INTRODUCTION

The slave society of Roman Italy, characterised by the presence of large numbers of slaves (forming perhaps as much as 35 per cent of the population) in all kinds of activity from personal service to crafts to business to education, and in all regions and all levels of society from the depths of the countryside to the houses of the urban elite, developed over the course of the last two centuries bc. Over this same period, slave labour maintained a central role in agricultural production, in the market-orientated villa system of central Italy described by Cato and Varro; slaves were by no means the only people involved in productive activity, or even the majority, but they played a vital role in accumulating the marketable surpluses that sustained the lifestyles and ambitions of many of the elite. Their role in ensuring the social reproduction of the elite, both through apparently unproductive' personal services (which in fact were vital for their owners' participation in the competition for status and the display of an ‘appropriate’ lifestyle) and through their dominant position in the process of educating and socialising the next generation of aristocrats, should also not be underestimated. Indeed, in a family environment that was characterised, as Bradley (1991a: 125–55) has argued, by a high risk of emotional uncertainty and dislocation, slave tutors and nurses offered some degree of continuity in personal relationships for young aristocrats, and so, perhaps, shaped the behaviour of generations of elite Romans.

THE STATE OF THE QUESTION

The fate of slaves and slavery in the late Roman world is a subject that may be taken as a weather vane for prevailing trends in scholarship concerning late antiquity. The late third to fifth centuries were long regarded as an awkward appendage to the classical period, or a prequel to the mediaeval world, to be dealt with swiftly in both cases. Surveys of slaves and slavery tended to follow suit. Standard accounts of slavery in the Roman period characteristically ended with the Severans, leaving the Dominate well alone. When the late empire was discussed, it was as a period during which numbers of slaves declined drastically, either as a result of a significant reduction in external sources, or as an attendant to the more general economic stagnation of the period. The most elegant statement of this was Marc Bloch's (1947) posthumous article ‘Comment et pourquoi finit l'esclavage antique’, which argued for a growing tendency to settle slaves on land as tenants, rather than in the slave gangs of the early imperial period, and a coalescence of this group of agriculturalists with the large numbers of formerly free peasant proprietors and tenants, whose condition declined to one little short of slavery in the period. Similarly, Marxist scholars focused upon the problem of the transition from the slave to the feudal mode of production. The late Roman empire was considered a period during which the inherent limits of slave productivity became increasingly apparent.

This is the first volume of The Cambridge World History of Slavery, dealing with the major slave societies of classical Greece and Rome. Slavery has been among the most ubiquitous of all human institutions, across time and place, from earliest history until, some would argue, the present day. Yet its durability and ubiquity are not widely recognised and, where they are, they seem poorly understood by the general public and scholars alike. A central aim of these volumes, which cover many different times and places, is to help to place the existence and nature of slavery against the backdrop of the broader human social condition.

Slavery has appeared in many different forms and is not always easy to separate from other forms of coerced labour. Nevertheless, there are basic similarities that emerge from the contributions that follow.Most critical of these is the ownership of one human by another, and the ability to buy and sell the human chattel such ownership creates. A second common characteristic is the fact that chattel status is a heritable condition passed down through the mother. Such characteristics are not to be found in the more general category of ‘coerced labour’, as normally practised. The latter typically involves a general loss of citizenship rights, but not necessarily ownership of one person by another and inherited status. Some scholars regard slavery as part of a spectrum of coerced labour and dependency, but the institution has maintained a distinctive legal existence in almost all societies.

This anecdote is recorded by Plutarch (Moralia 511d–e) of M. Pupius Piso, the consul of 61 bc. It may not be literally true. But if it has any plausibility at all, which it must, it suggests that slave-owners in the Roman world of Plutarch's era were well aware that their slaves could present challenges to their authority at any time and even place them, if only for a frustrating moment, in a position of powerlessness they normally expected their slaves alone to occupy. To express and circulate the idea that a slave could crushingly embarrass his master by obeying his instructions to the letter was to acknowledge that slaves were capable of resisting slavery.

INTRODUCTION

By the thirteenth book of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus has finally reached Ithaca. At first, it seems to be yet another strange island on which he has been cast adrift as an outsider. It takes the last half of the poem for Odysseus to reclaim his identity as the father of Telemachus, Penelope's husband, Ithaca's king. The process begins in the hut of Eumaeus, his swineherd and slave. Odysseus is disguised as an old beggar and does not identify himself even when Eumaeus demonstrates his loyalty to the master who has been gone for so many years. Instead, he weaves a false tale of his origins as the son of a wealthy Cretan and a bought concubine. On equal footing with his legitimate brothers while his father was alive (says Odysseus), he was allotted only a pittance on his death (Od. 14.199–210). Later, Eumaeus reciprocates with his own life story. He was not born a slave but the son of a king. His slave nurse, however, took him with her when she sailed off with a Phoenician seducer. Artemis struck her down on the seventh day at sea, and Odysseus' father Laertes bought the young Eumaeus (15.403–84).

One of these stories is clearly fabricated in Odysseus' crafty fashion, the other (so far as we can tell) no more than the truth.

INTRODUCTION

‘Helot’ has entered the contemporary English lexicon to refer to a member of a singularly oppressed or exploited underclass. This is a tribute to the enduring power of the Spartan myth or mirage. ‘Helot’ also occasioned an ancient Greek verb with general reference, heiloteuein (Isocrates 4.131), meaning to be reduced to the status of Helotage, which is a tribute of a different sort to the singularity of the institution in antiquity. Helotage, a modern English term of art for what the Spartans would have called douleia (see below), lasted throughout the rise, climax and decline of the Spartan polity – right up to the Roman conquest in the second or first century bc, as noted by the Augustan-period Greek geographer and cultural historian Strabo (8.5.4). Sparta, or Lacedaemon as the polis was officially known, was the largest Greek state in extent of territory (c. 8,400 sq. km.). The largest by far in fact: more than double the size of the next (Syracuse) and over three times as large as the most populous (Athens) of the 1,000 or so Greek citizen-states.

Yet although Sparta had a smaller overall population than Athens, it had the highest density of slave to free, followed, not by Athens, but by the island-state of Chios (Thucydides 8.40.2). As Plato, or the pseudo-Platonic author of the First Alcibiades Socratic dialogue (I.122d), observed in the fourth century bc, ‘no one could doubt that their land in Laconia and Messenia is superior to our [Athenian] land, both in extent and quality, not to mention the number of their slaves and especially the Helots’.

INTRODUCTION

Domestic slavery was imagined as existing at Rome from the beginning – it could hardly have been otherwise with a cultural institution so deeply embedded in daily life during the historical period – and its established presence by the middle of the fifth century bc can be presumed from references to manumission and the liability of slave-owners in the Twelve Tables. However, slave labour did not become a significant phenomenon in Roman culture before the fourth century bc, when its rise in importance coincided with a decline in the institution of debt-bondage (nexum), as foreign conquests brought captive manpower to Roman territory and sent citizen colonists abroad, while displaced peasants migrated to the city in search of new means of support. From then on, if not before, agricultural slavery in Italy and, eventually, throughout most of the western empire predominated over all other categories of slave labour in importance for as long as landholding remained the cornerstone of the socio-economic system and the ideal of self-sufficiency was aspired to by the elite. Anecdotal reports in our literary sources of domestic servants in the houses of the kings, like the legendarily servile origins of the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius, reflect the conventions of foundation myth-making more surely than they do any historical reality, about which the most that can be said is that the houses of the wealthy of the regal period might seem to require staffing.

Slavery was legal and common in the Jewish, Greek and Roman societies in which Christianity emerged and developed. Christians, who debated every aspect of theology, Christology and ecclesiology, likewise debated the nature of slaves and slavery. Although the words of some ancient Christian can be summoned to rebut almost any generalisation about the ancient Church and slavery, Christians, who frequently insisted that the distinction between free and slave was of no importance in the eyes of God, typically supported the institution of slavery. Slaveholding practices affected the lives of individual Christians and insinuated themselves into ecclesiastical policy. After first analysing in this chapter slavery as root theological metaphor in early Christian theology, I consider next the range of ancient Christian attitudes towards slaves and slaveholding and the impact of Christianity on the institution itself, in particular whether Christianity had an ameliorating effect on the conduct of slaveholders or the lives of their slaves.

Jesus of Nazareth would have known that the Jewish national story highlighted a period of enslavement in Egypt that culminated in divinely inspired liberation. He would also have been aware that the Torah permitted and regulated slaveholding: a mythic heritage of enslavement and liberation did not motivate an abolitionist ideology. Practices of slaveholding among ancient Jews followed the contours of slaveholding practices in surrounding cultures, a pattern of assimilation that complicates any attempt to isolate distinctively Jewish elements in Jesus' sayings or in primitive Christian attitudes toward slavery. Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus report a possible exception.

INTRODUCTION

Slaves are as conspicuous in the culture of the classical Greeks as they were important in their society. The action of the Iliad begins with a quarrel over a captive slave woman. In the Odyssey, Odysseus must re-establish his relationship with his slaves as well as with his wife to complete his homecoming. Philosophers and tragedians explored the relationship of luck and character using enslavement as a paradigm of catastrophe. The ‘clever slave’ in New Comedy took over important and subversive aspects of the comic hero of Old Comedy. Only in the genre of history with its increasingly narrow focus on politics and war were slaves largely absent. But even Greek historiography – and political discourse in general – though mainly devoid of actual slaves, cannot be understood without reference to the central concepts of political freedom or slavery. And politics was not the only place: Greeks used the metaphor of slavery in an astonishingly wide variety of contexts.

This mass of evidence is, however, obviously one-sided. The surviving literature of classical Greece was almost all written by slave masters and for its free, male citizens. Slaves – like women – are represented, especially in epic and drama, but they do not represent themselves. Even if we confine ourselves to the views and attitudes of the free and of masters, the burning questions modern interlocutors would ask do not find ready answers: how did they justify and defend slavery?

FAMILIES AND FAMILIAE IN ROME

In the early first century ad as one left the centre of Rome along the via Labicana heading south-east in the general direction of Praeneste (modern Palestrina), one would pass by the vast suburban estate of the Statilii Tauri, a distinguished senatorial family. These Horti Tauriani (‘Taurian Gardens’) had been developed by one of Augustus' most trusted generals, T. Statilius Taurus, consul in 37 bc and again in 26 bc. They eventually attracted the avaricious attention of the younger Agrippina, wife (and niece) of the emperor Claudius, and when in ad 53 T. Statilius Taurus (consul in ad 44) committed suicide after being charged with treason, the property passed into imperial hands. The marriage of Statilia Messallina, niece of the consul of 44, to Nero in 66 rehabilitated the family, who regained control of their luxury gardens, but this was to be short-lived; for once Messallina's marriage came to an end with Nero's suicide in 68, the estate reverted irrevocably to the imperial fisc. In the far south-east corner of these horti, near to where the Porta Maggiore now stands, the family constructed under Augustus or Tiberius a large funerary monument to house the remains of the many slaves and freed slaves who had been owned by the various members of the gens Statilia. During the family's political renaissance under Nero, further chambers were added.