Rome: An Empire's Story (17 page)

Fig 6.
A slave collar (original in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Terme di Diocleziano in Rome)

O gods above, what poor subhuman creatures were there, their bodies bruised all with livid marks, their back scarred from beatings, covered rather than clothed, in rags, some just wearing a loincloths to preserve their dignity, all of them so practically naked. Some had been branded on the forehead, some had their hair shaved off and some wore shackles. They looked ghastly, and in fact they could hardly see as their eyes were dimmed with muck and smoke in the foul smelling darkness of that place.
¹⁷

Meanwhile the lavish servile households of the super-rich kept growing. Slave teachers and barbers took their place alongside concubines and all kinds of chefs, doormen and dressers, bakers and wet-nurses, poetry readers, gardeners, and physical trainers. Literally hundreds of occupational designations are known from the elaborate graves their masters often provided for them. Extraordinarily complex societies arose within single households, societies marked by subtle hierarchies and minute differentiations of role and title. Slaves were so ubiquitous they often seem invisible. It is easy to forget that a free man or woman of any status was almost never alone, and never needed to exert themselves, because there was always another pair of hands to do it for them.

Slaves, Citizens, and Soldiers

Slaves, to begin with, were luxuries. When we can tell—rarely—how much a slave cost, the price in today’s terms is about that of a new car. Only the rich needed or could afford such skilled servants, to supplement their clients and tenants and dependent relatives. Yet Cato’s farm employed less skilled slaves. How did Rome become a society based on mass slavery? And how did this change relate to Roman imperialism?

Part of this story has been told already. During the second century
BC
there are many signs that slavery was becoming more and more important in the Roman economy. Cato’s description is an early piece of evidence. Anecdotes begin to pile up. At the end of the second century
BC
, Nicomedes,
King of Bithynia, refused to send troops to fight alongside Rome on the grounds that so many of his subjects had been captured by slave traders. Nearer to home there were two major slave rebellions in Sicily in the late second century (135–132 and 104–100), while the Spartacus war of 73
BC
took two Roman armies to suppress. If the growth of agricultural slavery can be matched to the development of wine production for export, then the pace of the transformation through the late second and early first centuries
BC
can be measured by a wide range of archaeological criteria from the number of container amphorae found from each period, to the growing number of wrecked cargo vessels that have been located by divers along the Mediterranean coasts.
¹⁸

The growth of Roman slavery was so rapid that it was one of the very few social transformations actually noticed by ancient writers. The geographer Strabo explained how one part of southern Asia Minor, Cilicia, became a major centre for piracy.
¹⁹
It began with a local rebellion against the kings of Syria. The rebels then began to raid Syria for slaves, because they discovered the slave market on Delos could handle a turnover of 10,000 slaves a day. The reason, says Strabo, was that after the defeat of Carthage and Corinth in 146
BC
the Romans had become rich and started to use great numbers of slaves. Other powers in the area—the city of Rhodes, the kings of Cyprus and of Egypt—were either enemies of Syria, or for other reasons did not interfere, and the Romans were not concerned with matters beyond the Taurus. Strabo got it right—more or less—but even he did not appreciate the full combination of factors that had turned the eastern Mediterranean into a playground for pirates and slave traders. Roman expansion was the root cause of most of them. First, it was Rome’s wars against the kings that had left the eastern Mediterranean unpoliced. Rome would not even begin to try to suppress piracy until the very end of the second century
BC
. It remained a menace until Pompey swept the inland sea from end to end in the 60s, and Augustus created the first permanent Roman fleets.
²⁰
Second, Romans had indeed begun to gear their economy to slave labour, but not just because of their wealth and not just after 146
BC
. Cheap slaves first become available during Rome’s Balkan wars in the first decades of the second century. One notorious agreement made between Romans and their then allies the Aetolians promised the latter any cities and territory captured, so long as Rome could take the movable booty and the population.
²¹
Prisoners of war were from that point on a major component of booty from most major campaigns.

Not all agricultural slaves were used on villas like those described by Cato. Accounts of the Sicilian Slave Wars also mention slave shepherds on the great ranches of the south. But the great demand was to staff the new-style villas, and Roman warfare was not quite regular enough to ensure a steady supply of captives. Many fewer legions were fielded during the 160s, for example, than in the 190s when Rome faced both Macedon and Syria, or in the years leading to the fall of Corinth and Carthage. This is where Delos came in. When there were no captives available, Rome turned to slave traders, who supplied themselves from piracy and raiding in the chaotic conditions left by Rome’s ventures in the eastern Mediterranean.
²²
At other times there were fresh consignments of war captives. Traders followed the armies, buying captives from individual soldiers. Others began to exploit new populations in northern Europe: there is some sign that—just as in Africa in the early modern period—some tribes took to raiding their neighbours for slaves which they could exchange for imported goods, goods that in antiquity included Mediterranean wine. As long as Rome had the appetite for slaves there would be no end to the trade in one form or another.

Why were Roman landowners so committed to slave labour? The population of Italy was not small; indeed it had probably never been so high as under Roman rule. Until the early second century most of the agricultural workforce was supplied by peasants, some owning their own land, others tenants on state land or on farms belonging to others, a few working for cash, and probably many families doing a little of all these things. Arguments have raged since antiquity over how far and how fast free peasants were displaced by slaves, and they continue today.
²³
Changes certainly took place, and they seem to have unfolded gradually. Peasant freeholders, sharecroppers, and tenants are well attested in the Principate. Citizen death rates on campaign were never catastrophic. Regional differences are clearer than ever in the archaeological data. Yet agricultural slavery and intensive agriculture did expand, and many of the soldiers who fought in the armies of the late Republic were landless. One way or another the ancient link between soldier-citizen and citizen-farmer had been broken, and Roman Italy had become a slave society.

Further Reading

One of the great achievements of the last generation of research has been a realization of the centrality of the family to all aspects of Roman society. Beryl Rawson’s
collection
The Family in Ancient Rome
(London, 1986) is an excellent starting point, including papers by most of the major scholars in the field. Paul Weaver’s
Familia Caesaris
(Cambridge, 1972) revealed the use the emperors made of slaves in governing the empire. Rawson and Weaver together edited a follow-up volume entitled
The Roman Family in
Italy (Oxford, 1997). Richard Saller’s
Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family
(Cambridge, 1994) harnessed demography and social science to show the gap between myth and reality when it came to the power of the
paterfamilias
.

The best starting points for finding out more about Roman slavery are the first volume of
The Cambridge History of World Slavery
(Cambridge, 2011) edited by Paul Cartledge and Keith Bradley, and Bradley’s
Slavery and Society at Rome
(Cambridge, 1994). For the relationship between the growth of a slave society in Rome and Roman imperialism, see the books by Hopkins and Rosenstein noted in the Further Reading for
Chapter 5
. The great debate over the significance of slavery in the Roman economy has been conducted mostly in Italian. Dominic Rathbone’s article ‘The Slave Mode of Production in Italy’, published in the
Journal of Roman Studies
in 1983, provides a sympathetic overview. Ulrike Roth’s
Thinking Tools
(London, 2007) offers an important challenge to the orthodoxy. Jean-Jacques Aubert’s
Business Managers in Ancient Rome
(Leiden, 1994) shows brilliantly how Romans adapted traditional institutions to cope with the demands of an ever more complex society.

KEY DATES IN CHAPTER VII

VII
CRISIS

As Scipio watched the city completely destroyed while the flames consumed it he is said to have shed tears and lamented openly for his enemies. After reflecting for a while he considered that all cities and peoples and empires pass away, just as all men have their own fates. Troy had suffered this, although once a prosperous city, and the empires of the Assyrians and the Medes, and that of Persia, the greatest empire of its day, and of Macedon that had just recently been so famous. Whether or not deliberately, he quoted the following lines of the Poet

The day will come when Holy Ilium will perish
And Priam, and his people, will be slain

And I spoke to him—for I was his teacher—and asked him what he meant. Without any dissimulation, he answered that he was thinking of his own country, for which he feared when he reflected on the fate of all mortal things.

(Polybius,
Histories
39.5)

The destruction of Corinth and Carthage in 146
BC
, following hard on the dismantling of the kingdom of Macedon, and the humiliation of Syria and Egypt, made the Romans masters of the Mediterranean world. Polybius was right about that. Yet within fifty years, they temporarily lost control of all their eastern territory, and nearly lost Italy too in a war against their Italian allies that caught them completely unprepared. Romans were also compelled
to fight major wars against new enemies emerging from the interiors of Africa and Spain, Gaul and Germany, and to deal with the growing menace of piracy. Even worse, the crisis of the Republican empire coincided with the onset of internal strife that would lead to multiple political murders and civil wars. Rome survived this bloody century, just. But its civil institutions did not. The assemblies and the Senate lost their power, the courts were first politicized and then marginalized, and the army found a permanent place at the heart of Roman politics. This chapter asks how Rome nearly lost the imperial plot for ever.