Slavery in Roman Society

Transcript

I need a very special expert guest. Would

you like to introduce yourself please?

Sure. I'm Dr. Chance Bonar. I'm

currently an advising fellow and lecturer at the University of Virginia. And I

work a lot on slavery and antiquity. I recently published a book called God,

Slavery and Early Christianity, looking at how early Christians imagined

themselves to be enslaved to God and how other ancient Mediterranean people did

the same, and I'm also right now in the middle of finishing up a book on slave

revolts and religion in the Roman Mediterranean.

So you know that I've chosen

the correct guest for this because, Chance is amazing. Okay. So first major

question, let's get it out of the way because everyone thinks that they know

what Roman slavery was like from watching movies, et cetera. So we know that

Rome was a slave owning society. Was this true from like right in the beginning

of Rome, you know, all the way back in time?

I mean, so as far as we know from

the period of the Roman kings onward, there were enslaved people in and around

Rome, and we know at least by the fifth century BC, we begin to see Roman laws

that deal with the status of at least this group called formerly enslaved

persons. They're in Latin, they're called liberti. So that tells us that this

population, this demographic was at least big enough in Rome that laws started

to need to be made to clarify what their legal status was, their social

situation was. But the really hard thing for us about these earliest layers of Roman

history is that this is before there was lots of Roman writing. We don't have

that much of this written material at this time in Roman history. So a lot of

it is information about enslaved people that's remembered centuries later in

these really nostalgic ways. One of my favorite examples is there's an

agricultural writer named Columella, who at the beginning of his treatise on

agriculture, he complains that, you know, Romans today are just so soft and

weak, and they depend so much on enslaved people to do their farming. Back in

the good old days of like people like Cincinnati, this wasn't a problem because

everyone was a good farmer who had their own land and didn't need to rely as

much on enslaved people. So it's this kind of like nostalgia that makes it

really hard for us to distinguish too much fact from fiction in this early

time.

Right. Okay. That makes sense. So we know that they had enslaved people. Was

this a Roman invention or was this fairly typical for the ancient

Mediterranean?

This was pretty typical overall. There are a lot of ancient

societies across Afro-Eurasia that had some forms of bondage or dependency,

although they differed a lot. When we think of Greece and Rome, they're often remembered

today as slave societies. This is a word that an ancient historian from the mid

20th century, Moses Finley, came up with and used to describe five different historical

entities throughout all time periods. He said Greece, Rome, the U.S. South, the

Caribbean and Brazil were slave societies, which for him meant that they had

pretty large population of enslaved people. And that slavery was like a central

cultural and economic feature of these societies. A lot of scholars today kind

of challenge and nuance Finley's idea of what a slave society is, but the idea

that people were kind of the theory around it and the practice of owning other

human beings and exploiting their labor in some way was shared across a lot of

ancient societies.

Okay. So it's not unique to Rome.

Right. Not unique to Rome.

They're one of many who are doing this.

So just so that we're all absolutely

clear, what is the difference between an enslaved person and a servant?

Yes,

this is a huge question for those who are in slavery studies and one that if

you ask Slavery Studies scholars today, they don't have a super defined, clear

answer. The difference between them is often really blurred. So it gives

scholars headaches trying to figure out where we put this line between slave

and servant. Yeah. Some cultures had really like legal definitions of enslaved

persons. So for example, in Rome, there was a legal definition for people who were

deemed a servus, a slave, although even then there are people that didn't fit

clearly into this kind of binary of free and slave. So formerly enslaved

persons were kind of this middle ground. Some serfs were this middle ground. Children

were also in this weird category of being really dependent on their parents in

ways that Romans recognized looked a lot like slavery, but they didn't think it

was exactly that. So it's helpful to think about it as kind of a spectrum. We

tend to use slave to describe those who are more stripped of legal and social

rights than others, who typically aren't being paid for their labor and or who

are being kind of torn away from their families and homelands.

So it's not

black and white as usual with anything we do. Which makes it more fun to study,

but it makes it more difficult. So when we think about, I mean, when we have

discussions about modern, for instance, immigration, we talk about the

immigrants are doing the jobs that no citizen wants to do. Is that what we're

seeing in ancient Rome, that they're being made to do just the disgusting jobs,

cleaning out toilets?

Yeah, it moves kind of beyond just the disgusting jobs,

right? And this is kind of a point where when we think about slavery in the Atlantic

world or exploitation of immigrants today, ancient Mediterranean slavery,

there's some noticeable differences. So we do know, of course, that there were

plenty of ancient Roman enslaved persons who did this kind of hard physical

labor, think mining or farming or domestic labor that was needed to maintain a

house and raise children, but also there were lots of enslaved people who

worked as craftsmen or artisans that ran businesses that functioned as

doorkeepers or guards. And I think especially important was that a lot were

used as literate workers. That's a fancy way of saying scribes, copyists,

letter deliverers, readers, that we know that lots of literature from ancient

Romans that we read today wasn't actually written by the hand of the person

who's supposedly its author, but was likely dictated to enslaved or formerly

enslaved scribes who are actually physically producing these texts. So this is

one of the biggest differences that we see that people were doing kind of hard

jobs. And of course, writing is also physically taxing in antiquity. So it's

hard in a different way, but it's very different than how we think about modern

slavery for what kind of jobs people had.

There were enslaved people doing all

kinds of jobs, not necessarily just disgusting or particularly painful ones. Does

this mean that Romans were capable of seeing enslaved people as human, or are

they seeing them in terms of these are subhuman?

Yeah, it's unsurprisingly a

complicated question, right? The answer is yes and no. We have some texts, most

famously the philosopher Seneca's 47th Letter, where he makes clear that some

Roman elites did recognize that enslaved persons were human and that anyone,

whether through bad luck in warfare or the circumstances of their birth, could

end up being enslaved. But at the same time, they also legally classified

enslaved persons as objects that were meant to be used for particular purposes.

So a good example of this, related to Roman law, is the author and politician

Verro said that enslaved persons were speaking tools. He called them instrumenta

and he saw them as comparable to other farm tools. So it's this complicated

thing where there was this kind of legal definition of enslaved persons as

objects or tools, but also there were definitely Romans who understood that

these were also people and that, especially in the way they conceptualize

slavery, they said, okay, we know that anyone could end up enslaved at some

point. So of course these are also humans at the same time.

Right. So we've

kind of touched upon a little bit about it, but what are some of the ways that

a Roman could end up enslaved?

Yeah, I mean, the main two ways that people

ended up enslaved in the Roman world were through warfare or through birth. So

especially in the kind of mid Roman Republic, as Rome is starting to expand

beyond the Italian peninsula, starts conquering not only Carthage, but moving

further and further east throughout the Mediterranean, there are many more

people who are being enslaved as captives of wartime, warfare, and are being

mostly transported to Italy or Sicily in order to be put to work farming,

basically supporting the breadbasket for Rome and many others, especially after

that time, were born to enslave people. Roman law eventually began to say that

the legal status of a mother played a large role in the status of the child. And

especially for listeners in the Western world, this is important because this

is an idea that places like, for example, Colonial America borrowed for their

own slave laws. Along with this, there were also a few other ways, such as debt

slavery, if someone was under enough debt, they could sell themselves for a

specific period of time in order to try to pay off that debt.

Right. Going back

to the women, because of course, I'm a woman, I'm interested in this, say that

I am working in a household and the master has taken a fancy to me, I

presumably don't have a choice if he decides this is what we're doing, is what

we're doing. I become pregnant. So even though my master could be a very rich,

powerful man, maybe a politician, because of who I am, that child will never be

able to have any status, even as an illegitimate son, right?

Right. That it

would not be the case that, yeah, if a enslaved woman was sexually assaulted by

her enslaver, became pregnant, that child carries the same legal status as the

mother. And this is something that Romans were at times concerned about and interested

in, for example, became really common for Roman enslavers to manumit or free

their enslaved women in order to marry them and have children with them. But

along with that, there is also this really important gendered aspect to some

ancient slave labor, especially for the Romans. But a really common practice

was wet nursing, where enslaved women were expected to help, for example, rear

and breastfeed enslavers' babies. And as those who have had children know much

better than I do, typically the ability to lactate is tied to having given

birth. So a lot of enslaved women were expected to feed and care for their

enslaved child over and instead of feeding their own child.

Ooh, I can imagine

that would have been mentally challenging. That's hard. Staying on gender for a

little while, we've talked about wet nurses, are there any other jobs that we

see that are very specifically gendered?

That's one of the main ones that comes

to mind. I would say when we think about this, there tends to be, probably

unsurprisingly for the Roman world, more domestic roles of domestic labor fell

on enslaved women. Some of that labor outside of the household tended to fall

on men. But also there are jobs that we, or I should say jobs or roles that we

don't often associate with enslaved people, even though they were really

common. For example, being gladiators was often something that fell upon those

who were either deemed criminals by the Roman state or who were enslaved.

So

we've spoken about a load of different jobs that enslaved people were expected

to do, including some that sound like it required quite a lot of education. So

how does this happen? Are people buying educated people that have, I don't

know, been defeated in a war, or are they training people to do this job in house,

as it were?

Yeah, a little bit of both. You do have, yeah, you have instances

of people who are going out and explicitly purchasing educated enslaved

persons. We know that there's a great piece by the scholar, Harriet Flower,

that looks at the case of what we know is the most expensive enslaved person

ever bought in Rome, who was kind of trained really well in different languages

and being able to write and being able to receive dictation from enslavers and

make all these notes. But also we know that there were instances of people

training enslaved persons in house. For example, Cicero had many enslaved

people under his command. Probably the most famous is Tiro, one of his enslaved

people who eventually became free. But he had many, many others and was known

for training some of them in kind of this, or paying others to train them in

the art of being a scribe.

So even though these people are legally owned, we

still see some investment in them sometimes. I'm not saying every time.

Exactly.

And the same happens on rural villas where you have large agricultural estates

where enslavers would pick a certain enslaved person to be the overseer, in

Latin that's called the villicus. And they're the one who's in charge of

essentially overseeing, but also training others and basically how to farm.

Okay.

Now I'm going to ask you a question from the perspective of, I'm thinking of

the items in my house that do jobs for me, and some of them are more expensive

than others and some of them, you know, really, really handy, but technically

not essential. Are we seeing that only really rich Romans are able to

afford to buy human beings or is this something that someone that working

class, you know, a butcher, is he able to afford to buy an enslaved person?

Yeah,

certainly not everyone in the ancient Roman world could afford an enslaved

person, but we know, for example, elites could own and enslave dozens or

hundreds. Whereas artisans or farmers may only be able to afford one or two. So

there's definitely a distinction that not everyone could afford to enslave

someone, not everyone did, but we do see this kind of discrepancy between the

kind of elites of Rome and everyone else who did not have that same capacity to

enslave, even to the point where some of the elites would purchase enslaved

persons essentially to be window dressing, that is to say that they were there

to show that the enslaver had status and didn't kind of fill a formal role in

the house other than showing that they have money and are able to exploit and

own other people.

So instead of buying a designer handbag, it's conspicuous

consumption by purchasing humans you technically don't need. Okay. So let's say

that I am in the market because I need some help around the house, is there a

place that I can go to buy a human being and what kind of prices are we looking

at? Are there set prices? Do I know how much I'm going to be paying before I

leave the house?

Yeah, there are. So when it comes to what the slave market

looked like in the Roman world, it's a little messy because we have some

written sources that tell us a bit about what slave markets were like, but we

don't have as many archaeological sources or the places that we do have aren't

as, it's not super clear how things functioned. So one of the things we do know

is that often enslaved people were transported to, there were kind of certain

key sites that were especially known for being slave markets. So the Greek

island of Delos was a major one, Athens, of course, Corinth also became known

as one for a while, the island of Rhodes. And of course the ports of Rome as

well. So typically what we think we would see in a slave market is that people would

be kind of essentially put up on an auction block and the slave trafficker

would provide information about them, saying their age, to some degree where

they're coming from. We might think of this as a nationality or race today, but

essentially saying their origin point. And we know that there were some Roman

laws about that were trying to restrict how slave traffickers would try to

like, basically like hide information about the enslaved person, right? Whether

that's like hiding a broken leg or hiding that they were sick or had some kind

of chronic condition in order to get more money from potential enslavers. So we

know that this was, at least according to Roman law was an issue and also that

traffickers were very, although slavery was such a lot of legal suspicion

around traffickers. The traffickers were not seen as good people, almost the

equivalent of pirates. So even though the system was an economic backbone of

Rome, the people who were doing this dirty work of trafficking were also

themselves not seen as good people and not trusted.

That's really interesting. Can

we see that people were deliberately purchasing certain people with particular

traits or particular physical abilities for specific jobs, or would you just

buy someone and hope for the best?

From what we know, Roman enslavers tended to

buy people with particular tasks or goals in mind. From what we know from, for

example, agricultural literature, from Roman elites, they tended to purchase

people based on their ability to do certain types of farm work, or if they were

hoping to have them function as an overseer on a villa, they might say, for

example, some of our agricultural writers say, make sure to find someone who's

smart, but not too smart, strong, but not too strong, right? They have certain

kind of characteristics that they're looking for where they wanted to find

someone who was capable of a job, but also didn't threaten the enslaver's

position there, right? If they ended up being stronger or smarter, that Roman

enslavers worried a lot that were always really anxious about their own

vulnerability.

Okay. So you didn't necessarily want to buy the best of the best

if it was going to show you up. Okay. So let's imagine then a Greek, he is in

Corinth just before the sack of Corinth, let's say, and he's literate and he's

quite elite. He gets enslaved after the sack of Corinth, hypothetically. He

gets taken back to Rome. Because he's literate and maybe not the physically

strongest, is he necessarily always going to be picked up for a job that

requires his skills or were there some people who were unlucky and would be

sent just wherever they were sent?

Yeah, it depends a lot on the person's

previous social status. This is something that classicist Catherine Hummler is

working a lot on right pointing out to us that when Romans tended to, you know,

during their colonial conquests of the Mediterranean, let's say, defeated a

certain city, destroyed that city and enslaved some of its population, the

elites of that population tended to get off without, with fewer consequences

that typically they weren't enslaved, typically they were treated a little bit

better. And those who were already enslaved in that city or that place tended

to be transferred over to do a similar type of job elsewhere. So in this case,

right, this might be, if this is someone who was already in a relatively, you

know, was a free person in Corinth, had some social status, they might be

enslaved, but have a specific role as a scribe or literate worker in Rome,

rather than being, let's say, sent to do agriculture or mine.

So they're

stripping people of rights, but they're still kind of keeping status in mind. That's

really interesting. Wow. Okay. I mean, everything with the ancient world, all

of it's due to status, right? So it's maybe not surprising that they're taking

it into consideration. Can you explain to me, because this is a word that maybe

isn't heard very often nowadays, what is manumission?

Yes, manumission is an

important word, and it's one that's a little different than emancipation or

freedom. So manumission is the act of enslavers freeing enslaved persons. So

that's because of that, it's different than an enslaved person taking their

freedom into their own hands. They might call that like self-emancipation. And

I'll clarify this as we go, but it's also a little bit different than how we

think of freedom today in a kind of Western society. So in ancient Rome, there

are a few ways manumission happened. There's a legal official could use their

kind of judicial rod to declare someone free. They could add their name to the

Roman census list and grant them citizenship since being a citizen and being an

enslaved person were considered antithetical in Roman society. You couldn't be

a slave and a citizen. You had to be, you could only be one of the other. Or an

enslaver could declare their enslaved person free in their will upon their

death. And also in the Eastern Mediterranean, so like Roman Greece or Roman Asia

Minor, it was really common to dedicate enslaved persons to gods like Apollo or

Zeus or the mother of the gods or the Jewish God in order to manuate them. So

what would they be doing then? Would they be turned into priests or temple

cleaners or something? It depends on the circumstances for the Eastern

Mediterranean that some ended up having a kind of a temple job that they were

forced to work in order to kind of show respect for the deity. Some were just

let free. That was it. Others were required with certain legal clauses to

continue laboring for their former enslaver, which is part of why this gets

really messy when we think about manumission for the Roman world is that it

often still involved certain obligations that they held to their former

enslaver. So freedom doesn't necessarily mean you are now able to go traveling,

start a family or a business. You still have obligations, even though you're

technically not owned anymore.

That's interesting. So what kind of obligations

would you have?

So freedom in the Roman world didn't mean freedom from enslavers.

For example, most formerly enslaved people were granted one of the names of

their former enslaver upon manumission. So you were kind of forever tied to the

Roman family that owned you. They also had legal obligations that were grouped

into two categories. In Latin these are called obsequia and operae. So obsequia

refers, like our word obsequius, refers to these legally expected instances of

obedience or deference that were owed to this former enslaver. Operae were

these works that had to happen. So this could be physical or intellectual work

that was owed to the enslaver even after manumission occurred. So for example,

sometimes contracts would say enslaved persons owed a certain number of days of

labor per year to their former enslaver, or would owe a certain portion of

their income to them, or in some cases had to just continue working for them

for the rest of their lives, that their freedom in this way was it's unclear

what it meant to be free if they were still being required to work until this former

enslaver died.

Yeah, right. Could someone ask to be freed or was there

something that you could not do? It was not a request that you would be allowed

to make?

Yeah, you could request to be freed. And usually what this involved

was also kind of basically building up a certain amount of money in order to be

freed. So enslaved people in the Roman world were often given what's called a

peculium, which is sort of like an allowance. So it's still legally was like

the finances of the enslaver, but they were allowed to have some money that was

kind of on its face belonged to them. And if they saved up enough, they could,

for example, purchase their own freedom. But often what this meant is paying

the price of one's replacement, essentially. So this is kind of the system kind

of perpetuated itself, that if someone bought their own freedom with money that

they kind of slowly gathered from their enslaver, of course, the enslaver could

say no, say this peculium is my money anyway, I still have use for you. But

also a lot of, especially by their 30s or 40s, enslaved persons tended to be

treated by enslavers as having less use, right? They're getting older, women

being past childbearing age, tended to be manumitted more, they were kind of

seen as less reproductive and less productive overall. So we start to have this

cycle of people paying to be free, but then are functionally paying for their

replacement.

Harsh, really, really harsh. Whether or not it's offered or

whether or not it's requested, how realistic was manumission for an average

enslaved person? Was this a pipe dream for most of them?

Yeah, this is also

where things differ a lot from when we think about modern Atlantic slavery and Roman

slavery, that in the Atlantic world, the manumission was not that common,

right, that enslavers barely granted freedom to their enslaved persons. Whereas

in the Roman world, it was a much more common phenomenon. The Roman world saw a

lot more manumissions than many other slave societies. But I want to clarify

that that doesn't mean that this was really realistic to expect or that most

enslaved persons would be manumitted in their lifetimes. Typically, manumission

happened for those who were already within the enslaver's inner circles, were

in these kind of higher status positions that an enslaved person could hold. So

it still came down to status in many ways. So Cicero's enslaved literate worker

Tiro is a good example of someone who already had a pretty strong social status

among Cicero's enslaved persons. If this was someone who was working in the mines

or working on a villa, this was much less likely.

So is it fair to say then

that there were some enslaved people who were seen as more disposable than

others?

Definitely, especially since, especially those who were working in

agriculture or mining and as well as kind of functioning as kind of doorkeepers

for a household. These were typically roles who were given to those who were

either seen as low status criminal or too old or disabled to do other types of

labor.

When we're talking about a slave-owning society, we've spoken

about some people couldn't afford any enslaved people, some people could afford

a hundred. What percentage of the population was enslaved at any one time? Did

anyone ever do like a head count?

Yeah, this is where our information is really

difficult, right? So because, as we said earlier, one of the ways to manumit an

enslaved person was to add them to the census list. And this meant functionally

that enslaved people weren't on the census list, right? There wasn't a head

count when Romans did their census. So we don't have super reliable

information. A lot of it is historical guesswork, but most historians place it

somewhere in the range of 10 to 30% of the population, 30% being a very high

end that very few agree on. 10 to 20% tends to be the number that most

historians think is probably the most accurate. So this is a substantial

portion, and here we're thinking especially about like the late Republican

period, the early Imperial period, when this number would be most accurate and

after these conquests of the Eastern Mediterranean and up into Gaul is when we

see this really high number.

And do those percentages change from, you know,

like the rural communities and the urban communities?

Yeah, it definitely does.

I mean, you definitely have kind of pockets of higher enslaved populations, especially

in places like Sicily and in southern Italy on agricultural states of the Roman

elites that they would employ dozens or hundreds of enslaved persons to keep up

their summer villas, keep up their plantations, you know, produce enough grain

to send back to Rome. So you definitely have kind of concentrations both in

rural areas, but then also some major cities like Rome definitely had a large

enslaved population.

Were there any people enslaved by, let's say, the state or

civic groups rather than individuals?

Yes, that was something that a lot of scholars

are now starting to turn to and look at more. We have this group that are known

as public slaves who were publicly owned by a city. So in this case, the city

of Rome could own slaves, but these were often people who were, had to do some

of these, let's say, the dirty jobs that we discussed earlier. These are people

who are often involved in construction work, often involved in city maintenance

in many ways, so are doing a lot of the jobs of hard labor and also involved in

religious practice. So we know that a lot of enslaved people were involved in

Roman religion, often in these roles of kind of the functionaries who are

making things happen to make Roman religion work, and this applies both to kind

of state religion, Roman state religion, but also to household religion in Rome

that enslaved persons were often responsible for kind of prepping worship for

one's household deities, prepping sacrifices or other things like that tending

to the hearth in many ways.

I'm going to ask a question that is directly

related to something that I saw on social media recently, which is that our, in

my country anyway, our King Charles has a servant who puts toothpaste on his toothbrush

for him, which begs the question, is this guy capable of being, you know, a

functioning adult? Is this what we're seeing in the ancient world that people are

relying on enslaved people so much that they themselves become essentially

useless?

Yes and no, we do see this at times. So a good example of this is work

that's happening right now at the intersection of slavery studies and disability

studies is starting to look at how we're enslaved people being used to, let's

say, compensate for an enslaver's disabilities, right? Enslaver, for example,

starts to lose their sight and they enslave another human in order to kind of

be their eyes or be their ears, or sometimes to be almost like their prosthetic

limb, that they are the ones who are picking things up for them, are helping

them walk. But along with that, a really good example of this is one of Pliny

the Younger's letters. This is letter 3.5. He describes his uncle Pliny the Elder

and his literary habits. I mean, in this it's really interesting because he

gives us this image that sounds a lot like King Charles in the way that he's kind

of fully taken care of by the servants around him. So just to give us an

example from this, part of why Pliny is telling us this story is that he wants

to show how Pliny the Elder is almost like this floating brain that everyone takes

care of his physical needs. So he has all the time in the world to think and

write. And one of the phrases he I'll read it off for us because one of the

great phrases he gives us is he says, for he, Pliny the Elder, never read

without taking extracts and used to say that there was never a book so bad that

it was not good in some passage or another. After the sun bath, he usually bathed

in cold water. He took a snack and a brief nap and worked until dinner time. After

dinner, a book would be read aloud. Note that he's not the one reading it. It's

being read to him. He would take notes in a cursory way. So he was dictating

notes to someone else besides the reader. He was only in the country when he

was there taking his bath. When I say in the bath, he was literally in the bath

bathing. He was being scraped and being rubbed down and listening to a reader

dictating. When he was traveling, he cut himself off from every other thought. He

kept a shorthand writer with a book and tablets who wore mittens in the winter

to make sure that the weather didn't rob even a moment of his thought. And he

used to be carried in a litter. So we had four enslaved people physically

carrying him on this kind of larger chair so that he didn't have to waste any

time from studying and writing.

Wow, that's intense. I mean, we talk about now,

don't we, about gadgets supposedly freeing us from drudgery so that we can concentrate

on higher thought and leisure time. These are essentially then human gadgets.

Exactly.

This is the way to think of this is a really important way to think of enslaved

people in ancient Rome is human gadgets. This is why enslaved people were

partially classified legally as tools for the Romans because they thought of them

as tools who helped you do daily tasks so that you don't have to do them

anymore and give yourself more leisure time.

Right. So what I'm thinking is, is

that when we see depictions of the slave society on screen, for instance, they

are always either completely in the background or quite often treated very

badly. Was this a universal experience or were there enslaved people that were treated

with a bit more respect?

Yeah, this is hard, right? Because the answer is in some

ways, yes, right? There are kind of like status differences within Roman slave

cultures, right? That some people were being treated less harshly than others. But

we also know that there are instances where even people in, let's say, roles that

we would assume are high status or less threatened or less vulnerable to their

enslavers still might experience lots of risk and bodily harm. A really good

example is from Galen in one of his texts on the diseases and errors of the

soul. He talks about how the emperor Hadrian got really mad at one of his

enslaved scribes and ended up striking them with a stylus and the enslaved person

lost their eye. And in response to this, Hadrian later felt guilty about this,

said if he could make up for it. And of course, the enslaved person said, all I

can ask for is your eye in return because what else could match this?

Wow,

that's cheeky. Did he get away with it?

As far as we know from Galen, we don't

have any other information about this story or whether it's, you know, fully true

or been embellished a little bit over time. But yeah.

Right. So let's, let's

imagine the emperor is amused by the audacity of someone speaking to him with

such, you know, bravery. We can imagine that the enslaved person might be allowed

to walk away. Let's say that the emperor was actually furious at the audacity What

were people allowed to do to their human property?

The answer is pretty much anything.

I mean, this is to think about it as, you know, comparable to chattel slavery

in the Americas that sexual assault and rape was allowed many times and allowed

foreign Roman law. Murder was at times allowed foreign Roman law. So this was a

really explorative system that didn't, didn't interfere much with the kind of what

the Romans imagined to be the absolute authority of the enslaver. And a lot of

this is also tied into the way that Romans were already thinking about especially

male enslavers as, you know, the head of the household, the pater familias, that

because enslaved persons were imagined to be part of the family, that the, let's

say that the head of the household had the same types of authority over them as

over children, right, that they were treated as people over whom absolute

authority could be used if needed.

So I'm thinking that some of the physical punishments

must have been really, really bad.And if I, for instance, wanted

to punish an enslaved person by withholding food or whipping them, for

instance, I'm guessing these things must have happened. Am I going to get a magistrate

knocking at my door saying, you can't do this. This is cruel. Or are they just

going to ignore me and say, yeah, that's your property. You do what you want.

Usually

the Roman answer was, your property, do what you want. Sometimes if there were

some instances of kind of excessive treatment that others would intervene,

there was an example of Augustus being really frustrated with an enslaver who

got mad because one of their enslaved persons broke a glass during dinnertime

and wanted to, I want to say feed them to the eels that he happened to have. And

Augustus intervened and said, no, that's excessive. So like there are instances

where Romans did say, okay, this is, this is going too far. But in a lot of cases,

physical punishment, capital punishment, torture were on the table as

possibilities for how enslavers treated enslaved persons and sometimes were

legally mandated. That's kind of a shocking aspect of Roman law is that

enslaved persons often could not testify in court without being tortured to do

so because they were considered not trustworthy on their own. That information had

to be extracted in order to be deemed true or valuable.

Wow. I mean, I'd heard

that. I'm perhaps assumed that that was excessive. Do we have any recorded

instances of this happening or is this just a possibility that was never

actually enforced?

We do know that it was enforced sometimes. It's definitely

not something that happened all the time. And by the imperial period, the Roman

jurists are kind of going back and forth about whether or not this is the best

approach to this. But it does seem that it happened at times and that we have kind

of also like moral tales that some of the enslavers told themselves, especially

in writings from people like Valerius Maximus, who has this whole section in

his kind of text on memorable sayings and doings all about enslaved people who

are kind of gladly stepping up for their enslaver to kind of take the blame in

court or to swap clothing with them in order to take their place when someone's

coming in to kill the enslaver and raise the household. So they definitely have

also these stories that they tell themselves and probably told their enslaved

persons about. Here's what it means to be loyal. Right. OK. So in other words, the

picture that we're building is that if you're an enslaved person, it really was

a huge amount of luck as to what your life was going to be like. You could end

up with someone who was kind and fairly aware of his social image outside of

the household, or you could get someone pretty sadistic and he would be allowed

to do anything to you.

That's extreme. If an enslaved person did not like their

master and their master did not want to free them, what could a slave do?

Yeah,

I mean, so the possibilities here are some enslaved persons attempted to transfer

enslavers that they basically requested from their enslaver to be transferred

to someone else. Sometimes an enslaver would grant that, sometimes not. Others

would attempt to run away. We have lots of instances of enslaved persons attempting

to flee their enslaver and some getting as far away as, for example, getting

from Rome to Asia Minor without being captured. Well, there's, you know, this

is a time period when if you're able to kind of escape the household and you have

enough money to get out of the city, it's really hard to track an individual. Right.

This is at a time when Rome is not necessarily, you know, a surveillance state.

It's not able to find individuals in this way. But this also led to different

practices of basically, you know, ads that would go out sometimes from

enslavers saying, I need help to find this enslaved person. I heard they were

last seen at X location. Can you help me find them? Or if an enslaved person was

captured and brought back to their enslaver, often they were required to wear

these certain collars and tags that says here's my name. I belong to this

person on this block of Rome. Return me for a gold coin, a solidus if you if

you find me.

I've seen I've seen one in a museum in Rome and I think my heart stopped

when I when I read the inscription. Wow. I mean, it's not a pleasant thing, is

it?

And beyond that, like there are a lot of one of the things

that that slavery scholars really are interested in looking at is how enslaved

persons sometimes kind of subtly rebelled by doing tasks more slowly or

refusing to do them or doing things that kind of slowly disrupted the

enslaver's life and what they expected from enslaved persons. And we see this a

lot not from what's kind of happening on the ground, but from this kind of top

down literature of the elites, right, where whenever there are complaints about

enslaved persons being lazy or troublesome, right, we often pause on that

rhetoric and say, OK, are they are they being lazy or are they just not doing what

their enslaver is trying to coerce them to do? What does it mean that enslavers

think this should be done and how would enslaved persons interpret this totally

differently? So we can almost see them making themselves annoying so that they

get sold to someone else, maybe, and, you know, cross their fingers that the

next one's going to be a bit better.

OK, so it sounds like they didn't have a

lot of rights or protections at all. But it does sound like there is the

possibility of improving one's way of life and improving your social status if

you if you're able to be freed. So it's fair to say, is it that being an

enslaved person is not necessarily a death sentence? You're not going to be

born and die enslaved. There is a possibility.

Right. For ancient Rome, yeah,

it's a possibility that it's it's not the only status that someone will hold in

their lives.

And it's not necessarily going to be a disgusting job. It can be

intellectually stimulating.

Right. Potentially.

But on the flip side, when we

say that, should we be worried about people in modern society who therefore

point to it and say, it's not that bad, we should be bringing it back?

Yes,

definitely. This is one of the biggest issues with studying ancient Roman

slavery is that because there are these things that are different than slavery in

the Atlantic world, such as, for example, higher manumission rates in Rome than

in the Americas, or that we we tend to hear more of the, let's say, let's call

them the success stories of ancient Roman people who were able to get out of

slavery than we do the millions and millions who didn't. And as well as things

like the fact that they're kind of different jobs or roles that the slave

persons had in Roman society compared to American society, that we tend to, it's

really easy to look at this and say, oh yeah, they had it easier because you

could get out of slavery. You could have, let's say, a cushier position as an

enslaved person. But that was the case for only a very small portion of Roman

enslaved persons. And that this doesn't mean that this isn't still chattel

slavery and that people weren't extremely physically, sexually, psychologically

vulnerable at any given moment.

Yeah. So let's stress then, we should not hear

these stories of rare people managing to make their lives better and become

free and then put on some rose tinted spectacles and say, yeah, it's fine. Ancient

Rome was a great place to be a slave. What was daily life like for

the average enslaved person? Would they be able to have a family, for instance,

a bit of romance, a bit of leisure time?

Yeah. There's only a little bit that

we know. This is really hard to unpack given that we have so little kind of

evidence from enslaved persons themselves about their daily lives. But when it

comes to what we do know about something like enslaved persons having families,

unsurprisingly, the answer is yes and no, but in a really interesting way. So

under Roman law, enslaved persons were stripped from their homelands, their

families. They weren't kind of legally or socially allowed to have ancestors,

right? Their ancestors, yeah, they were kind of deemed as not having ancestors.

This is part of why in Roman or Pompeian households, enslaved persons would

tend to the ritual space for the ancestral deity of their ancestors, sorry, of

their enslavers ancestors, right? They would tend to them because they were

considered part of that family. So they became kind of part of that ancestral

legacy, which is really strange and there's still a lot to unpack there for

scholars. But also because enslaved people were considered property rather than

people, there was no legal way to marry for enslaved persons. They couldn't

marry each other under Roman law, but Roman enslavers did recognize an informal

type of marriage. They called this type of marriage contubernium. And what it

means is essentially that enslaved persons could still make families and strive

to stay together, right? They had to maintain the relations in a system that

was built to pull them apart. But they also had to deal with kind of, there's a

really dark side to this too, of like enslavers tended to exploit this hope for

stable family relationships that enslaved persons had. A good example, this is

Theo Frastus. He's one of Aristotle's students. In one of his economic

writings, he says that he claims that it's really important for enslavers to

allow enslaved persons to have children because then enslavers could use them as

essentially hostages or collateral to ensure that the enslaved parents would be

loyal and would stay there. So they kind of at times would take advantage of

the fact that enslaved persons wanted to also have lives, have families, have

relationships and use that to also kind of exploit even further.

So you're not

going to run away from me because I have your baby?

Essentially, yes.

And that

baby, I'm assuming when it grew up would become yet another enslaved person in

the household.

Exactly.

Who they didn't even have to purchase at the market. They,

you know, oh, wow, okay. Let's talk about the rose-tinted spectacles a little

bit more. Is it fair to say that we don't have a huge amount of written

evidence from specifically enslaved people that says, this is what my life is

like?

Exactly, yeah. This is one of the hardest things about trying to

reconstruct a lot of our information about Roman slavery is that there's not

too much that speaks directly or explicitly about the experiences of enslaved

persons, right? Usually what we see is writings by Roman elites about enslaved

persons saying, this is what they think enslaved persons should or should not

be doing. And the problem here, of course, is that, as I mentioned earlier, we

know that enslaved persons were often the writers themselves. They are often

the scribes of so many texts in the ancient Roman world. So there might be

things that are kind of, let's say, hidden away or that we haven't interpreted as

being said by enslaved persons that we've just assumed like, oh, this is

written by Cicero or Caesar, so this must be his thought rather than the

thought of an enslaved person. But also we look a lot at inscriptions on

tombstones since enslaved and formerly enslaved persons would often have

tombstones and memorialized themselves or be memorialized by an enslaver on

this tombstone. So we can at least see a little bit of how they're positioning

themselves at their death, even though that may not kind of reflect everything about

them, their entire lives. It gives us some way in. And one of the places that

scholars are starting to look more and more to try to see what we might be able

to hear about slavery is reading the writings of formerly enslaved persons. So

for example, the philosopher Epictetus, the fable writer Phaedrus, the early

Christian Hermes are places that we can look to to say, okay, we know that

these people were enslaved at some point, do they give us any hints of what

that was like for them in their writings? We don't have like a, this is what it

was like, but we can just get snippets here and there if we're looking really

closely.

So it's a bit like fighting a needle in a haystack.

Of course

it is, okay, of course it is.

So we've spoken about not having a lot of

evidence from enslaved people themselves. I'm assuming we have a lot of

evidence from say owning people. I am aware that the field of ancient studies in

academia has not been perfect in the past. Is it fair to say that some of our

longer held assumptions about what slavery was like are colored by the fact

that we have writings by elites, so we're just gonna really trust what the

elites are saying and not bother trying to work out and reconstruct what other

people are saying. We've got these texts, let's go.

I think that's very true. I

mean, one way to put it too is that a lot of the work in ancient slavery

studies that's been, let's say more critical of ancient sources, not taking

them at face value, that have started to recognize the kind of atrocities and

slavery mostly happened from the 1970s onwards, right? So in some ways-

That's

really recent.

It's really recent, right? So it's really in the last 50ish

years that scholars have taken this more critical perspective. And part of that

has to do too with the fact that a lot was changing in our own society in the

60s and 70s globally, right? And we're thinking about post-World War II reconstruction,

decolonization, civil rights movements that really shifted the way that

scholars started to interpret data from the past, right? That we have a lot of

the same data that we had previous to the 70s, but are looking at it

differently and saying, oh, okay, this is actually a lot worse than we had

previously allowed ourselves to see. So is it fair to say that in those recent

decades as more and more different kinds of people from different backgrounds

and different identities have been able to study the ancient world, we are now

getting people who are willing and keen to ask these questions and focus on

these topics that may not have been of particular interest of the typical

classicist of 100 years ago. I think that's true. And I think part of it too is

of course that like comparative slavery studies is a huge field that's not only

looking at the Atlantic world and the ancient world, but is considering a bunch

of different types of slavery and forms of dependence throughout the globe and

throughout history that have really shifted the way that scholars have thought

about slavery and said, okay, we need to look at this in light of other slave

societies or slave-owning cultures throughout history. And the same goes for

methods and approaches, right? That we have to bring together social history,

right? The study of lived experiences and everyday practices of people, archeology,

paparology, epigraphy, prosopography, which is like the study of names, kinship

ties, all of these different sub-fields and fields to try to get an accurate

picture of what's going on given that we're trying to reconstruct a bit of the

experiences of people who weren't allowed to leave that much in, let's say the

material record or the written record that we have to kind of do this work of

reconstructing from so many different angles.

I mean, I think everything in the

field of ancient studies has typically previously been a focus on texts, but

I'm a huge fan of a multidisciplinary approach. So what kind of approaches,

what kind of angles can we use, what kind of evidence can we use to try and see

a picture that isn't just what we read in the text of elite slave owners?

Yeah,

some of the places to look for are, so I would say epitaphs, right, inscriptions

on tombstones are a major place to start to look for people speaking a little

bit in their own words, although there are limits to this too because we know

that sometimes enslavers would be the ones who are commissioning the

inscriptions on an enslaved person's tombstone to say, oh, I'm this person, I

was enslaved to the ex-person and I loved my enslaver, and you're like, okay,

well, that's written by the enslaver to praise themselves, that's not helpful

information to us. Same with papyri, that a lot of people who work with

documentary texts that happened to be preserved in Egypt, we can learn a lot

about what was it like to be an enslaved person in Roman Egypt from contracts

that we have from there, from enslaved persons who were letter carriers of an

invitation to a birthday party that was sent from one enslaver to another

person. We can start to piece together a little bit of this experience from

stuff outside of kind of elite written texts.

If we think about imagery, when a

lot of us think about Atlantic slavery, one of the objects that always comes to

mind is shackles. Do we see objects like these being used by the Romans?

We do,

so we see things like shackles, the collars with the tags that I mentioned

earlier, and this is where we're starting to see more and more collaboration in

the field between scholars of slavery and scholars of incarceration to try to

think through how did kind of shackles or other ways to kind of bind or confine

people, how were they used in other locations? Well, there's a really good

study that gets a little bit outside of Roman studies, but of Greek towers in

kind of rural Greek areas where enslaved persons were likely, after working in

let's say a field, doing agricultural work at night, were locked into these

towers and shackled up to make sure that they did not try to escape in the

middle of the night. And we still have some evidence of kind of how the

doorstops worked, where the shackles would have been, the walls. So we know

that there were also, yeah, this material evidence that we can try to

reinterpret to understand how people were kind of confined to certain spaces. The

same goes for example, Pompeii. There was famously in the news recently a

discovery of a bakery where there were also potential evidence of enslaved

persons being forced to labor here and being kind of confined to this space that

they had to work and live and sleep here. I think it always becomes a bit more

real when the evidence is tangible rather than something that we're reading in

a book. And it really brings it home.

Now, you know me, always talking about

gladiators. I can't go through this conversation without mentioning Spartacus because

everyone knows who he is. He led a slave revolt, right? Is he the only person who

ever did that in the history of Rome?

Unsurprisingly, no. He was not the only

person to have ever done that. So Spartacus's famous revolt is one of many, but

sometimes we call it the Third Servile War. And you can guess by the fact that

it's the third, that it's one of at least three. So there were two other major

slave revolts that the Romans were really concerned about that we now call the

Servile Wars that happened in Southern Italy and Sicily. And these earlier ones

were actually really successful. It's sometimes helpful to kind of think of

them as comparable to what happened on Haiti today and kind of the Haitian

Revolution because these earlier leaders who led slave revolts on Sicily overtook

about half the island and ruled there from multiple years and developed their

own independent kingdoms that were, and really a lot of them seem to have been

Syrians who were enslaved, who ended up trying to kind of recreate a kind of a

Syrian-style government on Sicily. And we also know of other slave revolts that

happened, for example, around the silver mines outside of Athens, on some of

the Greek islands around Sparta, especially with the helots around Sparta. This

is, even though we don't often think of them as enslaved, they kind of often

fall into this category of like serfs rather than slaves that they also

famously rebelled a lot. And this continued into the Roman imperial period. Even

though we have fewer and fewer slave revolts in our historical record, we know

of some instances of this happening as well as one of my favorite examples of

this is in North Africa, we have this revolt led by Bulla who is going around

killing enslavers and freeing enslaved persons. And this causes a lot of kind

of consternation on the part of the Roman government that they're unhappy with

how things are going in North Africa. So we're seeing slaves taking their fates

into their own hands and, you know, risking it all.

What's the Roman response

to revolts like this? Are they thinking to themselves, yeah, it is an unfair

system and we should be kinder? Or are they going the opposite way and saying, we're

clearly not being authoritarian enough and we need to buy some more shackles?

It

is the latter.

Of course it is. Of course it is, it's the Romans.

Especially

when it comes to, for example, the Sicilian slave revolts, the answer is

military response to call in legions to send down to the island to try to

overtake them. But also in a way that isn't necessarily successful for the

Romans at first, that it takes them a while to overtake these revolts and they

start to become really worried because they aren't able to do so immediately. And

maybe one of the ways to think about this is that Romans were at times, actually

a lot of the time really anxious about the social and the, let's say the

physical power that enslaved persons could have. We know from the philosopher

Seneca that at some point the Roman Senate proposed to require enslaved persons

to wear uniforms. But immediately when they started deliberating this, they

backed off this idea, right? Because they realized that enslaved persons would

then realize how many people they had and how many free people there were and

presumably could fight back. So there was this concern that letting people know

that they had power was a bad idea.

Incredible, of course, that's the most

Roman response I could think of. So this is all going on in a pagan society, but

Rome didn't stay pagan forever. They began to go to Christianity. You and I,

we've read the Bible. It says that you should treat others as you would like to

be treated. I shall not kill, et cetera, et cetera. So do we see when

Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire? Do they end

slavery because that's not treating people how they would like to be treated?

Yeah,

Christians did not enslavery at all when they took over the Roman Empire. Christians,

yeah, Christians continued to enslave people across the Mediterranean world. And

this continued well into late antiquity and the medieval period. And kind of in

relation to our conversation earlier about public slaves, some people ended up not

just being enslaved to individuals, but could also be enslaved to monasteries

or churches. They became this legal definition in the medieval period, the race

ecclesiae, the property of churches where people were enslaved to churches. So

especially under the Christian controlled Roman Empire, laws were still being

passed that allowed Christians to kill or harm their enslaved persons without

consequence. Really good example of this, just to give us one from the

Theodosian Code. It's one that Constantine himself back in 319 put into law

where he at the time said, okay, well, if an enslaver beat an enslaved person

with rods, they shouldn't fear any criminal punishment if the enslaved person

dies. As long as this was done in an okay way that he would be guilty of murder

if this was done kind of immoderately or really willfully, but if it's done by

accident, no problem. And later in 326, Constantine beefs up this law a little

bit, he revises it and says, whenever someone happens to beat an enslaved

person such that they die, masters free from blame provided that they were

doing this because they were trying to correct the very evil deeds and the bad

conduct of these household enslaved persons.

So I think there's definitely a

bit of a misconception present in certain pockets of modern society, isn't

there, that they claim that Christianity made the lives of enslaved people

better, but that's not what the historical record is saying.

Yeah, our

Christian Roman laws did not necessarily change this. And I think where we get

that impression is because we start to hear some voices that become more

critical of slavery among early Christians. Best example of this, church father

Gregory of Nyssa really famously said that it's immoral to turn humans into

property. And he based this on his kind of biblical interpretation. He, you

know, in reading through Genesis 1 said, well, okay, like God ordained people to

be rulers of creation. We shouldn't turn rulers of creation into enslaved

persons. But maybe you can already tell this is kind of problematic, right? This

isn't really a fully like abolitionist hot take, right? He's not saying that

humans shouldn't be enslaved at all. He's saying humans are either rulers or

enslavers of creation. So they're, you know, he's not saying slavery is

necessarily bad. It's just humans shouldn't be on the lower end of that

relationship. And also goes on to say humans are God's property. So it's bad to

steal God's property from him. So he's just, he doesn't get to the point of

abolition yet. He's saying slavery should exist, but you shouldn't be enslaved

to the wrong person.

Right. And I think it's always important, isn't it? Because

again, in the past, we've been overly reliant on the texts that we have from

elite writers, but we should also point out that they are speaking from their

own point of view, their own opinions. They're not necessarily telling us what

the general consensus is. So just that we've got this one guy saying, slavery

is not perfect. It's not great. We should maybe think about this. It's not

necessarily what everyone's thinking.

Right, we should take into account that

not every elite's gonna agree on this. And also that a lot of the times we

don't hear from enslaved persons on their own perspectives on slavery. So it's

often a common misconception that everyone just agreed in pre-modernity or in

the Roman world that slavery was normal and natural. But of course we say that without

actually taking into account what enslaved persons would have thought about how

they were being treated.

Sure. Now I've been to Rome. I've been to Roman

cities. I've been really lucky to travel and go on tours, et cetera. And quite

often a guide will point to a building and say, this huge monument, several

stories tall, was built by enslaved people. And usually the group will say, oh,

that's really unfortunate. But there's always that one guy who says, yeah, but

look at the building, right? It was worth it. What would you say to people who

think that ancient slavery is justifiable because it allowed Romans to build

massive aqueducts and baths everywhere? What would you say to those people?

Yeah,

I mean, my straightforward answer would be, it's horrible to believe that the

death and exploitation of millions of people is something that we should

celebrate or try to mimic. That the elimination of people's cultures across the

Mediterranean was genocidal, that this was a kind of, slavery was a slow form

of cultural genocide that destroyed people's cultures, that separated them from

their homes, and that it made it impossible for us to know so much more about

the ancient world because people were torn out of their families, torn out of

their relations, their societies, that it's not worth it.

I mean, the Romans

would argue, wouldn't they, that slavery was essential to their society. But

that doesn't mean that the Romans were right. So let's talk about this. Did the

Romans need enslaved people or could they have just paid free people to do this

work?

I wish I had a good answer to this question. I mean, it's hard to imagine

the what if of if things would have been different here, right? That they could

have done things differently, but participated in a system that for the elites was

considered fairly normal, right? That for them, they were comfortable with

exploiting and enslaving people and did not, at their kind of, the most elite

classes here, did not fully wrestle with the implications of this.

So we might

look back from our moral high modern horse and say that being a slave society was

a choice that they made. But really, when you grow up in that society, you're

not probably gonna question something that benefits you, that you've grown up

with and that your parents and their grandparent, they've all grown up with it.

We shouldn't be expecting them to question a system that benefited them.

I

think in some way it's right that we shouldn't expect that they were fully

going to question it and also recognize that the fact that they kept it going

for centuries was a choice and that constant choice that had to continue to be

made every day, every month, every year. And even as the empire became

Christianized, that these were still choices that were being made by elites

over and over and over that in ways that try to make it really natural and

normal.

There are, as we all know, and I'm sure I'll do an episode on it one

day, there are groups of people in modern society that idealize the ancient

Roman world, including the things that we are discussing now as negatives. They're

still even now viewing them as positives. I really want to emphasize to every

listener that my guests and I, we love talking about the ancient world, but it

doesn't mean that we have to like what we're reading about, right? Is that true

for you? Do I even need to ask if it's true for you?

No, it's very true for me

that, yeah, like I am invested in some of the worst aspects of Roman culture

because these are in many ways the backbone on which a lot of the things that

we think of as the glories of Rome were built on this. Probably for me, one of

the most important examples is the Colosseum, right? It was built mostly out of

the stolen funds and slave labor of Jews who were defeated by the Romans in

Judea in the 60s and 70s CE. So even when we think of something like the

Colosseum, we're looking at a building that was built out of the destruction of

a city, the exploitation of people, the theft of funds from Jerusalem.

Yeah,

and I think if you're visiting the Colosseum and your tour guide mentions none

of this, you need to be asking them why, frankly. Because it is important,

isn't it, when we're studying the ancient world, to look at the bad along with

the good. It's no good us looking at just what we're attracted to and what we

approve of and cherry picking what we're gonna take away from it. How important

is it that we take all of these things into consideration when we're presenting

scholarship about the Romans?

I think it's really important. And I think that a

lot of that falls on scholars and students too, right, to be able to say that

we're not just looking at this to, especially those of us who happen to live in

the UK or the US to say, look at these great people that we understand

ourselves to be, we're inheriting their legacy, right? We're continuing what

they're doing. But to be able to say like, okay, what are all of the bad things

that they've done and how do we imagine our own world in a way that doesn't

need to repeat these things or continue these things.

In the last couple of

centuries, because we see a lot of Western countries really explicitly

emulating Rome in architecture, civic institutions, can we see anyone in more

recent history specifically saying, we would like to have a slave society because

it worked for Rome, so we're gonna copy it.

Yes, definitely. I mean, one of the

probably most unsurprising examples of this is US President Thomas Jefferson, who

also founded the university that I work at, that in his notes on the state of

Virginia, he has this long book where he's trying to unpack everything that he

thinks about the state of Virginia in the United States, all of the

agriculture, the economy, everything here. And he in this argues that slavery

in the US wasn't as bad as slavery in Greece or Rome or Egypt, that it's

actually more mild and that it's good to have slave labor in order to

accomplish his vision for what Virginia should look like. The same goes for a

later 19th century writer, guy named Josiah Priest, who lived in the US. He

wrote this book called Bible Defense of Slavery, where during the antebellum

period right before the US Civil War, he looks at classical and biblical texts and

tries to argue that black people were naturally inferior and enslaveable and

said that Greek and Roman slavery was more like servitude than actual slavery. This

is again, where we see this issue of who counts as servant or slave come up where

there's a lot of rhetoric around saying, well, you know, it was more like

servitude. It wasn't that bad. And I think really importantly, even for Civil

War era abolitionists, a lot tended to see ancient Greek and Roman slavery as

better than what was happening in the Americas. So they looked to it as

sometimes as an example of an alternate system that could be done instead of

what was being done in the Americas.

Interesting. Now you will know more about

this as a resident of the States than I will. So I will ask this from the very

naive point of view as a Brit. In your country, you had a lot of slaves. You

had a civil war that was talking about this issue. More recently, the civil

rights movement of the 60s, et cetera, and very recently, BLM protests. And we

are currently seeing threatening of rights for people of African origin, because

there are some people that believe that they were born even now to be enslaved.

Can we see anyone in current politics trying to bring up Rome as a

justification for the continued oppression and this renewed verve for

oppressing certain members of society?

Yes, often this happens, at least in the

United States, this often happens. Sometimes it's through classical texts or

classical architecture. More often it's through biblical texts. So for example,

in the last week or so, our Speaker of the House, who's kind of a head figure

in our political system, Mike Johnson, quoted the Apostle Paul, Romans 13, which

is a really famous biblical passage about where Paul encourages Romans to be, Roman

Christians to be subject to the Roman state and Roman government. It says, God

ordained this state, so you should listen to what they say you have to do in

order to, and Mike Johnson evoked this passage to say people shouldn't fight us

on US immigration policies because this is a divinely ordained thing to do. So

we do see this kind of idea of the Roman state having the right to act how they

want over subject populations being evoked today, sometimes through biblical

literature, to say that we should be mimicking what Rome is doing.

Now, in my

own scholarship, I've been dipping my toes into the reception of the ancient

world amongst alt-right groups and it's horrified me and I don't like doing it and

I'm gonna stop doing it really soon, I promise. Is it really important for us

to be discussing realities because there are bad faith actors who will try and

give us a false narrative of what things like ancient slavery and misogyny, et

cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they're going to be giving us false pictures. How

important is it that we make a concerted effort to be discussing the realities?

I think it's really important. I think it's important to be able to give people

a more accurate historical picture of what people's lives were like in

antiquity and also to point out when both people today and our elite writers

from antiquity are kind of weaponizing ancient history or weaponizing nostalgia

about the ancient world, right? To say, oh, in the good old days we used to do

this and we need to bring that back is a really common strategy that the

Provenants themselves used to say we need to be manly and self-sufficient and

take over all of these places. But that's still being used today in some ways

to say look at the glories of this ancient past. We should mimic what they did or

what we imagine that they did in order to make ourselves a new empire.

So one

last question then before we let you go. What's the main takeaway about Roman

slavery that you hope every listener goes away with? What's the main thing that

we should be bearing in mind moving forward?

So I think the main takeaway that

I hope the audience has is ancient slavery was really complex and that we only

hear so much from enslaved persons themselves, right? That a lot of this work

is having to read between the lines, to interpret in ways that get us little

bits and pieces, little hints of what people were actually experiencing. But

that so much of this needs to be filtered through what elites imagined or said they

wanted out of enslaved persons.

Okay, and that's really important. I agree. This

has been, I'm not gonna call it a fun subject to talk about with you. I think

it's a pretty essential, vital subject to talk about with you. So I am so

grateful to you for coming and explaining to us all of these complexities and

making them a little bit easier to understand, busting some myths for us along

the way. We are so grateful to you. Thank you so much.

Of course, thank you for

having me.