Aren’t many of the slaves you see in movies “house slaves”? In that case, it would make sense to dress them decently. When you’re entertaining guests, neither you nor your guests wants to see grubby slaves in rags. Spoils the decor and the atmosphere.
While it is certainly true that your run-of-the-mill Roman agricultural slave would have been chained, the kinds of slaves you’d see more in movies- house slaves, servants, etc- would not have been chained. There are very, very rare survivals of some objects that look like dog collars (they are all metal and could have been effectively welded on to someone’s neck) with inscriptions that say “I am a runaway slave. If you find me, return me to my master ___________.” The presumption, based on their rarity, is that such collars were only put on slaves who had a history of running away.
In general slaves were distinguished by what they couldn’t wear- the toga, the official dress of a Roman citizen. But this would not apply to slave women, since the only women who wore togas were prostitutes, who wore distinctive flame-colored togas.
In general, we must be careful not to conflate ancient and ancient Roman slavery with slavery as practiced in the American South. It was not race based, manumission was far more common, and slaves were used for a lot more than agricultural labor (although the majority of slaves were laborers).
Even worse is all the Arabian Nights movies that show the Sultan’s daughter dressed like a palace concubine! Even assuming she was allowed out of the harem, you’d expect a princess to be more modestly attired.
OK, that makes sense. A takeoff that got frozen in time by visual media, as Bryan Elkers suggests. This was so much easier than wading through 5,000 fetish websites … not that there’s anything wrong with that …
Yeah, I was aware of that. I think the French painter Ingres was responsible for a lot of that … he painted some smokin’ hot (for the times) sexually supercharged visions of harem life that still show up in a lot of art history books.
Good point, actually. Although a few dark-skinned white people did get enslaved in the American South by “accident.” (That is, some slavers didn’t look to close at their merchandise so long as they thought they had a chance to make money from them. Another reason not to conflate U.S. and Roman slavery.
Thanks for the specific cite. I will assume they are dressed as Eve suggests.
Yeah, and in the really rich houses there might have been some sort of “Our slaves are dressed better than your daughters” thing going on."
I would assume that generally it would be hard to find out details of how slaves lived because it wouldn’t have been considered worthy of recording by the ancient Romans.
I think that’s OK, really, for some Arabian Nights epics … if we’re dealing with an Ingres-type fantasy of the harem as a sex slave pool, it makes sense to have all the women dress sexy, because that makes everything … sexier.
::Barging cite-less into the fray::
There actually was quite an amount written about slaves, slavery and how to keep and treat slaves. This was (for the most part) not out of any philanthropic love of the slaves themselves, but rather from a sort of “Men & Motors” point of view : These “farm tools with voices” cost an ass-load of money (the good ones anyway). It was of great interest to the Romans, how they should treat them in order for them to live longer and to be most productive.
But one expects better of Roger Corman. I have difficulty believing he’d’ve missed this detail.