Slavery played an important role in the society and economy of ancient Rome. Unskilled or low-skill slaves labored in the fields, mines, and mills with few opportunities for advancement and little chance of freedom. Skilled and educated slaves—including artisans, chefs, domestic staff and personal attendants, entertainers, business managers, accountants and bankers, educators at all levels, secretaries and librarians, civil servants, and physicians—occupied a more privileged tier of servitude and could hope to obtain freedom through one of several well-defined paths with protections under the law. The possibility of manumission and subsequent citizenship was a distinguishing feature of Rome's system of slavery, resulting in a significant and influential number of freedpersons in Roman society.
At all levels of employment, free working people, former slaves, and the enslaved mostly did the same kinds of jobs. Elite Romans whose wealth came from property ownership saw little difference between slavery and a dependence on earning wages from labor. Slaves were themselves considered property under Roman law and had no rights of legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, by law they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation, torture, and summary execution. The most brutal forms of punishment were reserved for slaves. The adequacy of their diet, shelter, clothing, and healthcare was dependent on their perceived utility to owners whose impulses might be cruel or situationally humane.
Some people were born into slavery as the child of an enslaved mother. Others became slaves. War captives were considered legally enslaved, and Roman military expansion during the Republican era was a major source of slaves. From the 2nd century BC through late antiquity, kidnapping and piracy put freeborn people all around the Mediterranean at risk of illegal enslavement, to which the children of poor families were especially vulnerable. Although a law was passed to ban debt slavery quite early in Rome's history, some people sold themselves into contractual slavery to escape poverty. The slave trade, lightly taxed and regulated, flourished in all reaches of the Roman Empire and across borders.
In antiquity, slavery was seen as the political consequence of one group dominating another, and people of any race, ethnicity, or place of origin might become slaves, including freeborn Romans. Slavery was practiced within all communities of the Roman Empire, including among Jews and Christians. Even modest households might expect to have two or three slaves.
A period of slave rebellions ended with the defeat of Spartacus in 71 BC; slave uprisings grew rare in the Imperial era, when individual escape was a more persistent form of resistance. Fugitive slave-hunting was the most concerted form of policing in the Roman Empire.
Moral discourse on slavery was concerned with the treatment of slaves, and abolitionist views were almost nonexistent. Inscriptions set up by slaves and freedpersons and the art and decoration of their houses offer glimpses of how they saw themselves. A few writers and philosophers of the Roman era were former slaves or the sons of freed slaves. Some scholars have made efforts to imagine more deeply the lived experiences of slaves in the Roman world through comparisons to the Atlantic slave trade, but no portrait of the "typical" Roman slave emerges from the wide range of work performed by slaves and freedmen and the complex distinctions among their social and legal statuses.
Origins
From Rome's earliest historical period, domestic slaves were part of a , the body of a household's dependents—a word especially, or sometimes limited to, referring to the slaves collectively. Pliny (1st century AD) was nostalgic for a time when "the ancients" lived more intimately in a household with no need for "legions of slaves"—but still imagined this simpler domestic life as supported by the possession of a slave., citing Pliny, Natural History, page 33.26
All those belonging to the were subject to the , the "father" or head of household and more precisely the estate owner. According to Seneca, the early Romans coined as a euphemism for the relationship of a master to his slaves., citing on Seneca, Epistula 47.14), 196. The word for "master" was as the one who controlled the domain of the (household); was the word for his control over the slaves.Benedetto Fontana, "Tacitus on Empire and Republic", History of Political Thought 14:1 (1993), p. 28. The held the power of life and death () over the dependents of his household, including his sons and daughters as well as slaves. The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st century AD) asserts that this right dated back to the legendary time of Romulus.
In contrast to Greek city-states, Rome was an ethnically diverse population and incorporated former slaves as citizens. Dionysius found it remarkable that when Romans manumitted their slaves, they gave them Roman citizenship as well. Myths of Rome's founding sought to account for both this heterogeneityKathryn Lomas, Andrew Gardner, and Edward Herring, "Creating Ethnicities and Identities in the Roman World", Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies suppl. 120 (2013), p. 4. and the role of freedmen in Roman society.Parshia Lee-Stecum, "Roman : refugee narratives in Augustan versions of Roman prehistory", Hermathena 184 (2008), p. 78, specifically on the relation of Livy's account of the asylum to the Augustan program of broadening the political participation of freedmen and provincials. The legendary founding by Romulus began with his establishment of a place of refuge that, according to the Augustan-era historian Livy, attracted "mostly former slaves, vagabonds, and runaways all looking for a fresh start" as citizens of the new city, which Livy considers a source of Rome's strength.Rex Stem, "The Exemplary Lessons of Livy's Romulus", Transactions of the American Philological Association 137:2 (2007), p. 451, citing Livy 1.8.5–6T. P. Wiseman, "The Wife and Children of Romulus", Classical Quarterly 33:3 (1983), p. 445, on Greek attitudes that therefore "the Romans were simply robbers and bandits, strangers to the laws of gods or men", citing Dionysius 1.4.1–3. 1.89–90. Servius Tullius, the semi-legendary sixth king of Rome, was said to have been the son of a slave woman,J. N. Bremmer and N. M. Horsfall, Roman Myth and Mythography (University of London Institute of Classical Studies, 1987), p. 32. and the cultural role of slavery is embedded in some religious festivals and temples that the Romans associated with his reign.
Some legal and religious developments pertaining to slavery thus can be discerned even in Rome's earliest institutions. The Twelve Tables, the earliest Roman legal code, dated traditionally to 451/450 BC, do not contain law defining slavery, the existence of which is taken as a given. But there are mentions of manumissionAlan Watson, Rome of the XII Tables: Persons and Property (Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 86. and the status of freedmen, who are referred to as , "freedmen who are Roman citizens", indicating that as early as the 5th century BC, former slaves were a significant demographic that the law needed to address, with a legal path to freedom and the opportunity to participate in the legal and political system.
The Roman jurist Gaius described slavery as "the state that is recognized by the in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature" (Institutiones 1.3.2, 161 AD).Fields, Nic. Spartacus and the Slave War 73–71 BC: A Gladiator Rebels against Rome. (Osprey 2009) p. 17–18. Ulpian (2nd century AD) also regarded slavery as an aspect of the , the customary international law held in common among all peoples (). In Ulpian's tripartite division of law, the "law of nations" was considered neither natural law, thought to exist in nature and govern animals as well as humans, nor civil law, the legal code particular to a people or nation.Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002, originally published 1997 by Scholars Press for Emory University), p. 136. All human beings are born free () under natural law, but since slavery was held to be a universal practice, individual nations would develop their own civil laws pertaining to slaves. In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. The was not a legal code,R. W. Dyson, Natural Law and Political Realism in the History of Political Thought (Peter Lang, 2005), vol. 1, p. 127. and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct".
Although Rome's earliest wars were defensive, a Roman victory would still result in the enslavement of the defeated under these circumstances, as is recorded at the conclusion of the war with the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC., citing Livy 5.22.1. Defensive wars also drained manpower for agriculture, increasing the demand for labor—a demand that could be met by the availability of war captives. From the sixth through the third centuries BC, Rome gradually became a "slave society",, especially n. 2, citing Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge 1978), pp. 99–100 on the criteria for "slave society" with the first two Punic Wars (265–201 BC) producing the most dramatic surge in the number of slaves.
Slavery with the possibility of manumission became so embedded in Roman society that by the 2nd century AD, most free citizens in the city of Rome are likely to have had slaves "somewhere in their ancestry".Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (W. W. Norton, 2015), pp. 68–69, qualifying this statement as the view of "some historians".
Enslavement of Roman citizens
In early Rome, the Twelve Tables permitted debt slavery under harsh terms and made freeborn Romans subject to enslavement as a result of financial misfortune. A law in the late 4th century BC put a stop to creditors enslaving a defaulting debtor as a private action, though a debtor could still be compelled by a legal judgment to work off his debt.Andrew Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 37. Otherwise, the only means of enslaving a freeborn citizen that the Romans of the Republican era recognized as lawful was military defeat and capture under the .
The Carthaginian leader Hannibal enslaved Roman war captives in large numbers during the Second Punic War. Following the Roman defeat at the Battle of Lake Trasimene (217 BC), the treaty included terms for ransoming prisoners of war. The Roman senate declined to do so, and their commander ended up paying the ransom himself. After the disastrous Battle of Cannae the following year, Hannibal again stipulated a redemption of captives, but the senate after debate again voted not to pay, preferring to send a message that soldiers should fight to victory or die. Hannibal then sold these prisoners of war to the Greeks, and they remained slaves until the Second Macedonian War,Ernst Levy, "", Classical Philology 38:3 (1943), p. 161, citing Livy 22.23.6–8, 22.60.3–4, 22. 61.3, 7, and 34.50.3–7; Plutarch, Fabius 7.4–5. when Flamininus recovered 1,200 men who had survived some twenty years of slavery after Cannae. The war that most dramatically escalated the number of slaves brought into Roman society at the same time had exposed an unprecedented number of Roman citizens to enslavement.Matthew Leigh, Comedy and the Rise of Rome (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 96, in connection with the of Plautus.