The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh
Yâall know that Iâm into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and Iâm hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second
Emperor Hadrian randomly stabbed a slave in the eye in a fit of rage and he was supposedly unusually sympathetic to slaves.
Thereâs other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didnât even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.
And slaves didnât rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.
People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.
Like how many people throughout history were beaten to death because some rich asshole was angry and there was no legal or social consequences for doing so? We donât know.
When you study ancient history youâre reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.
Chattel slavery is an incredibly cruel and dehumanizing system.
So is every other kind of slavery.
This doesnât diminish the awfulness of what people were forced to endure under chattel slavery.
I just think itâs useful to remember that cruelty is complicated and diverse and just because a cruel system is different doesnât make it right by any means.
Roman slavery operated differently from slavery in the antebellum American south which operated differently from slavery in the Ottoman Empire which operated differently from modern prisoner chain gangs.
All of these are still slavery. Theyâre all cruel and unacceptable. Their diversity does not matter. Their willing participants have still committed the crime of taking away the self ownership and personhood of another human being.
My dad is a high school physics teacher, and every year he does an incredibly valuable and deeply uncomfortable exercise with his students to drive home why âthe Industrial Revolutionâ was called that:
In the unit about physical work, he points out that work is, at its core, a measurement of labor, and that labor which isnât done by a paid laborer had another name before the rise of automation: slavery. He has his students quantify the amount of physical work that you might expect out of a human slave, and then sets them to work calculating what that means for their own standard of living. If you wanted to live like you currently do in the ancient world, how many slaves would you need? Calculate your washing machine in slaves. Calculate your dishwasher in slaves. Calculate your refrigerator and your TV and your HVAC in slaves.
And then he asks them to think about those calculations every time they read about any form of wealth at any point in history prior to the Industrial Revolution, and to ask themselves how many slaves went into creating and supporting that wealth. Sometimes itâs chattel slavery, and sometimes itâs serfs, and sometimes itâs forced marriages, or debt bondage, or penal labor⌠but scratch the surface of wealth and civilization and leisure time throughout history, and you inevitably find slavery hiding underneath. Sometimes (often) you still find slavery hiding underneath, even in the modern day â but until automation, itâs a virtual guarantee about any culture with a high standard of living at all.
