I understand why you would get this narrative, but it’s really pretty… ok totally wrong. However, as mentioned above there is some truth to it, but the trick is that it was true only a very small portion of the time.
First off, Yes, some slaves in the Roman world had considerable value, and the Romans often did liberate slaves with talent especially those who could be useful. However, on the whole Roman slaves were treated very badly. Mathematically, we don’t have the same kind of evidence to prove this, but there are very good reasons to think that the slave population in Rome’s dominions constantly declined over time, and not really because of manumission. That tended to occur at the “top” of the social ladder while the bottom was slowly dying off. Agricultural slaves led tough lives, and, although it’s an ugly topic to raise, Rome worked slaves to death in the mines in the tens of thousands. Being sent to the mines became effectively a delayed death sentence, and delayed only for tortuous conditions, semi-starvation, and beatings in the midst of the most cruel labor. Many of the later protections for slaves in the Imperial era were put in place to prevent the immense wastage of human lives - and not coincidentally because the Rome no longer had rich sources of slaves in the Imperial period. It’s also completely evident that the Romans viewed slavery as so shameful it could taint generations to come, and while they freed some slaves they nevertheless considered them beholden to the former master for life, and that was a distinct minority among slaves. For most, slaves would die as slaves still.
On the contrary, while no honest man could or would say that American slaves lived happy or content lives, they mostly lived full lives, assuming they survived childhood diseases. Conditions were definitely bad, but life expectancy was shorter than their masters by only a few years. The population of American slaves increased over time and in roughly the same proportion to the population of the nation as a whole, despite the early banning of the slave trade and the continued immigration from Europe.
Finally, the concept of race and the Enlightenment is complex, and I think your statement on that may be a bit too simplistic.
I never said that Romans treated slaves well, so I’m not sure why you’re posting that I’m ‘wrong’ about a bunch of things I never disputed or disagreed with. You seem to be agreeing with the actual words that I posted, but disagreeing with an argument that I didn’t make and don’t agree with. The only ‘narrative’ that I posted is that Romans didn’t think of slavery as the permanent proper condition of an entire category of people, and that they didn’t mind educated slaves as part of this.
I don’t accept your the contention that living a life where you are forbidden to learn how to read, not allowed to make decisions about your own life, can be raped, beaten, and killed at will, and where your children can be sold off, never to be seen again is living a ‘full life’. Even if you’re only talking about life expectancy, having one that is years shorter (and filled with much more pain and sickness) is not ‘full’ by any reasonable measure.
It’s a single sentence on a message board, not a formal dissertation. Of course it’s not a detailed, comprehensive exploration of a complex phenomenon that took place over centuries.
I do recall some discussion of this that said that Romans were not allowed to simply toss their slaves out (or free them) because they were no longer able to work. Which makes sense, the last thing any town needed was a herd of homeless people wandering the streets desperate.
Another discussion of Roman slaves mentioned that a slander of prominent Romans included the accusation that they slept with their female slaves. A lot of the salacious gossip in classical Roman writing is fabricated slander where the intellectual elite got even with their peers by accusing them of all sorts of misbehaviour in their writings for posterity. It was pointed out that accusing a man of sleeping with his woman slaves was a slander - so likely something severely frowned upon socially and not regularly done… we hope.
For the luckier, more independent slaves (i.e. not the mines) Roman slaves were much like indentured servants - they could have their own possessions, accumulate wealth, and even buy their freedom. (I recall something similar said about slaves in Brazil, commemorating one enterprising clergyman who realized the gold mine workers who went home and washed their frizzy hair could eventually recover enough gold dust to buy their own freedom.)
OTOH, American slavery was pure luxury (hint for the hard of thinking, this is sarcasm) as opposed to the West Indies, where plantation work was so grueling that few slaves lasted more than a few years -which contributed to the large slave trade and the humanitarian effort of the British intelligentsia to stop the trade. Still somewhat better than the treatment in the Congo, or Columbus’ original treatment of the locals in Dominica, where failure to meet quotas mean losing one or both hands.
Romans had nothing like the post-1500 conception of race and thus did not equate slave status with the notion of an “inferior” or “servile” race in the way that Southern planters did. But they definitely thought of slavery as the “the permanent proper condition of an entire category of people” - slaves. 40 percent of the population of Italy was enslaved at the time of Augustus and of course ancient philosophers had their theories about why this was justified. Yes, it was possible to become a freedman (just as manumission from race slavery was possible until the very last years of American slavery) but most slaves were simply worked to death, and the point of freedman status was to encourage slaves to continue working and be docile instead of risking escape; it wasn’t based on any notion that humans deserved freedom.
Most of the post-hoc attempts to depict Roman slavery as somehow “not that bad” arise from very modern political concerns in which American agricultural slavery must be depicted as a unique moral and historical phenomenon, in order to make certain conclusions about U.S. society or present-day race relations. In the past, I’m sure there were also classicists who downplayed it because they went native with their subject, but I can’t imagine finding that in the academy in 2020.
Really? Everything I’ve ever seen suggests that the quasi-fascist ethos of Roman society made ample allowance for using slaves for sexual purposes. The strong dominating the weak was their conception of how the world was supposed to work, and only free citizens were entitled to any kind of bodily autonomy.
Again, I didn’t attempt to depict Roman slavery as “not that bad”, nor did I claim that American slavery was “unique”. You and the other person on this tack are taking an argument that you’ve had with someone else and trying to pin it on me, then refute it. If you were attempting to discuss points that I made this could be an interesting discussion, but there’s simply no reason to argue with me that Roman freedman status “wasn’t based on any notion that humans deserved freedom” when not only did I never claim or imply that it was, I explicitly stated that one of their justifications of slavery was “might makes right”.
Roman slavery is depicted as “not that bad” because it was “not that bad” in contrast to American slavery. And Caribbean slavery. And South American Slavery. And no doubt, slavery in multiple societies at different times and cultures. You can visit Zanzibar and still see the Stonetown slave market cells (missionaries built a church over the old auction site) the same “farm Africa for slaves” methodology worked to supply Arabia and Persia with slaves.
But Roman slaves (some) could buy their freedom. Many were highly educated, a Greek tutor for the (male) offspring of a rich Roman household was a prized acquisition. The Romans had no illusion they were superior (except militarily) to some of the lands and peoples they conquered. They even copied a lot of Greek culture. Slaves were simply a convenient way of disposing of the spoils of war. They could either slaughter the armies they defeated, and their families, or disperse them across the empire according to their abilities, where they would be too scattered to organize mischief. Plus, slavery was a solution to poverty and homelessness in the age before welfare states.
For some household slaves, they could perhaps be compared to indentured servants with no expiration; they worked for the master, no pay and no specific release. Also, keep in mind that corporal punishment was common in many places and times before modern sensibilities took hold. Of course slaves were beaten. So were servants.
As to sexual use - I have no doubt it happened, but if you want to see what behaviour society truly frowned upon, look at what the elite accused each other of to claim the person was depraved. Some of the innuendo and misbehaviour we hear about the Roman Emperors, for example, is simple exaggeration or falsification by factional intellectuals whose writing has survived. Some is no doubt true.
What do you imagine the ratio of “highly educated slaves whose job was tutoring rich children” to “agriculture and mining laborers who were worked 18 hours a day until they dropped dead at age 33” was? Pick any time period during the Roman era that you’d like.
OK, what pre-Christian Roman historian ever accused another Roman of raping his (adult female, underage male, or otherwise) slaves as a “depraved” act in and of itself? Most of the accusations I can think of involved the notion of lack of self-control and failure to provide expected service to the state - Tiberius was condemned not for his orgies with boy slaves but for abandoning his duties as emperor to engage in them full-time. I can’t imagine where you got the impression that Roman conservatives looked down on using slaves for sexual purposes; that was one of the main drivers of slavery in the city, where little farming was going on, and no one seemed particularly surprised or uptight about it in any source I’m aware of. Even in the American South, where the alleged Christian influence and specific doctrines of justification for slavery seemingly ruled out treating slaves as a harem, it’s well-documented and accepted by every historian I’ve ever encountered that this behavior went on rampantly. Why in the world would it be less common among people with no such ideals?
No, most attempts to clarify the difference between slavery in the Ancient World (including but not limited to Rome) are in response to the “Lost Cause” school of Southern history from the first half of the 20th C, when an awful lot of ink was spent trying to portray slavery as a sort of benevolent, patriarchal, unprofitable relationship and a continuation of a tradition that went back to the ancient world, and that treated racist ideologies as the norm for thousands of years and Southern Plantation owners as just the unlucky assholes left holding the hot potato when we all decided it was bad.
It is important that undergraduates understand that slavery in the ancient world wasn’t justified by the idea of racial inferiority and that slavery in the US was, because that ideology continues to shape and influence every aspect of our culture. It’s important to understand that the idea that black people are stupid and not suited for freedom is not something “everyone” knew going all the way back to Rome, and is instead a relatively new, deliberately manufactured belief. And there are a lot of undergraduates who don’t know that. So clarifying that difference is important.
I grew up in the South in the 80s and 90s. I heard ancient slavery used many times in apologies for Southern slavery, by teachers and educated people. These ideas are not dead.
On the other hand, it’s also really good for undergraduates to know that life was very, very cheap in the ancient world, so they can appreciate how new and fragile our modern ideas about the value of life are. And certainly we shouldn’t romanticize ancient slavery. But it’s really, really important to clarify that race-based chattel slavery was different in some critical ways.
I agree with what you posted - saying ‘the Romans didn’t have the same philosophy of slavery as the Americans’ or ‘the Romans weren’t racist and didn’t even have the underlying concepts’ simply isn’t a statement that ‘the Romans were all nice and kind to their slaves’ or ‘the Romans treated everyone well’. It really drives home the ‘life is cheap’ message to think of the single most persistent image of the Roman legal system in action, that is memorialized in countless statues, necklaces, t-shirts, paintings, posters, stained glass, and on the cover of books. It’s the image of a man who the Roman officials ordered whipped until bloody, then a crown of thorns shoved into his head, then nailed to a cross to die a slow agonizing death - not exactly the kind of thing a culture that is kind, gentle, or places a high value on human life does.
Aren’t you saying the same thing I am? There was no difference in the conditions of slavery in Rome versus the South. Only the rationales. You can teach the development of racism after 1500 or so without teaching the ahistorical notion that non-racial slavery was somehow better for the slaves. Either way slaves were property* and could be killed, raped, or worked until they dropped dead, which in fact almost all of them were, tiny minorities who worked as tutors in Italy or attained similar positions in the South notwithstanding.
*The notion of “non-chattel” slavery is somewhat contradictory - if you have meaningful, enforceable rights then you’re not really a slave but some other kind of oppressed person, probably a serf. In both societies we’re discussing here, the “chattel slavery” concept more than applies; there were absolutely no protections, either in law or in fact, against a master doing whatever he wished to his slaves in either Roman or Southern society. The notion of some other kind of slavery is sometimes invoked to defend indigenous African slavery as “not that bad” but when you dig into it, once again you find a lot of handwaving and papering over the reality of what slavery is, designed to create the conclusion that American plantation slavery is the only bad kind and everything else is somehow defensible.
But the rationale is really important. You seem to think distinguishing that rationale is done in order to push some current political agenda: I think distinguishing that rationale is to undo the damage of a political agenda.
This is a patently false claim. There were differences in the conditions of slavery between individual states in the US, and between countries in America, and between different places and times within the two millennia or so of Roman existence. And for that matter there were differences between various countries and societies that had slavery over the course of history.
It’s pretty obvious that there’s a distinct agenda that isn’t based on actual history at work here.
Would you care to tell us what you believe those differences were, or what agenda (anti-Roman Empire landholder bigotry?) you believe I am engaging in by failing to recognize them?
One can look at the laws in two different US states to see some differences, for example, and compare the various laws in the US with Roman law at some particular time. Or the differences in death rates for West Indian slavery vs slavery in the continental US vs slavery in Roman silver mines vs slavery in Roman metropolitan areas. Or observe what language and clothing the slaves were required to use, or what tasks they did and crops they harvested. There are a plethora of differences that are trivial to find, claiming that there are no differences in the conditions is patently at odds with obvious facts. The fact that slaves feared getting ‘sold South’ is one of the obvious indicators of regional differences just within the US.
The agenda I’m referring to is whitewashing the history of US slavery. It’s painfully obvious, and discussing it at best it would be a GD topic not a GQ one anyway, so I’m not going to bother debating it.
That’s a category error. Of course harvesting sugar is more work than harvesting tobacco. The comparison at hand is whether slaves in Rome had some sort of rights and status greater than those in the South. They did not.
I think you’ve adequately proven my point - because people are obsessed with proving that slavery in the American South cannot be compared to anything else, they deny the reality of slavery in the ancient world. It is not “whitewashing” to say that slavery existed at other places and times and insist that the history of places such as Rome be relayed accurately and not filled with a bunch of nonsense about how slavery wasn’t that bad.
Seems to me that the comparison at hand is whether slaves in Rome were considered to be some specific group of people that were considered as meant to be slaves, while those in a different specific group of people were by their nature never meant to be slaves; group membership being hereditary.
If anybody might wind up enslaved if their city lost the next war, then it’s not really the same situation; even if individuals, once enslaved, are treated equally badly.