300- 272B.C- the city- state of Rome conquered her surrounding neighbors then expanded and eventually overthrew the ruling Etruscan Empire. The Romans then formed alliances with neighbors that did not resist them and eventually became the strongest power in Italy. By 272B.C, Rome added Greek cities into their confederation and was the ruler of all Italy south of the Po River.
Rome began as agricultural based city. Trade and industry were secondary to the military at the beginning of their expansion, but as Rome became militarily successful, trade and industry became more important in the lands that they conquered.
264B.C- was the start of the Punic Wars with Carthage for supremacy of the Mediterranean. The battle was for control of trade and commerce on the Mediterranean Sea. The war lasted for 150 years, but in the end, Rome ruled or owned almost every land on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea and Carthage was destroyed. During these wars of conquest, slavery became a powerful force in Roman life. Before the Punic Wars, Rome was a relatively poor city- state, but after the wars, Rome became very rich and became the heart of the Mediterranean trade overnight.
New Type of Enslavement:
Before Rome came on the scene, Carthage used slaves in agriculture and took part in the slave trade in the western part of the Mediterranean Sea.
The large-scale enslavement through war began around 405B.C with Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse. He fought several wars with Carthage and his policy was to take the population of entire cities and sell the captives into slavery or ask for a mass ransom. This was a policy that made the enemy pay for his wars. It was a new idea and the generals of Dionysius were very happy to adapt to it.
This seizure of booty in the form of prisoners was planned to bring an immediate profit in money. Hundreds of thousands of people were taken prisoner to Rome and Carthage during their wars. When Rome finally won the war, almost all the Carthaginians were enslaved. After the defeat of Carthage, Rome had no real challenge to its power militarily, but they did have problems with piracy on the seas. Piracy became big business right after the last Punic War in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Pirates:
Sea rovers roamed the Mediterranean kidnapping people and selling them to retail slave dealers, or ransoming the person if he or she was rich. Their headquarters was the Isle of Delos, a tiny Mediterranean island used for convenient exchange of slaves stolen from the East to be sold to the West. In 167B.C, Delos received preferential trade status when Rome crushed the stubborn sea power of Rhodes. To make sure that Rhodes did not rise again to power, Rome declared Delos, which was located nearby, a free port. This meant that the Roman government would collect no dues (harbor or customs taxes). This gave Delos the lucrative East- West trade once centered on Rhodes. This also left the seas open to pirate fleets to rove freely to steal and kidnap whenever and whomever they liked. All the pirates of the seas used Delos and the island became very prosperous. The kidnapping operation grew larger and larger while Roman rulers stood by, apparently not caring about the stealing of free people because they needed the slave labor on their plantations.
88B.C- Delos was finally sacked during one of the Roman Wars with the pirates. But this did not put them out of business. They kept on going with their trade until about 69B.C. By this time the Romans had a huge fear of pirates to the point that all sea trade and travel came to a halt. The pirates raided any and everybody on the seas, including the Romans.
67B.C- Finally, when financial ruin and famine threatened Rome because of mayhem that the pirates were causing, a law was passed that gave Pompey (the great Roman general) unlimited powers to rid them off of the Mediterranean seas. He accomplished it in 40 days with ruthless precision, thus ending centuries of pirating in the Mediterranean area. Peace was established in the empire and Rome developed peacetime methods of enslavement. Slavery by birth, sale of members in border tribes, and the sentencing of law-breakers into servitude were some of these methods.
From 150B.C until A.D450 (over 600 years) Rome held power over the whole-civilized world. When the Empire collapsed in the 5th century A.D, one of the main causes was the prevalence of slavery. As wars became less frequent, the supply of slaves from this source fell off. People in the Roman provinces who rebelled were sold to make up for the slave shortage. An example of this was the Jews. They were sold by the thousands on the slave market by Emperor Titus when he crushed their rebellion in Jerusalem in 70 AD. Another source of some slaves came from pirates, whom although were diminished, they were not completely wiped out. Also, the poor still sold themselves or their children into slavery.
But the majority of slaves during the Roman peacetime came from birth. If the mother was a slave, then all of her offspring were also slaves, thus most slaves in Rome at that time were born into it. But these slaves were not cheap. Since there were no war captives to boost the slave markets, these people who were born into slavery were a premium on the market, because there was not many of them. The law of economics worked here. If there is a great demand for a product, and the product is scarce, then the price of that of that product will rise, and the product we are talking about here are slaves. (Greek was the language of the slave business).
Who Were the Slaves in the Roman Empire:
Slaves in the Roman Empire came from all over the known world; Asia Minor, Jews, Arabians, Indians, Parthians, Persians, Macedonians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Nubians, Gauls, Germans, Spaniards, Danubians, Thracians, Dacians, Siracians, Sarmatians.
What Slaves did in the Roman Empire:
They did household tasks, entertainment as actors, circus members, singers, musicians, artists. They were builders, firemen, clerks, farmers, secretaries, tax agents, masons, miners, weavers, goldsmiths, jewelers, and carpenters. (Slaves and criminals worked in the mines and quarries)
Slaves, especially from the Orient and Greece, who had experience and skills with figures, languages and trade were given incentives, such as the prospect of making money and freedom.
Peculium- was money that a slave was allowed to earn and retain over his keep. By law, this was the master’s, but it was treated as though it was the slave’s. This gave the slave a chance for a degree of independence and a chance to eventually buy his freedom.
The Gladiators:
Gladiators were slaves that were trained to fight to the death in the arena for the entertainment of the Romans. The word gladiator comes from the Latin word “gladius” which means sword. These men were chosen among war captives, condemned prisoners and slaves. Gladiator battles dated back from 600B.C during the time when the Etruscans ruled Italy. Romans started gladiatorial shows in 264B.C at the time of the First Punic War. By 105B.C, gladiator spectacles were recognized as an official practice when the Roman consul (senators) began sponsoring the shows. Human sacrifice (munus) soon became a festival enjoyed by the whole Roman population.
The lives of the people that Rome enslaved during their wars of expansion were wasted in vast numbers, so much so that wholesale butchery of men for public pleasure was not questioned. Torture and floggings were commonplace. People were tortured and executed in the most fiendish means. The Colesseum, located in the center of Rome, was the most famous arena where these cruelties took place and the center to go to for cheap, and very violent entertainment. Despite “progress” and “advancement” of civilization by the Roman Empire, sadistic cruelty seemed to lie just beneath the surface, and it rose up whenever given the opportunity, especially when it had to do with mass entertainment.
In the time of the Republic (the most ‘peaceful’ time in Roman history) the Roman people had become so hungry for the Colesseum spectacle that political candidates offered the bloody entertainment as a means of winning votes. Inevitably, the emperors played on the same lust for murder to promote their own popularity. By the 4th century A.D, the Colesseum had 175 “games” a year!
Laws Dealing With Slaves:
Cato, a Roman philosopher and historian, had some practical advice on slaves: feed slaves so they won’t steal supplies, give them more food when tasks are hard labor in nature, cut rations if they fall ill and cannot work, sell them when they grow old or wear out. Roman law stated that a slave had no rights respected by law. They are property to be treated like animals. If a slave kills his master, the law demanded the lives of all the household slaves, to be an example to other slaves.
Although Roman slavery was cruel, there were still opportunities for upward mobility. The Latin definition of Emancipation- “manus” (hand), and “capere” (to take). The slave had to stay in the hands or power of the Roman until the Roman releases him “out of hand” or emancipates them. Ironically, this came easier and more often under Roman rule than under the Greeks. There were several reasons why the Romans granted emancipation more often than Greece:
- The cost to keep the slave. Romans would free him and retain his services as a freedman, which would cost less than keeping him as a slave.
- Letting the slave go at the time of the slave’s death in hopes of being rewarded for the act in the afterlife.
- Out of kindness and goodwill for the slave’s long or special service.
Ways to Set a Slave Free:
The master symbolically slaps the slave as a token of the last dignity he would suffer in his old status. A high judge has to witness it.
A letter from the master, granting the slave’s freedom.
Announcing the slave’s freedom before witnesses (a 5% tax was required to do this).
The slave could buy his freedom.
When a slave was freed, he was a semi-Roman citizen with restricted rights. It took two generations for the blemishes of slavery to rub off. The grandchildren of the freed slave would finally obtain full political rights. There were many prominent Romans whose family backgrounds began in slavery. One Emperor, Pertinax, was one such person. His grandfather was a slave. Unfortunately for Pertinax, he was only emperor for three months, and then he was assassinated. In the second century A.D, a slave named Callistus became the Bishop of Rome. Diocletian, another emperor, was born a slave in Dalmatia, and won power through his military skill.
At one time, even Julius Caesar was briefly enslaved. As a young man on his way to Rhodes to study law in 76B.C. he was captured by Cilician pirates. Freed after a ransom was paid, he came back and captured the pirates. He crucified them, but generously cut their throats before nailing them to the cross.
If a slave could not obtain his freedom by purchasing himself (and millions of them could not raise the money) or by the other methods mentioned before, the options to get freedom were usually these:
- The slave could kill himself. This was the most desperate way out of an unbearable servitude. Through drowning, leaping off of roofs, stabbing oneself, throwing self between the wheels of moving carts, etc.
- Running away. This wasn’t easy, except during civil wars. After Caesar’s assassination in 44B.C, tens of thousands slaves fled to join Pompey in his quest to grab power. Pompey promised freedom to all slaves who helped him, but Augustus defeated him. Augustus gave the slaves back to their former owners, almost 30,000 captives. He also impaled some 6000 slaves whose masters were not found. In the early 2nd century B.C the Roman senate made laws that all runaway slaves were to be returned to their masters. Apparently this “loss of property” became so widespread that organized private businesses popped up, exclusively for slave catching. These businesses operated with plenty of autonomy and power to search anywhere for runaways. The slave catchers delivered the slave to the nearest magistrate for a “bounty.” Anyone who was caught harboring a slave was severely punished.
- Killing the master. This happened often enough to make masters very conscious of their perpetual danger. There was a Roman proverb; “every slave we own is an enemy we harbor.” As mentioned before, the Roman tradition was that if a slave killed his master, all the master’s slaves were put to death.
- Slave revolts. This did not happen frequently because an oppressed class or people, in order to rise up against an armed authority, required planning, organization, discipline, and leadership. Under the conditions of slavery these necessities were almost impossible to meet, but nonetheless, four major revolts did occur during the Roman Empire’s peaceful era.
The Roman Slave Revolts:
The Revolt after the Second Punic War (218- 201B.C)- Revolts broke out here and there in the republic after this war. In 198B.C the North African slaves of Carthaginian hostages revolted and found allies among the slaves nearby. Two years later, Rome sent a legion and they put down the revolt, which had spreaded over the two years, crucified the leaders and sent the survivor’s back to their masters.
The First Servile War of 135- 133B.C- this revolt took place on the island of Sicily. Sicily was said to have had the worst forms of slavery. There were two main ingredients for the uprisings: a large number of slaves concentrated together and the extraordinarily cruel treatment of the slaves by their masters. Sicily was guilty on both of these counts; thus they had two of the four major slave revolts in Roman history. The rich Roman and Sicilian landowners prospered off cheap slave labor and they used every form of inhuman torture to squeeze work out of their slaves; wooden racks, dungeons, fires built around imprisoned bodies in a pit, hook dragging of corpses, the use of chains, and other various, more crueler forms of punishment, like tearing off limbs, and the branding of foreheads.
These slaves were descedents of slaves that came by the tens of thousands from Greece and Asia-Minor (Turkey), Syria, and Egypt as spoils of war and political upheavals that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323B.C. The majority of slaves was Greek speaking and educated, and was brought to Sicily for field labor or working on the latifundia (cattle ranches). The slave owner and the slave spoke the same language and also the slave was not a slave previously, so this situation had the needed ingredients for revolt. The slaves could plan together because they all spoke the same language, and a strong leader named Eunus, who showed discipline, organized them. Under Eunus, whom the slaves proclaimed their absolute king, the slaves began conquering the countryside of Sicily, gaining recruits at each farm, or estate. The Romans reacted slowly in moving against the revolt because of a war with Spain, but after Rome conquered Spain, they finally sent an army large enough to reconquer Sicily. It was a very brutal takeover by the Romans and it took almost seven years to reclaim the island for the empire. Long sieges, plague, famine and betrayal were the slaves’ downfall mainly. The slaves who surrendered were massacred (20,000 men). Eunus was captured and thrown in prison until he died. After the revolt was put under control, the Romans stopped the killing, and sent the slaves back to the fields, but within a few years the masters were treating the slaves in the exact previous way, terribly.
The Second Servile War: 104B.C- another revolt in the same place, with the same causes, broke out in 104B.C with the next generation of slaves on the island. The main spark for this revolt was that the slaves heard about Rome releasing the slaves in Asia-Minor in order to get enough troops to fight the wars with the Germanic tribes who were invading the empire. Rome had to release the slaves in Asia-Minor because pirates, who ironically were protected by Rome, had captured most of the army-aged men (see Pirates on previous pages). The slaves on Sicily, at its height, had 40,000 men to fight off the Roman armies but the Romans organized much faster then in the previous First Servile War and proceeded to crush this revolt completely within four years.
The Third Servile War: 73B.C- this slave uprising occurred in Capua, Italy, just south of Rome on the Mediterranean coast, and is considered the greatest slave uprising in history. For centuries this was where gladiators trained (the Gauls, Thracians and Germans were considered to be the best fighters in the arena by the Romans) and Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator, led the revolt against the Roman Empire. He and other gladiators fought their way out of Capua to the mountains, and then defeated a Roman expedition, which was sent to destroy them. As Spartacus’s army went along the Italian hillside, they were joined by as many as 120,000 slaves, herdsmen, shepherds, brigands and other outcasts. They joined his army with the hope of being freed out of Roman bondage, and for two years, this army went undefeated against the Roman legions. Spartacus’ legions of misfits crushed one Roman army after another, showing little mercy on their former masters. Their goal was to fight north to the Alps and to freedom, but for some unknown reason, he turned back, maybe thinking that he could take Rome itself. This was a big mistake. The Romans were ready for him and crushed his army, thus ending the uprising and the last major slave rebellion during the rule of the Romans.
Outline Source: SLAVERY: A World History, by Milton Meltzer; Da Capo Press 1993
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