Greece & Rome as "slave societies"

Sources of slaves
o Sale by self/family
o Capture (war, piracy)
o Breeding (Slave/slave or Master/slave)

10,000,000 of 50,000,000 under empire?

Functions
o Agricultural labor (latifundia)
o Mining
o Domestic service
o Small-scale manufacturing, crafts
o Prostitution
o Professionals (doctors, teachers)
o Imperial slaves/freedmen

Legal Status

Slave as property, non-person
o Kinship not recognized
o Marriages not legally valid
o Cannot own/inherit property

Informal Rights
o Marriage (contubernium)
o Private savings (peculium)

Strategies of Control
o Nomenclature (cf. women) & forms of address ("Boy")
o Beatings, sexual assault
o Judicial torture
o Degrading punishments (crucifixion)
o Collective guilt (cf. Pedanius Secundus)

Attitudes to Slavery

Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery

Philosophical & religious evasion
o "We are all slaves ..."
o Humane treatment ≠ abolitionism
 (cf. Seneca, Moral Letters 47)

Stereotyping
o "Clever slave" in Roman comedies
o Faithful slave/nurse

Slave reactions
o Acceptance/collaboration
o Passive resistance
o Running away, suicide, murder
o Organized revolt

Slave revolts
o Sicily, 135
o Sicily, 104-100
o Italy, 73-71 (Spartacus)

Freeing of Slaves (= manumission)

Procedure
o Owner frees unilaterally (reward for service, gesture to dying slave etc.)
o Slave 'buys' freedom with peculium

Freed slave —> Freedman
o Pre-manumission family stays slaves

Freedmen
o Full citizen rights
o Certain obligations to former owner
o Social stigma
o Status holds only for 1 generation

Master's praenomen, nomen + slave name
e.g. Tiro, slave of M. Tullius Cicero
  -> M. Tullius Tiro