Roman Slavery

Slave Numbers

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

• "Extrusive" Slavery (slave = rejected insider)
• Sale by self/family
• Debt slavery
• Exposure of children
• Penal slavery
• "Intrusive" Slavery (slave = imported outsider)
• Foreign conquest
• Piracy
• Breeding (slave/slave or slave/master)

• Agricultural labor (work on latifundia)
• Mining (esp. Spain)
• Domestic service
• Small-scale manufacturing, crafts
• Prostitution
• Professionals (doctors, teachers)
• (under empire) Imperial household

Slave as non-person ("social death")

• No legal kinship
• No right to marry
• No right to own/inherit property
• No judicial standing

• Marriage (contubernium)
• Private savings (peculium)

• Unilateral (= reward for service, deathbed gesture etc.) or bought w/ peculium
• Full rights, but w/ obligations to ex-owner
• Freedman takes owner's nomen, praenomen
• Freedman status lasts only 1 generation (children are ordinary citizens)

Reinforcing Authority

• Nomenclature (cf. women) & forms of address ("Boy")
• Visible marking: tattooing, branding
• Violence: beatings, sexual assault, torture
• Degrading punishments (e.g. crucifixion)
• Collective retribution

• Acceptance/collaboration
• Passive resistance
• Running away, suicide, murder
• Organized revolt
• Sicily, 135
• Sicily, 104-100
• Italy, 73-71 (Spartacus)

Justification

• Doctrine of "natural" slavery (Aristotle)

• Stereotype of faithful slave/nurse
• "Clever slave" in comedy
• Humane treatment (* abolitionism)

• "We are all slaves ..."