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Slaves and slavery were extremely different in Pompeii and Herculaneum then what we usually think of as chattel slavery as the default and only slavery that eve

Slaves and slavery were extremely different in Pompeii and Herculaneum then what we usually think of as chattel slavery as the default and only slavery that ever existed. An interviewee either doesn’t understand this or made very sweeping claims. > “This is a window into the precarious reality of people who seldom appear in historical sources that were written almost exclusively by men belonging to the elite, and who as a result risk remaining invisible in the great historical accounts,” - Many slaves were captured and famous intellectuals (Aesop is a famous example) or educated and used as tutors, they were not as modernists assume to be universally ill treated and abused. Slaves in Herculaneum were able to become free and it was a very racially diverse place where being a former slave of different racial background did not mean you were unable to have social mobility, many of the wealthy people of Herculaneum were indeed former slaves. Slavery was not a permanent state of being and the very elite the quoted author complains about often did write about slaves at least in name; the former slaves would take the last name of the old master and records were excellent.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Epictetus, freedman roman Stoic philosopher seems as a whole have an attitude of like "what of it, it's not like you're free from obligations even as senator or the caesar". As a slave, you are free from all concerns and worries beyond fulfilling your duties. Discourses 4.1 is perhaps the most direct example of this.
- lovecg 5y ago
  Ah Stoics, they’re the best at turning being a resigned quitter into dignified philosophy.
  - twright 5y ago
    https://existentialcomics.com/comic/286 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/286
  - sbacic 5y ago
    I wouldn't be so harsh; it's better to have some way of handling things life throws at you, especially things you have little to no control over, than none at all.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    I would rather say an ability to be "well-adjusted".
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    I think that's a mis-characterization of stoicism. That sounds more like Epicureanism (quit stressful things and live a simple life) or cynicism (quit everything and live like a stray dog so that you don't have to worry about losing anything). Stoicism because popular with Roman elites specifically because it didn't ask the adherents to quit anything, but simply to adapt themselves to whatever adversity they might face[1]. [1] https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powerful/ https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powe...
    - lovecg 5y ago
      I think there are different flavors of Stoicism chiefly differentiated by the social status of the person practicing it. The wealthy and the powerful don’t have to deal with systemic oppression, only their own emotions and consequences of playing the game of realpolitik. In that context Stoicism has a lot to offer. For everyone else though - well sometimes raw, “unmanaged” anger for example is a useful emotion. A “stoic revolutionary” is an oxymoron.
      - marginalia_nu 5y ago
        Rage unfailingly makes you a pawn in someone else's game. You should always be wary of anyone telling you that you need to be angry. The Stoics inherited the Cynics attitude that death isn't an evil. If worse comes to worst, you can always just fall on your sword. They used to say that the door is always open. Marcus Cato weaponized this fact to rob Julius Caesar of complete victory: Caesar couldn't demand his submission if he fell on his sword first. They found him and patched him up. But he ripped out the stitches and disemboweled himself with his bare hands.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- twright 5y ago
  After reading Discourses 4.1 I would like to summarize it as a defense of the institution of slavery that goes something like “Slavery is good because slaves themselves don’t know what it means to be free and freedom is actually a burden in the wrong mindset so it shouldn’t be for everyone.” (Ignoring that slavery, the deprivation of personhood, is an inhumane burden somehow comparable to “oh no I’m free and now I have to answer to Caesar”) Yes, it’s an odd opinion from a former slave who was maimed by a former master. Unfortunately this argument is sustained all through history and today we have people going something like “actually, working multiple minimum wage jobs and struggling to pay rent is good”.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    I'm not really passing judgement on Epictetus, merely relaying his position, as someone with a far more personal understanding of roman slavery than anyone discussing it 2000 post fact. Difficult to explain to the man how he ought to feel about events in his life we have only a sketch of an idea about. Within the framework of Stoicism, where worrying is one of the greatest evils, his argument makes every sense.
  - dlhavema 5y ago
    If thats all a person can do would you rather them sit on a couch and live off of/depend on the state? No it's not a super fun existence and that's what my life was like right after high school in the early college years. The real problem comes in when someone in that situation gives up and does nothing.
  - sbacic 5y ago
    I don't think Epictetus was actually defending the institution of slavery. Rather, stoic philosophy is full of these "hacks" for handling unpleasant things in your life. Many of them seem quite morbid and bizarre to the untrained mind (such as actively thinking about the death and absence of a loved one).
    - bobthechef 5y ago
      I don't know about "hacks", rather observations. If most people didn't have to work to survive, they wouldn't know what to do with the time. An observation about slavery is that you've traded in the burden of responsibility that liberty introduces for the comfort of not having to worry about what to do with yourself It's easier to just go do what you're told than it is to determine what must be done. Most people actually prefer that way of living. Left to themselves, they'd either become paralyzed with indecision, or they'd piss their lives away indulging their appetites and possibly commit suicide.
ludamad 5y ago
Isn't it a bit of a penmanship bias that the slaves you hear about in history have more dignity? All writing is propaganda to a degree, while we see here evidence of multiple people locked in a tiny room
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  You see evidence for the sleep quarters and assume they’re locked in, what evidence do you have to claim that? Where is the evidence of slave abuse you feel is true? From archeology of Herculaneum they looked at a household with a slave and noted that one of the remains was fat, well fed man and had many signs of eating a meat rich diet, and a girl found was less nourished and had signs of malnutrition. They assumed from his healthy bones he was the master and the teen girl was the slave. The well fed man was the cook, a slave and the young girl was vegetarian by choice and the daughter of the master of the household. Your assumptions of it being propaganda are not factually accurate.
  - ludamad 5y ago
    You're right, evidence of locked is not there. And I'm not fully convinced they're slaves, either, as many conditions bind people to work. There's definitely a lot of ambiguity from these time periods, but whitewashing slavery in written text is a well-known phenomenon
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >> Isn't it a bit of a penmanship bias that the slaves you hear about in history have more dignity? All writing is propaganda to a degree, while we see here evidence of multiple people locked in a tiny room > You see evidence for the sleep quarters and assume they’re locked in, what evidence do you have to claim that? Where is the evidence of slave abuse you feel is true? People can be locked in by things other than a physical lock one the door. Didn't some slaves in classical times receive tattoos like "I belong to so and so, return me to him for a reward."? Edit: here's a citation: https://archive.archaeology.org/9903/abstracts/tattoo.html https://archive.archaeology.org/9903/abstracts/tattoo.html > A legal inscription from Ephesus indicates that during the early Roman Empire all slaves exported to Asia were tattooed with the words "tax paid." "Stop me, I'm a runaway" was another standard motto etched on the brows of Roman slaves. New research indicates that Roman authorities punished early Christians with forehead tattoos that condemned them to the mines. In A.D. 330, the first Christian emperor, Constantine, banned the practice of tattooing the faces of convicts, gladiators, and soldiers. Because the human face reflected "the image of divine beauty," he said, "it should not be defiled."
inglor_cz 5y ago
Fate of a Roman slave was decidedly different depending on what the slave did. House and urban slaves weren't much worse off than a regular citizen, having a good chance of manumission (release), after which they became freedmen - still not full citizens, but their children would be, and some freedmen became very rich. Given that those slaves are the ones that we know the most about (from both archeology and written sources), it skews our perception of Roman slavery to being more benign than it actually was. Rural slaves which worked in agriculture were worked very hard and they were much more numerous than house slaves. Not an enviable fate, though one must admit that ancient agriculture was a backbreaking work regardless of personal status. Slaves sent to mines were basically sentenced to death. Few of them would last more than five years. Ancient Rome had very extensive mining operations and mines "ate" men by the thousands. These were mostly enslaved men, because they were cheaper and could not say "no". Mining safety back then was basically zero.
- johnny53169 5y ago
  > Slaves sent to mines were basically sentenced to death. It's less bad now, but being a miner is not much better nowadays, even more so since most of the mines are in poor countries with little care for the workers and rich countries would prefer not to think too hard where the iron for their eco-conscious steel bottle is coming from.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I grew up in a mining city (Ostrava, black coal). Now the mines are closed, but when I was a kid, they were in full operation. Disasters happened infrequently, but when they did, they were ugly. A spark at a wrong time in a wrong place, and sixty fathers would never come back home again. Mining is freaking dangerous. The forces of nature involved are enormous, and human is but a small ant facing them.
    - sologoub 5y ago
      A bit off-topic, but how did the city cope with the mine closure and loss of so many jobs?
neaden 5y ago
By definition slaves are ill treated because slavery in itself is terrible. To be clear here, even if your master was individually kind you existed in a system where you had no rights, if you were a witness to a crime you would have to be tortured during your testimony to prove it's true, where you were not fully protected from the law by assaults from any free person, and where you could be sold at any point. It was considered perfectly acceptable for a "kind" master to rape and beat you at any time. Slavery is always a horrendous thing.
jterrys 5y ago
I have a simple question: Is it possible that they were servants and not slaves? I'm not very knowledgeable about ancient Roman history but it seems somewhat presumptuous to assume these are slave rooms. Was there no such thing as a lower economic class of free people that were working as either attendants or servants? This is after all, a villa in a resort area. Its not as if people throughout the annals of history didn't work as attendants alongside slaves. All of a sudden "An intact servants quarters found in Pompeii's ruins" doesn't sound all that enticing of headline.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  No, there were no free "servants" in ancient Rome. Incidentally, even today, "servants" (domestic workers) are often enslaved or work in conditions that are only nominally not slavery. Many are children at an age that is too young to work legally. https://web.archive.org/web/20140930183517/http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/child_domestic_work.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20140930183517/http://www.antisl... >> All of a sudden "An intact servants quarters found in Pompeii's ruins" doesn't sound all that enticing of headline. The actual headline is not clickbait, if that's what you're suggesting, neither is it spiced up to make it more "enticing", or anything like that. Rather, the headline you propose is an anachronism because there were no free "servants" in ancient Rome. The role of "household servants" (domestic workers) was fulfilled by slaves.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > Is it possible that they were servants and not slaves? Fun Fact: This interpretive problem comes up in translations of the New Testament, where the same word is very frequently used in the context of [servant|slave] of [Christ|God]. See different translations of Romans 1:1. The Greek word, δοῦλος (doulos) literally means "slave", and is a reference to the contemporaneous Roman practice as can also be seen in other Roman works written in Greek. But this then creates all sorts of translation issues for English readers: * if you use the word "slave", then people think of slavery of Africans (people chained, working in fields, being constantly whipped, living in large group quarters). This is way too harsh. The key point of doulos is that he was forced to do something by another will. The emphasis is on the powerless and passive nature of the slave, not on harsh treatment. A slave might be treated well, but if he was, it was only because his Lord decided to treat him that way. But in practice, they were household slaves with better treatment than African slaves. * if you use the word "servant", then people perhaps think of a butler, which is way too soft. A Butler can decide to leave. He may not have the means to leave, but he has his own will. So some translations use the term "bondservant" as a compromise, given the fact that this refers to something between our modern conception of slavery and our modern conception of servanthood. Fun-Fact 2: One of the related words is diakoneo which means "to serve", so one "serves as a slave". From this we get the English word deacon, who is supposed to be a slave/servant of a local church, again with the ambiguity that this is between African slavery and being a butler. Therefore if you really wanted to remain ambiguous (and mess with your readers) you could call them deacon's quarters. From the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament entry for doulos[1]: Hence we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. → οἰκέτης is almost exactly synonymous, but in δοῦλος the stress is rather on the slave’s dependence on his lord, while οἰκέτης emphasises the position of the slave in relation to the world outside and in human society. This shows us again how strong is the passive element in δοῦλος, and in the whole word group to which it belongs. - - - source: [1] Rengstorf, K. H. (1964–). δοῦλος, σύνδουλος, δούλη, δουλέυω, δουλεία, δουλόω, καταδουλόω, δουλαγωγέω, ὀφθαλμοδουλία. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
cletus 5y ago
I've heard this quite a few times now and I'm not sure where the idea comes from that slavery in the Roman Republic and Empire were somehow humane but that wasn't the case at all. Roman slaves were property and could be treated as such, including sexual exploitation (eg made to be prostitutes) and being summarily executed. And yes, slaves could be freed but that was also true in the American slave era. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's accessible, particularly by the slave themselves. Also, freedmen in Rome had less rights than citizens. The history of Rome is a fascinating one but it's hard to look at through the eyes of modern morality. I think this generally applies to the Ancient World: if somehow we could be transported back to that time I'm sure we'd find it quite alien. My favourite example of this is the origin of the word "decimate" [1]. If, say, a military unit rebelled against Rome, groups of 10 would have to decide which one of the 10 would die and to kill them. Slavery has always been brutal. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  You claim most slaves in Roman times were not freed, do you know the history or are you just assuming with no evidence that's the case?
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > You claim most slaves in Roman times were not freed, do you know the history or are you just assuming with no evidence that's the case? Honestly, I think you're the one who needs to be providing the evidence, especially if you're claiming anything close to the opposite of that (i.e. that most slaves in Roman times were freed).
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  > And yes, slaves could be freed but that was also true in the American slave era. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's accessible, particularly by the slave themselves. Also, freedmen in Rome had less rights than citizens. In the US slaves were used as collateral for loans. In a way slaves weren't owned by plantation owners, they were owned by the banks. That if anything explains some of the pernicious aspects of US slavery. Also likely the US banking system. And the mistreatment of blacks after the civil war.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
The philosophers Plato and Epictetus were, for a time, slaves.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  I've never read anywhere that Plato was a slave. He came from an aristocratic family and was one of the noble youths the Athenians were so concerned about the historical Socrates corrupting with his epistemic skepticism. He had family that were apart of the anti-democratic coup d'etat.
  - npongratz 5y ago
    I was also unaware of Plato's possible slavery, and found this [0], but I do not have the background knowledge judge the veracity of the information: > One source of the story of Plato being sold into slavery is Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius. An English translation is available online [1] on Project Perseus. You can find the full story in Book 3 that discusses the life of Plato. [0] https://history.stackexchange.com/a/37499 https://history.stackexchange.com/a/37499 [1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
    - imbnwa 5y ago
      These sources just highlight that he was, at best, under threat of being a slave though, not that he was actually sold and performed as a slave. He's ransomed for at the last minute by someone recognizing him at the market. If Plato had actually been a slave, his lifelong commitment to anti-democratic political organization would've been a little different, though maybe not, considering even this experience didn't change his philosophy, to the point that's likely not worth mentioning as a significant experience, unlike Epictectus who was born into slavery.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        Sorry being up for sale in a slave market isn’t enough—I think it is fascinating and important.
throwaway829 5y ago
How is that different from slaves like William Ellison in the USA? Pre-Civil War he became one of the wealthiest property owners in South Carolina. Sounds like decent social mobility to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  How often did this happen vs Roman times? Before the dreadful US took over the South, slaves were much better treated and had way more upwards mobility, like in Florida when the Spanish and French were the colonizers. Places like New Orleans was much better for African descendants and many fled when they found out they’d be ruled by America. I don’t cite Thomas Jefferson and his treatment of his slaves as the normative, in Roman times it was built into the system for slaves to buy their freedom and also have upwards mobility. That is not institutionalized for slavery in the US.
tablespoon 5y ago
> Many slaves were captured and famous intellectuals (Aesop is a famous example) or educated and used as tutors, they were not as modernists assume to be universally ill treated and abused. And far, far more slaves worked the fields or lived short nasty lives in mines, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion (near Athens): > Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life. > ...The Romans provided cheap slave labor and new technologies gave the Greeks new means of extracting silver in more efficient ways.
kragen 5y ago
Roman slaves, including in Herculaneum, were chattel; they could be bought and sold, and their children were born into slavery. Their owners could break up their marriages with impunity simply by selling them or their spouse to a different household. Aisopos was also a chattel slave, but he lived 600 years earlier, in a very different culture from that of Herculaneum; consider the difference between your own circumstances and the circumstances of domestic servants 600 years ago in Russia. Herculaneum did not have very much social mobility; it was a society with much more persistent stratification than our own. Half of Herculaneum's citizens (the most privileged 20%) were freedmen, but most of the wealthy citizens were the great-grandchildren of wealthy citizens, and the great majority of people born enslaved died in slavery. Freedmen and often even their children were ineligible for most political offices. Throughout Italy, 80% of decurions had no slave ancestry at all, any number of generations back. (I'm not sure what the number was in Herculaneum.) https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436383 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436383 To liberals, enslaving someone is itself ill treatment and abuse, because we consider freedom to be the birthright of every human being, and its denial to amount to ill treatment. So we consider the idea of slavery without ill treatment and abuse to be a contradiction in terms. Even if a slave is not being beaten, raped, berated, or worked to death in a mine, they are being deprived of many of the most precious things in life by the very nature of slavery.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Epictetus, freedman roman Stoic philosopher seems as a whole have an attitude of like "what of it, it's not like you're free from obligations even as senator or the caesar". As a slave, you are free from all concerns and worries beyond fulfilling your duties. Discourses 4.1 is perhaps the most direct example of this.

lovecg 5y ago
Ah Stoics, they’re the best at turning being a resigned quitter into dignified philosophy.
- twright 5y ago
  https://existentialcomics.com/comic/286 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/286
- sbacic 5y ago
  I wouldn't be so harsh; it's better to have some way of handling things life throws at you, especially things you have little to no control over, than none at all.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  I would rather say an ability to be "well-adjusted".
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  I think that's a mis-characterization of stoicism. That sounds more like Epicureanism (quit stressful things and live a simple life) or cynicism (quit everything and live like a stray dog so that you don't have to worry about losing anything). Stoicism because popular with Roman elites specifically because it didn't ask the adherents to quit anything, but simply to adapt themselves to whatever adversity they might face[1]. [1] https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powerful/ https://www.exurbe.com/stoicisms-appeal-to-the-rich-and-powe...
  - lovecg 5y ago
    I think there are different flavors of Stoicism chiefly differentiated by the social status of the person practicing it. The wealthy and the powerful don’t have to deal with systemic oppression, only their own emotions and consequences of playing the game of realpolitik. In that context Stoicism has a lot to offer. For everyone else though - well sometimes raw, “unmanaged” anger for example is a useful emotion. A “stoic revolutionary” is an oxymoron.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Rage unfailingly makes you a pawn in someone else's game. You should always be wary of anyone telling you that you need to be angry. The Stoics inherited the Cynics attitude that death isn't an evil. If worse comes to worst, you can always just fall on your sword. They used to say that the door is always open. Marcus Cato weaponized this fact to rob Julius Caesar of complete victory: Caesar couldn't demand his submission if he fell on his sword first. They found him and patched him up. But he ripped out the stitches and disemboweled himself with his bare hands.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
twright 5y ago
After reading Discourses 4.1 I would like to summarize it as a defense of the institution of slavery that goes something like “Slavery is good because slaves themselves don’t know what it means to be free and freedom is actually a burden in the wrong mindset so it shouldn’t be for everyone.” (Ignoring that slavery, the deprivation of personhood, is an inhumane burden somehow comparable to “oh no I’m free and now I have to answer to Caesar”) Yes, it’s an odd opinion from a former slave who was maimed by a former master. Unfortunately this argument is sustained all through history and today we have people going something like “actually, working multiple minimum wage jobs and struggling to pay rent is good”.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  I'm not really passing judgement on Epictetus, merely relaying his position, as someone with a far more personal understanding of roman slavery than anyone discussing it 2000 post fact. Difficult to explain to the man how he ought to feel about events in his life we have only a sketch of an idea about. Within the framework of Stoicism, where worrying is one of the greatest evils, his argument makes every sense.
- dlhavema 5y ago
  If thats all a person can do would you rather them sit on a couch and live off of/depend on the state? No it's not a super fun existence and that's what my life was like right after high school in the early college years. The real problem comes in when someone in that situation gives up and does nothing.
- sbacic 5y ago
  I don't think Epictetus was actually defending the institution of slavery. Rather, stoic philosophy is full of these "hacks" for handling unpleasant things in your life. Many of them seem quite morbid and bizarre to the untrained mind (such as actively thinking about the death and absence of a loved one).
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    I don't know about "hacks", rather observations. If most people didn't have to work to survive, they wouldn't know what to do with the time. An observation about slavery is that you've traded in the burden of responsibility that liberty introduces for the comfort of not having to worry about what to do with yourself It's easier to just go do what you're told than it is to determine what must be done. Most people actually prefer that way of living. Left to themselves, they'd either become paralyzed with indecision, or they'd piss their lives away indulging their appetites and possibly commit suicide.

ludamad 5y ago

Isn't it a bit of a penmanship bias that the slaves you hear about in history have more dignity? All writing is propaganda to a degree, while we see here evidence of multiple people locked in a tiny room

GhettoComputers 5y ago
You see evidence for the sleep quarters and assume they’re locked in, what evidence do you have to claim that? Where is the evidence of slave abuse you feel is true? From archeology of Herculaneum they looked at a household with a slave and noted that one of the remains was fat, well fed man and had many signs of eating a meat rich diet, and a girl found was less nourished and had signs of malnutrition. They assumed from his healthy bones he was the master and the teen girl was the slave. The well fed man was the cook, a slave and the young girl was vegetarian by choice and the daughter of the master of the household. Your assumptions of it being propaganda are not factually accurate.
- ludamad 5y ago
  You're right, evidence of locked is not there. And I'm not fully convinced they're slaves, either, as many conditions bind people to work. There's definitely a lot of ambiguity from these time periods, but whitewashing slavery in written text is a well-known phenomenon
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> Isn't it a bit of a penmanship bias that the slaves you hear about in history have more dignity? All writing is propaganda to a degree, while we see here evidence of multiple people locked in a tiny room > You see evidence for the sleep quarters and assume they’re locked in, what evidence do you have to claim that? Where is the evidence of slave abuse you feel is true? People can be locked in by things other than a physical lock one the door. Didn't some slaves in classical times receive tattoos like "I belong to so and so, return me to him for a reward."? Edit: here's a citation: https://archive.archaeology.org/9903/abstracts/tattoo.html https://archive.archaeology.org/9903/abstracts/tattoo.html > A legal inscription from Ephesus indicates that during the early Roman Empire all slaves exported to Asia were tattooed with the words "tax paid." "Stop me, I'm a runaway" was another standard motto etched on the brows of Roman slaves. New research indicates that Roman authorities punished early Christians with forehead tattoos that condemned them to the mines. In A.D. 330, the first Christian emperor, Constantine, banned the practice of tattooing the faces of convicts, gladiators, and soldiers. Because the human face reflected "the image of divine beauty," he said, "it should not be defiled."

inglor_cz 5y ago

Fate of a Roman slave was decidedly different depending on what the slave did. House and urban slaves weren't much worse off than a regular citizen, having a good chance of manumission (release), after which they became freedmen - still not full citizens, but their children would be, and some freedmen became very rich. Given that those slaves are the ones that we know the most about (from both archeology and written sources), it skews our perception of Roman slavery to being more benign than it actually was. Rural slaves which worked in agriculture were worked very hard and they were much more numerous than house slaves. Not an enviable fate, though one must admit that ancient agriculture was a backbreaking work regardless of personal status. Slaves sent to mines were basically sentenced to death. Few of them would last more than five years. Ancient Rome had very extensive mining operations and mines "ate" men by the thousands. These were mostly enslaved men, because they were cheaper and could not say "no". Mining safety back then was basically zero.

johnny53169 5y ago
> Slaves sent to mines were basically sentenced to death. It's less bad now, but being a miner is not much better nowadays, even more so since most of the mines are in poor countries with little care for the workers and rich countries would prefer not to think too hard where the iron for their eco-conscious steel bottle is coming from.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I grew up in a mining city (Ostrava, black coal). Now the mines are closed, but when I was a kid, they were in full operation. Disasters happened infrequently, but when they did, they were ugly. A spark at a wrong time in a wrong place, and sixty fathers would never come back home again. Mining is freaking dangerous. The forces of nature involved are enormous, and human is but a small ant facing them.
  - sologoub 5y ago
    A bit off-topic, but how did the city cope with the mine closure and loss of so many jobs?

neaden 5y ago

By definition slaves are ill treated because slavery in itself is terrible. To be clear here, even if your master was individually kind you existed in a system where you had no rights, if you were a witness to a crime you would have to be tortured during your testimony to prove it's true, where you were not fully protected from the law by assaults from any free person, and where you could be sold at any point. It was considered perfectly acceptable for a "kind" master to rape and beat you at any time. Slavery is always a horrendous thing.

jterrys 5y ago

I have a simple question: Is it possible that they were servants and not slaves? I'm not very knowledgeable about ancient Roman history but it seems somewhat presumptuous to assume these are slave rooms. Was there no such thing as a lower economic class of free people that were working as either attendants or servants? This is after all, a villa in a resort area. Its not as if people throughout the annals of history didn't work as attendants alongside slaves. All of a sudden "An intact servants quarters found in Pompeii's ruins" doesn't sound all that enticing of headline.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
No, there were no free "servants" in ancient Rome. Incidentally, even today, "servants" (domestic workers) are often enslaved or work in conditions that are only nominally not slavery. Many are children at an age that is too young to work legally. https://web.archive.org/web/20140930183517/http://www.antislavery.org/english/slavery_today/child_domestic_work.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20140930183517/http://www.antisl... >> All of a sudden "An intact servants quarters found in Pompeii's ruins" doesn't sound all that enticing of headline. The actual headline is not clickbait, if that's what you're suggesting, neither is it spiced up to make it more "enticing", or anything like that. Rather, the headline you propose is an anachronism because there were no free "servants" in ancient Rome. The role of "household servants" (domestic workers) was fulfilled by slaves.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> Is it possible that they were servants and not slaves? Fun Fact: This interpretive problem comes up in translations of the New Testament, where the same word is very frequently used in the context of [servant|slave] of [Christ|God]. See different translations of Romans 1:1. The Greek word, δοῦλος (doulos) literally means "slave", and is a reference to the contemporaneous Roman practice as can also be seen in other Roman works written in Greek. But this then creates all sorts of translation issues for English readers: * if you use the word "slave", then people think of slavery of Africans (people chained, working in fields, being constantly whipped, living in large group quarters). This is way too harsh. The key point of doulos is that he was forced to do something by another will. The emphasis is on the powerless and passive nature of the slave, not on harsh treatment. A slave might be treated well, but if he was, it was only because his Lord decided to treat him that way. But in practice, they were household slaves with better treatment than African slaves. * if you use the word "servant", then people perhaps think of a butler, which is way too soft. A Butler can decide to leave. He may not have the means to leave, but he has his own will. So some translations use the term "bondservant" as a compromise, given the fact that this refers to something between our modern conception of slavery and our modern conception of servanthood. Fun-Fact 2: One of the related words is diakoneo which means "to serve", so one "serves as a slave". From this we get the English word deacon, who is supposed to be a slave/servant of a local church, again with the ambiguity that this is between African slavery and being a butler. Therefore if you really wanted to remain ambiguous (and mess with your readers) you could call them deacon's quarters. From the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament entry for doulos[1]: Hence we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. → οἰκέτης is almost exactly synonymous, but in δοῦλος the stress is rather on the slave’s dependence on his lord, while οἰκέτης emphasises the position of the slave in relation to the world outside and in human society. This shows us again how strong is the passive element in δοῦλος, and in the whole word group to which it belongs. - - - source: [1] Rengstorf, K. H. (1964–). δοῦλος, σύνδουλος, δούλη, δουλέυω, δουλεία, δουλόω, καταδουλόω, δουλαγωγέω, ὀφθαλμοδουλία. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

cletus 5y ago

I've heard this quite a few times now and I'm not sure where the idea comes from that slavery in the Roman Republic and Empire were somehow humane but that wasn't the case at all. Roman slaves were property and could be treated as such, including sexual exploitation (eg made to be prostitutes) and being summarily executed. And yes, slaves could be freed but that was also true in the American slave era. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's accessible, particularly by the slave themselves. Also, freedmen in Rome had less rights than citizens. The history of Rome is a fascinating one but it's hard to look at through the eyes of modern morality. I think this generally applies to the Ancient World: if somehow we could be transported back to that time I'm sure we'd find it quite alien. My favourite example of this is the origin of the word "decimate" [1]. If, say, a military unit rebelled against Rome, groups of 10 would have to decide which one of the 10 would die and to kill them. Slavery has always been brutal. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)

GhettoComputers 5y ago
You claim most slaves in Roman times were not freed, do you know the history or are you just assuming with no evidence that's the case?
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > You claim most slaves in Roman times were not freed, do you know the history or are you just assuming with no evidence that's the case? Honestly, I think you're the one who needs to be providing the evidence, especially if you're claiming anything close to the opposite of that (i.e. that most slaves in Roman times were freed).
Gibbon1 5y ago
> And yes, slaves could be freed but that was also true in the American slave era. Just because something is possible doesn't mean it's accessible, particularly by the slave themselves. Also, freedmen in Rome had less rights than citizens. In the US slaves were used as collateral for loans. In a way slaves weren't owned by plantation owners, they were owned by the banks. That if anything explains some of the pernicious aspects of US slavery. Also likely the US banking system. And the mistreatment of blacks after the civil war.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

The philosophers Plato and Epictetus were, for a time, slaves.

imbnwa 5y ago
I've never read anywhere that Plato was a slave. He came from an aristocratic family and was one of the noble youths the Athenians were so concerned about the historical Socrates corrupting with his epistemic skepticism. He had family that were apart of the anti-democratic coup d'etat.
- npongratz 5y ago
  I was also unaware of Plato's possible slavery, and found this [0], but I do not have the background knowledge judge the veracity of the information: > One source of the story of Plato being sold into slavery is Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius. An English translation is available online [1] on Project Perseus. You can find the full story in Book 3 that discusses the life of Plato. [0] https://history.stackexchange.com/a/37499 https://history.stackexchange.com/a/37499 [1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    These sources just highlight that he was, at best, under threat of being a slave though, not that he was actually sold and performed as a slave. He's ransomed for at the last minute by someone recognizing him at the market. If Plato had actually been a slave, his lifelong commitment to anti-democratic political organization would've been a little different, though maybe not, considering even this experience didn't change his philosophy, to the point that's likely not worth mentioning as a significant experience, unlike Epictectus who was born into slavery.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      Sorry being up for sale in a slave market isn’t enough—I think it is fascinating and important.

throwaway829 5y ago

How is that different from slaves like William Ellison in the USA? Pre-Civil War he became one of the wealthiest property owners in South Carolina. Sounds like decent social mobility to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ellison

GhettoComputers 5y ago
How often did this happen vs Roman times? Before the dreadful US took over the South, slaves were much better treated and had way more upwards mobility, like in Florida when the Spanish and French were the colonizers. Places like New Orleans was much better for African descendants and many fled when they found out they’d be ruled by America. I don’t cite Thomas Jefferson and his treatment of his slaves as the normative, in Roman times it was built into the system for slaves to buy their freedom and also have upwards mobility. That is not institutionalized for slavery in the US.

tablespoon 5y ago

> Many slaves were captured and famous intellectuals (Aesop is a famous example) or educated and used as tutors, they were not as modernists assume to be universally ill treated and abused. And far, far more slaves worked the fields or lived short nasty lives in mines, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion (near Athens): > Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life. > ...The Romans provided cheap slave labor and new technologies gave the Greeks new means of extracting silver in more efficient ways.

kragen 5y ago

Roman slaves, including in Herculaneum, were chattel; they could be bought and sold, and their children were born into slavery. Their owners could break up their marriages with impunity simply by selling them or their spouse to a different household. Aisopos was also a chattel slave, but he lived 600 years earlier, in a very different culture from that of Herculaneum; consider the difference between your own circumstances and the circumstances of domestic servants 600 years ago in Russia. Herculaneum did not have very much social mobility; it was a society with much more persistent stratification than our own. Half of Herculaneum's citizens (the most privileged 20%) were freedmen, but most of the wealthy citizens were the great-grandchildren of wealthy citizens, and the great majority of people born enslaved died in slavery. Freedmen and often even their children were ineligible for most political offices. Throughout Italy, 80% of decurions had no slave ancestry at all, any number of generations back. (I'm not sure what the number was in Herculaneum.) https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436383 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436383 To liberals, enslaving someone is itself ill treatment and abuse, because we consider freedom to be the birthright of every human being, and its denial to amount to ill treatment. So we consider the idea of slavery without ill treatment and abuse to be a contradiction in terms. Even if a slave is not being beaten, raped, berated, or worked to death in a mine, they are being deprived of many of the most precious things in life by the very nature of slavery.