have a couple of hundred census returns. So this isn't the actual data produced by the Roman census, but it's the forms that individual households filled out for that, and it's one of our most important sources of evidence for slavery and other aspects of the demography of the empire.

So we have a couple of hundred census returns that document something like a thousand people, about 11% of whom are slaves. And based on that, I mean, I suppose the educated guess at the moment would be that that might be indicative of the overall level of slaveholding in the empire as a whole, and then we would assume that in the heartland of the empire, so Italy, so where the initial influx of slaves would have led to,

that the level might have been higher than that. But probably more important is how those slaves were distributed. And I think there it is quite clear that slaveholding was quite concentrated. So in Egypt, for example, only a sixth of households own slaves. So I think, I mean, I certainly believe that we should imagine a world where a large proportion, probably the majority of households have no slaves at all. Then there's a middling group of households that have a handful of slaves. And it's only when we get to,

the top of societies, the top couple of percent, that's probably where a very large proportion of slaveholding is concentrated. And there you have households of hundreds, tens or hundreds of slaves. And at the very top, so the wealthiest men of the empire who dominate the Roman Senate, as people like the philosopher and Seneca or his ilk, they would have had estates that constituted maybe more than a thousand slaves. They would have lived in urban residences where they were surrounded by hundreds of slaves.

They obviously were parts of the household. You've just said that. What did they do that? Well, at this level, the top level, a lot of it is about conspicuous consumption. I mean, there's a one of the roles a slave can perform in the Roman culture is called pedisequist, literally a foot follower, a footman, right? And so at some level, the number of slaves who are following you in public is an indication of your wealth. And so large domestic households in city of Rome would be full of slaves in a range of domestic and even purely ornamental functions. But they're also used as secretaries to manage accounts.

You're given the estimate that there might be 10% of the population is from very slight evidence-based, but it's the best we've got. They still, it seems to me, from the reading, are quite prominent in the cities in society. They're taking messages. They're teaching children. They're doing things there with their important masters or very, very, very important masters. So they're a feature. They're there. Especially at the very top of society. I imagine if we were to look in the poorer section of the city or out in the countryside, we wouldn't find a society quite so,

in which slaves and ex-slaves were so prominent. But I think at the top of society, these men, their households are composed largely of slaves and ex-slaves, and so society is full of them. When victories in war stopped or dwindled away, not stopped and die, where did they look for the slaves then? Well, wars of conquest never really stopped. So I think warfare is a constant source of slaves,

but it was probably never the exclusive source or necessarily the most important. I think most of us believe that the single most important source of slaves was natural reproduction. So the key context here is Roman law under which the child of a slave is always a slave

and the property of the owner of its mother. So it's clear that Romans, I mean, when Romans commodifying slaves and slave bodies, as they often do, they often think about female slaves as breeding stock essentially as a source of future slaves. And do they encourage that? She'll produce a lot of good slaves.

Some of the authors you alluded to earlier who talk about how to manage slaves will talk about how you can manage slaves in order to ensure they will reproduce. There's a rather chilling part of Roman law that concerns essentially the circumstances under which you can get a refund for a defective product

and there's a long section of what counts as a defect in a slave. And so among other things, it says that if you were to purchase a slave woman and discover that she was barren, that does count as a defect. and you would be allowed to claim a refund if you hadn't been told in this advance.

So it's clear that they treat the slave population as a resource that should reproduce itself. Also, you're just a well-organized slave market. Oh, very definitely, right? And that, in fact, brings me to the third significant source of slaves. So as soon as you commodify human beings and create a market in them, which is quite sophisticated and pan-Mediterranean,

you create an opportunity for entrepreneurs. So there are clearly men, organizations, who are engaged in slaving, and some of that is moving slaves that have been produced by conquest, but it's quite clear there are also entrepreneurs who are preying and vulnerable populations, people in transit,

essentially abducting people. And then if you're abducted on the road somewhere in Africa, if I whisk you away to the other side of the Mediterranean, somewhere like Syria, there's no one there who knows that you're a free person, so I can treat you as a slave and sell you on there. And then there are other sources.

We know that it's common in many places in the Roman Empire to expose, some unwinted children. And it seems that one of the things that happened these exposed to children is that they get taken and raised as slaves. There are situations of hardship in which parents sell their children into slavery.

And exceptional cases where an individual might even sell himself into slavery to somebody wealthy. Neville Morley, can we, what impacted this huge influx have on the Roman zoo are there, the Roman, let's call them peasants, but all sorts of other Romans who suddenly

face this army or ex-army of slaves taking on important jobs? We're very much talking about Roman Italy and central Italy and the city of Rome. That's where the greatest impact can be seen, certainly in the period where this system is developing, so the late republic with these enormous conquests, enormous influx of slaves. And it does seem to be different in the countryside from the city. In the city, it's certainly the case that a wide range of different sorts of jobs are being done by slaves. There isn't, for example, the sort of thing that we see in early modern cities where there's an enormous market for domestic service, where people come to the city to work as footmen or maids or whatever.

In Rome, that sort of role is taken by slaves. There's a wide range of building activities, crafts, retailing services and so forth, where certainly a lot of the people doing these jobs are slaves rather than free people. So in one sense, the influx of slaves reduces the opportunities for the free population. On the other hand, most of these are new opportunities. This is going hand in hand with the really dramatic expansion. of Rome and of other cities. Out in the countryside, there is a sort of a complex process

which we could describe as displacement. And the old story used to be that, rather like the early modern enclosure movement, the peasants were being driven off the land to make way for slave estates, which were profit-orientated and benefit. benefiting the elite. And the new story? The new story is that to some extent, the peasants are moving of their own accord.

They're not simply being forced off. They are, at least some of them, are migrating towards the cities, perhaps because they see better opportunities there. Perhaps also, as Ulrika mentioned, some of them are going into the army. Can I turn to you and then Ulrica again? I think a central thing for a lot of listeners would be

how entwined, opposed, or how resolved were the ideas of liberty, the great Roman ideas of liberty, the liberty of the citizen and with the condition of the slave? The short answer is that there was a direct relationship, that these are two poles on the spectrum, the extreme poles in many ways. And I might just as well come out with a contention that is probably in the back of the mind of every ancient historian

working out there. and this is a passage from an article by Moses Finley, who's the individual who probably influenced the study of ancient slavery more than anyone else in the second half of the 20th century. And he said very clearly that for Greek history, he was a Greek historian primarily, there is an advance hand-in-hand of slavery and freedom. That is very clearly there,

and for me as a Romanist, this also applies to the Roman world. So we can see this very nicely in the Roman sources, and if I give you one example, where to my mind this comes out extremely striking, And it's an invented example in terms of, it's a Roman invention. So in the first century BC, the Roman historian Livy writes the history of Rome. And he writes about the period in which Rome gets rid of his monarchy in the 6th century BC. Now he can't have known what actually happened.

That's neither here or there. And after they got rid of their kings, they established a democratic, a republican government, which for them is the epitome of liberty, of libertas. But there are, of course, plots going on to conspiracies to bring the kings back. and one of these plots involves a lot of romance in the city but it is a slave who stops the first plotting. The slave is rewarded and the reward are three things. Money, freedom and citizenship.

And that's very interesting for many reasons. On the one hand, we see the slave moving from his several status to freedom. That's the other end, the epitome of what he can achieve. And yet there is another element, there's citizenship. It comes in this case with freedom, but it's separate from it at the same time. They're not the same thing. So there's two things, sort of clustering at one end of this pole, freedom and citizenship, and slavery is at the other end.

But the fact is that they're still slaves, and even if they get freedom, when they die and they have not become citizens, which is very, very, very rare, everything they have have, goes back to the state. Okay, we again need to differentiate here historically. When we talk for the republic before we have emperors in Rome, the slave who is informally freed remains a slave even legally. at that point. So de facto, they are protected by the authorities. But otherwise not. If they are formally freed, they become a citizen. And they can make wheels. They can pass on their monies. But behind all that, were they bothered that there were slaves? The Romans. Yeah. There is no reason to suggest the Romans were...

Is there any evidence that any Roman was saying, we shouldn't do this to these people, this is wrong? There is some evidence that people had hesitations of how to treat a slave. But not many by the sign of it. but not in the fundamental way of getting rid of slavery. I can give you an example. We know that K to a second century BC writer, politician, commander, etc., etc., says if you have a farmstead,

when you hold an auction, sell any old and sickly slave. Now we see later that another writer, Plutarch, a few centuries later, says, you wouldn't do this to your dog. So there was clearly a dispute of how you handle the management of your slaves, but there was no fundamental issue with it. Miles Lemon, what happens do we have of slavery from the tombstones,

but first of all, what happens do we have of the way that slaves were maltreated? It's very important to be aware of just how important violence is in the regime of slavery. Now, it's not as if all slaves were treated brutally or as if violence was the only pillar of slavery, but it is hugely important. And so, in Roman culture, the two symbols of slavery are the whip, which is used to punish slaves, and the cross, right,

which is the way of executing slaves. Crucifixion was the specific punishment for slaves. And so it is occasionally used to punish other outsiders, such as bandits in the province of Judea, which is the context for the Christ's story. But the point is that these bandits

are being treated as if they were slaves. Another chilling document that I often talk about to illustrate the realities of slavery is an otherwise innocuous municipal law from Putioli, a city in Italy, and this is a law that regulates the business of the undertaker, which is essentially, that's a public contract

and entrepreneur can bid for it to be the undertaker for the city of Puteoli. And the reason this is important is that among other services, the undertaker was responsible for torturing and executing slaves. And so this municipal contract lays out the conditions under which the chosen undertaker will provide its services. And in this case, it lays out the fees that the undertaker will charge for crucifying slaves and precisely who is to supply the wood, who's to supply the nails, etc.

So that we can see that the execution of slaves is here a service industry that's being regulated by the state. Back to the tombstones. What do they tell us? So tombstones, so that is, stone gravestones inscribed with texts are one of our most important sources

for Roman social history in general because they give us access to a swath of the population we wouldn't otherwise see. And of course, one important thing to bear in mind is that stone grave markers were by no means universal. We assume that the majority

the population were commemorated with something far more ephemeral that wouldn't survive to today. But say from the city of Rome alone, we have tens of thousands of gravestones. Now, what's interesting about them is not the presence of slaves per se, though there are not insignificant numbers of slaves commemorated in these tombstones, which is revealing in itself because it shows that many slaves received a privilege that lots of freeborn Romans did not get. And that's presumably because they lived in relatively wealthy households,

and they're commemorated by their fellow slaves with the stone monument. It's indicative of the fact that some slaves actually lived in material conditions better than some of the free poor. But the extraordinary thing about this body of tombstones is that of those 20 or 30,000-odd tombstones, something like 80% are ex-slaves,

which is a truly extraordinary proportion. How do you account for it? So I think none of us believe that that can be a direct representation of the proportion of ex-slaves in the population. It's too bad to be true, too good to be true. It's too high. So we assume,

We assume that they're overrepresented. And there might be two factors at work at one level. You're saying you by surprise to over-representation. Yeah, something we'll come back to again. Just like previously 10% was under-representation. You have a high old time with these non-sources, don't you? We always have to reconcile what our fragmentary evidence indicates where there are a priori assumptions

about what's plausible or not. No, but you want to come in. And the way it's often talked about is something like, you know, the epigraphic habit. It's not, you know, not everybody can afford to put up a stone tombstone, not everybody wants to. Our sense is that slaves and still more ex-slaves are especially likely to do this.

And certainly one of the reasons is, it goes back to what Rieker said about, you know, the importance of status as being a free person and a citizen, these are people who want to assert themselves in the social sphere, particularly to say, I have achieved something,

I have got to the point of being able to, show off my success in gaining freedom and my profession, my position in society, in a way that freeborn people seem to be much less bothered about. Which brings you to the point I wanted to ask you anyway, which is there's been quite a lot of talk in the notes that I've had from the three of you about them making money and buying this and especially Cicero's great friend, Terry, his slave, who are bought estates and all the rest of it. Why did they make money if you're a slave, you have to pay them, you look after them, you feed them, you give them clothes. But making real money, how did that happen?

It essentially works as an incentive. I mean, it's a fiction. Strictly speaking, a slave is property and therefore cannot own property. But it suits slave owners in the case of particular trusted slaves to allow them to accumulate something as if it is their own. and very often this operates to keep the slaves quiet and compliant that they've then got a stake in the business of the master and it allows them potentially to gain their freedom at the end of the process

that they can build up what's known as a peculiarium when they have acquired enough they can buy their freedom off their master and of course the master has had all of the benefit of their work and has now got the money to go and buy a replacement slave. Ulrica, can you tell the listeners about manumission because it links on to what Neville was saying? Yes, it does. It does extremely well. Manumission, the act of freeing a slave,

is in essence, in theory, available to all slaves. Although available to slaves is the wrong way of putting it. A master can, in theory, at all times, freed their slaves. The Romans very early on know what we are scholars called formal and informal manumission. Both ways of manumitting a slave lead to freedom for the slave

but only one, that is the formal mode if taken out in the right way, gives the slaves also citizenship. So just to get to the core of it, the master says you are now free. Does he give them a form? Is there a bit of paper and form? That's a very good question.

I wish we had those. You don't have a single form. I personally assumed that they would give them a piece of paper but we need witnesses as well. So we may not be quite enough people in this room to do so. But in pure practice, yes, a master can at the drop of a head, free a slave, say at the dinner table with a few people around.

And some of our literary sources play on this precisely. But the slave only gets freedom at this point. And I'm now talking for the empire. What do you mean only gets freedom? Not citizenship. And that is critical because citizenship protects you in many ways from a lot of things that pure freedom, as you were, doesn't give you. The problem is when the slave...

When the slave dies, the slave... The slave, you mentioned yourself early on, the slave cannot make a will and pass on property if he hasn't got citizenship. And it means everything that slave accumulated in the course of their lifetime as a free person goes back to the master. It's the bingo situation for the master. But if the slave is family, where are they afterwards? Nothing that that family accumulated that is in the ownership as a way in the possession of that slave goes to that family. And that is where formal money mission is interesting because we assume you would want this. is to protect yourself in that way.

Now, Neville mentioned the piculium, the money that slaves are entitled to amass. My personal view is that slaves primarily buy their freedom. And you can see why this differentiated way of having freedom and citizenship works for the masters extremely well because they can make the slave pay twice because you can have two money missions to get there. So we have a money mission in the slave economy.

I'm sorry to keep asking this pedantic. question, but it is quite interesting to know. I mean, do you know how many they were? We know famous examples, we know famous, this, that and the other. But there seems to be, come from your notes, and I'd a feeling that this was a contented part of the population. This was comparatively serene. And we're coming to this next, but the very, very, very few slave revolts over centuries,

only one of real significance, Spartacus, seems to confirm that. Yeah, you say it's a potentate question, but I think it's a profound one. And I would say, I mean, it is, This is probably the single most important thing we don't know about Roman slavery. If we were to put it very bluntly, what proportion of slaves could hope to be freed and after how long? Because different answers to that question would give us a radically different sense of what the slave experience actually was. Now, there are several bits of evidence that suggests that the answers to that might be a large proportion and quite early. As you've seen before, we don't really want to believe that.

but I think it is important to recognize them. So one piece of evidence is the extraordinary representation of ex-slaves in tombstones. A second example would be to go back to our census documents from the province of Egypt, which contain about 100 slaves. It's quite striking that in that among the 100 slaves, I think there is not a single male slave over the age of 35 or 30, and not a single female over the age of 45. Why? Because there were none left,

or because they'd been freed. And there's various anecdotal evidence that Manumission was quite common. There's a famous and much-disputed passage of Cicero where he's trying to mobilize his fellow senators and to rebel against Mark Anthony, where he says, you know, we the people of Rome,

we have been slaves for six years, longer than the average, longer than our frugal and hard-working slave might expect to remain a slave before winning his freedom. So all of this suggests that Manumission might have been quite common. You talked about the, I mentioned, the low level of obvious rebellions,

and really it's more or less right, isn't it? And the big one was Spartan. The only one in three or four centuries was Spartacus. No, there were two serious slave rebellions in Sicily at the end of the second century. But were they, that's right, fine, where you go? Which in some ways are similar. I mean, it starts with a small group of slaves rebelling against their conditions. and there's no sign that they're launching a war to overthrow slavery.

It is about their own situation. These groups then succeed in seeing off the local authorities, in gathering more people, and both in Sicily and with the Spartacus Revolt in sort of 73 in central Italy, they hold out against increasingly large Roman armies for a surprisingly long time. Now, partly, this is, they accumulate sheer numbers and they tend to retreat up into the hills

where they're difficult to deal with. Partly, the Romans tend to take a long time to recognise or admit the seriousness of the threat, partly because you don't want to admit that a bunch of slaves have seen off your forces if you're the governor, so you play down the news. So there is two rebelled and systems. which I skipped over because they don't Spartacus really,

so I do apologize for that. You now left yourself less time to speak about Spartacus. But never mind, Sparticus, we all know about Spartacus. That was a big one, wasn't it? It was. Okay, it starts. You admit that with a certain reluctance, so it was a big revolt.

We know about that from the movies. Well, I think that's exactly it. That is the one that gets the attention in modern sources, the heroization of the figure of Spartacus. There are actually some really, you know, the leaders of the Sicilian revolts are quite interesting as well. They just don't get the same. They're quite interesting, but did they do as much as Spartacus did,

is what we're longing to know? They hold out for longer, for what that's worth. They don't defeat as many Roman armies. They don't intrude themselves on Roman history to the same degree. That Spartacus did? As Spartacus does. And partly, of course, Spartacus is in Italy. You know, Sicily is a province.

whereas the idea of an army of slaves and bandits and discontented natives and whatever, carrying on in central Italy and even threatening to escape Italy, which would be deeply, deeply embarrassing, that that clearly is something of a shock for the Romans, but it also provides an opportunity to play politics as who is going to get the chance to defeat the rebels and take the credit. Okay, I'm going to stop being a Spartacus poor. Ulrica, to what extent were slaves?

Aristotle said that slaves were, as it were, born and not made. I mean, sometimes you let us stand very badly, doesn't it, Aristotle? And that permeated right to the Romans, so I understand it. And that was the idea, if you're a slave, it's because you're, as it were, that's the way you are in your birth and in your life. What you're referring to is what we call it the theory of natural slavery. You get that as well on the Roman side, but you get both on the Roman side. You get clear evidence for the Romans recognising the slave's humanity,

and you get clear evidence for the Romans engaging in the absolute humanisation of the slave, in what we also call the animalisation of the slave. So on the one hand, for instance... What does that mean animalisation of the slaves? Treating the slave like an animal? In what way? Also conceptually, physically and conceptually. I've mentioned earlier on how plume.

Interprets Cato's dictum to sell an old or sickly slave as treating that person like a dog. And we find this repeatedly in our sources. We find slaves, for instance, being downgraded by being regarded as lazy, as idle, as sleepy all the time, which goes hand in hand with the citizen being alert and bright and there. So this is a means of also defining what a citizen is, a free person at the same time as downgrading that slave to a lower level. But let me also point out the other side. of the coin, because we have in the big legal

qualification of laws put together in the 6th century AD by the emperor Justinian or under the Emperor Justinian, which starts off with a legal view by the jurist Florentinus that states very clearly that freedom, libertas, as the Roman call it, is the natural capacity to do as you please, unless prevented by law, etc. In other words, naturally, crudely put, everybody's free. And then Florentines goes on to state, but

by the law of nations that we all agree to, they use Gantium, some people are subjected to the dominion of others, are slavery. So the Romans have their cake and eat it. Conceptually, juridically, they're perfectly aware that naturally everybody is in that freedom box, but there is a different practice coming in to stop it out. That's great, thank you.

And I really has clear that, Miles. In the third century, the fourth century, the Romans were told that they had to be Christians and some of them did and then became the Roman Empire, then the Holy Roman Empire, then the Holy Roman Catholic Church. How did the idea of slavery, or did it,

carry on into Christianity at the time and afterwards? So we know that early Christian communities counted many slaves and ex-slaves among their members, which is probably not specifically an issue about Christianity, but perhaps is typical of sub-elite Roman society where the slaves, the freed, and the freeborn all rubbed shoulders together. And it's clear that the Christian message,

like much Greco-Roman philosophy, had contained a message of universalism that might have developed into a critique of slavery. And there were certainly some early Christian thinkers who toyed with the idea that slavery was not consistent with God's message. But it seems that the Christian community as a whole very quickly accommodated itself

to the reality of slavery. we can see the Christians making concessions to the rights of masters. There's a debate about whether if a slave wants to be baptized whether you can baptize him just like that or whether you need the master's permission

and there's a debate about that but it seems that the dominant position is that the master's permission is required for the slave to be baptized which is a very big concession to the right of a master over his slave. The other way in which Christianity

naturalizes or legitimizes slavery is in the way it appropriates the relations between masters and slaves is actually the paradigm of the Christian's relationship to God. And so for Christian writers like Paul, the idea of being slave to God or Christ, Doulos Tha'u in Greek, is a fundamental metaphor for understanding the Christian's relationship to God. And so the New Testament is pervaded by the language of slavery, often obscured in English translations by the choice to translate the Greek word Doulas as servant, whereas actually it means slave. And as soon as Christianity, looks to slavery as a paradigm

for this most important relationship in a Christian's life. It therefore legitimizes that master slave relationship as part of the fundamental nature of the world. And very, very briefly, you suggest that this ripples through to the Holy Roman Empire and keep inside the Roman Catholic Church and other...

So slavery is legitimated both in Roman law, which has a huge influence of legacy, and then also in Christianity. Christianity very early accommodates itself to the rights of masters. Can I ask you, Noel, I'd ask you to be slightly brief about this, but it seems that the Roman citizens, the proper Roman citizens, didn't like getting their hands dirty. They were an elite, and one of the things that Mark and Madison elite was having slaves

who did all that work for them, and they went around thinking all the time, or going to, whatever it was. Did that idea of being an elite come in with the introduction of slaves, or was it before that? And the big question is, has it carried on ever since one way and another? But let's leave that for another programme. What do you think of that? I think the Roman elite always think of themselves as superior. What's always?

As far back as we have sources, and it clearly echoes the ways that Greek elites talk about themselves. Their sense that they are above ordinary free people, not just above slaves. Having slaves, of course, accentuates it, you have these, well, you don't quite classify them as people. You have these animate tools doing your bidding, clearly places you at the top of the pyramid.

And going with that is an attitude of sort of condescension and distaste for any sort of manual labour. That is associated with slaves. So free people who do that sort of thing are perceived. as slavish. It's not to say the ordinary Roman citizen has this attitude. We don't hear from the ordinary Roman citizens. What we hear from are the people at the top of the pyramid

who are commanding, you know, thousands of thousands of people doing their bidding. Would you say, fine, Ely Elyker, would you say that the introduction of these hundreds of thousands, millions of slaves, changed the character and enabled the character of ancient Rome to be as it was? I would definitely say so, yes. I cannot imagine ancient Rome

from the early period onwards actually as a society without slaves or as what we might want to call a slave society however defined. It made Rome distinct in many ways because as Miles said early on because of the scale at which these things happened but also because of the uses

and the very fine distinctions in which slaves were used and abused in this world, but which I don't mean it didn't happen elsewhere but it was clearly a quintessential element of being Roman to define oneself in regard to slaves and in using slaves in that way. Well, thank you all very, very much.

Thanks to you, Ulrich O'Hodd Miles Levin and Nebel Moorley. Next week we'll be discussing George and Robert Stevenson and the development of the railway. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we miss out? We've only got 403 minutes to remember, but what essentially, did we essentially miss out something?

I think there's a lot more that could be said about. the treatment of slaves and the control of slaves. I mean, Miles emphasised the fact that the whip is seen to be central. And the Romans simultaneously believe in the loyalty of their slaves. It's one reason why they hand over a lot of really sort of confidential, intimate information. It's why they trust slaves with managing their business, managing their correspondence and so forth. especially when a slave has been home-bred, there's the assumption that they are loyal and dependent,

and you can trust them. And this goes hand in hand with the sense that you cannot ever trust a slave. All slaves are naturally lazy, rebellious. You don't take evidence from a slave unless they have been tortured. As an owner, you have almost unlimited rights to deal with a recalcitrant slave as you wish. So somehow, you know, sort of they see slaves both as completely trustworthy, if not sort of part of the background, and as always dangerous and hostile. And, you know, there's a proverb that a man has as many enemies as he has slaves and sort of things like that. So it's this slightly sort of contradictory attitude.

But it does mean they are very conscious of what they need to do. to keep their slaves in line and prevent trouble. There's a touch of paranoia about it. Or yeah. Something that goes on from what Neville just said, this ambiguity that's imbilled in the Roman slave system, but also the diversity that we've seen and that we've talked about in slave roles,

slave tasks, slave services. This is mind-boggling in many ways. How can that be slavy? Because what we have in mind, the paradigm, also in scholarship, is often the American slave system. And there we don't see this diversity. We see quite different ways. Freedom in that sense is not there.

The legacy of American slavery is still that black Americans are disadvantaged today. We don't see, we see a quite different thing in the Roman world. And it's very good to think with the Roman world in that way. From the perspective of the study of slavery, I would say the Roman world is much more typical with its approach to slavery than see the American South. Yeah, I would develop on that and say one of the defining features of Roman slavery in this historical perspective is the absence of race as a factor. So visually, there is nothing obviously to distinguish the slave population in a city from the freed or freeborn population.

So this interpenetration is very distinctive in that there's no obvious physical distinctions between them. They rub shoulders in all sorts of walks of life. So in their labor, many forms of labor use both free and slave labor. Associations like Christianity, but also all sorts of other associations in the city involve slaves, freed and free. and then the constant traffic of slaves becoming free and citizens leads to an interpenetration, a blurring of the lines between slave and free that's, I think, quite distinct, well, at least that surprises those of us, and I think it's most of us, who approach ancient slavery through the model of the American South,

which has become, I think, our paradigm of a slave society. And there's an anecdote in Seneca that the Senate once debated, should we make the slaves dress differently so we can spot them, and the clinching argument against this is, no, then they'd know how many they would, were and we'd be in trouble, or worse to that effect. But it clearly emphasises that, you know, normally it's not visible, certainly out in the streets of Rome. You can't automatically spot who's a slave, who's free.

That's a really good point. I wish I'd tucked it into the programme. We also may want to come back to something my said earlier on about Christianity and slavery. In With the Gothic Spain, in the early Middle Ages, a church that has less than 10 slaves is regarded as poor. So this is not just a question of the thinking with slavery. Slavey is there. The church generally, even not just in the West in Spain,

is the biggest landowner. With landowning comes labour exploitation, comes slavery, in my view in any case. In this country it owned about a third of the land at one stage, didn't it? In the Tudor times for the great vandalism of Henry VIII. We never picked up on your opening point about slaves owning slaves,

which is a distinct feature of the Romans system. And it goes to the point of that huge diversity of the material conditions under which slaves lived. And some slaves lived extraordinary privileged lives in material terms. One of the, one of the irksome things for you as scholars, I suppose,

is that your sources tend to come from the more privileged, almost by definition. And therefore you want to, they live together and you're happy ever after, but that's maybe one in a thousand or whatever, who knows. And we know much more about the households of the wealthiest. We actually know very little about what slavery

was like in households that only owned a handful of slaves, especially in the countryside. And that's where most of us are actually skeptical towards the evidence in terms of the patterns that the evidence produces, because it comes from such peculiar niches. But there are colleagues who say, well, slaves are mainly in towns, because that is where the inscriptional evidence comes from. That does exist as well. But yes, I mean, the lack of evidence for the slave experience compared with what we have, say, from 19th century America, and we've got some... This is the problem. They're elite literary imaginings of the condition of slavery.

So it's almost a kind of, I don't know, sort of tourism. You know, it's about slavery rather than slaves. It's members of the upper classes imagining themselves falling into that condition and what it would be like. Now, this isn't a completely impossible scenario. as Miles mentioned, you've got a slave trade, there are bandits and pirates capturing people and sending them into slavery. So it's not inconceivable that a member of the Roman elite might know someone in this situation. It comes up in various sort of Greek novels. It's almost a sort of stereotypical situation of peril that the hero or heroine or both are.

captured by pirates or bandits and potentially being sold into slavery. It's presented as one of the worst things that might happen to you. And they do acknowledge the possible consequences of that. That you then lose your identity, you lose any sort of status, you're open to rape and sexual exploitation, you're open to violence and so forth. So they can at least imagine what it might be like to be put in that situation. There's a sort of a long narrative account by Apaleus, often known as the metamorphosis or the golden ass, where the hero is transformed into a donkey.

And we can see this as, again, imagining what is it like for a proper rational human being to be changed into an animal who is treated like an animal? It's a kind of metaphor for being a slave, and it's the loss of independence, it's the, you know, you're open to violence, you're at the mercy of whether your master happens to be nice or happens to be nasty. But it's still, this is not the reality of slavery. It's an imagining of what it might be like for you as a Roman to find yourself in this situation.

Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Paul Lewis and I'm here to tell you about the Moneybox podcast. Moneybox is all about your money, how you earn it, spend it, save it, invest it, and how you stop anyone else taking it from you. Sadly, there's a lot of that about. By the Monday, we was a voice that we'd lost the $3 million, which is virtually everything that we had in there.

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