Slavery in ancient Rome

Based on Wikipedia: Slavery in ancient Rome

Here is a fact that might unsettle you: by the second century AD, most free citizens walking the streets of Rome probably had a slave somewhere in their family tree. Not a distant ancestor from some mythical age, but someone close enough that their descendants still remembered.

Rome wasn't just a society that happened to have slaves. It was a slave society—a civilization whose economy, culture, politics, and daily rhythms were built on the foundation of human bondage.

A Ladder with Many Rungs

Picture two slaves in ancient Rome.

The first works in a silver mine in Spain, descending into darkness each morning, breathing toxic air, knowing that most miners don't survive more than a few years. He has no name that matters to his owners, no hope of freedom, no future beyond the next swing of his pickaxe.

The second is a Greek physician who treats Rome's elite. He lives in a comfortable apartment, earns money on the side, dines with senators, and expects to be freed within a decade. His owner actually depends on his expertise—the physician holds knowledge his master can never possess.

Both are slaves. Both are property. Both can be beaten, sold, or killed at their owner's whim. Yet their lives couldn't be more different.

This was the peculiar nature of Roman slavery. It wasn't a single experience but a vast spectrum. At the bottom: agricultural workers, miners, those condemned to the mills—people ground down by brutal labor with almost no path upward. At the top: educated slaves who served as accountants, teachers, secretaries, doctors, and business managers. These skilled individuals could accumulate savings, build relationships with powerful people, and realistically expect to become free citizens themselves.

The Romans had a word for this household of dependents: familia. It originally referred specifically to slaves, not to the biological family we mean today. Everyone in the familia answered to the paterfamilias—the "father of the household," though really this meant the property owner, the man who controlled the estate.

The Power of Life and Death

The paterfamilias held what the Romans called vitae necisque potestas: the power of life and death.

This wasn't metaphorical. A Roman household head could legally execute his slaves. He could also execute his children. Under early Roman law, the family was a small kingdom, and the father was its absolute monarch. The state barely interfered with what happened inside those walls.

The philosopher Seneca, writing in the first century AD, suggested that Romans invented the term paterfamilias as a kind of euphemism—a softer way to describe the relationship between a master and his slaves than simply calling him their owner. The actual word for "master" was dominus, the one who controlled the domus, the household. From this same root we get "dominate" and "dominion."

Under Roman law, slaves had no legal personhood. They couldn't own property in their own names. They couldn't marry—not legally. Any children born to an enslaved mother were themselves slaves, belonging to whoever owned the mother. Slaves could be tortured during legal proceedings; free citizens could not. The most gruesome forms of execution—crucifixion, being thrown to wild beasts—were reserved primarily for slaves.

Yet here's what made Rome different from many slave societies: the door to freedom was always visible, and for many, it actually opened.

The Roman Bargain

When Romans freed their slaves, something remarkable happened. The freed person didn't just escape bondage—they became a Roman citizen.

The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus found this astonishing. In Greek city-states, freed slaves remained outsiders, never quite belonging. But in Rome, yesterday's property could become today's voter, tomorrow's businessman, perhaps the ancestor of next century's senator.

This wasn't accidental. The Romans told themselves stories about it.

According to legend, Romulus founded Rome by establishing a place of refuge. The historian Livy, writing during the reign of Augustus, described the city's first citizens as "mostly former slaves, vagabonds, and runaways all looking for a fresh start." Romans saw this as a source of strength, not shame. Their city was built by the desperate and the dispossessed who transformed themselves into conquerors.

Even more striking: one of Rome's legendary kings, Servius Tullius, was said to be the son of a slave woman. The sixth king of Rome, who reorganized the army and established the census—the child of a slave. Whether or not this was historically true, Romans believed it, told it, and embedded this origin into their temples and religious festivals.

Manumission—the formal freeing of slaves—was so common that Rome's earliest surviving law code, the Twelve Tables from around 450 BC, already addressed the status of freedmen. The laws refer to cives Romani liberti: "freedmen who are Roman citizens." This tells us that even in Rome's early centuries, freed slaves were numerous enough to require legal definition.

How People Became Slaves

Some were born into it. If your mother was enslaved when you were born, you were a slave—regardless of who your father was.

But many entered slavery later in life, and the primary engine was war.

Under the ius gentium—a concept the Romans understood as the customary law recognized among all peoples—the victor in war had the right to enslave the defeated. This wasn't uniquely Roman; they believed every nation accepted this principle. When Rome conquered, the conquered became property.

Rome's military expansion during the Republic created a flood of slaves. The first two wars against Carthage, spanning 265 to 201 BC, produced the most dramatic surge. As Roman legions marched across Italy, then Sicily, then Spain, then Greece, then North Africa, they brought back human cargo by the hundreds of thousands.

The conquest of a single city could enslave an entire population. After Rome finally defeated the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC—a siege that had lasted ten years—every surviving inhabitant was sold.

War cut both ways, though. Romans could become slaves too.

When Romans Became Property

During the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal captured Roman soldiers by the thousands. After his devastating victory at the Battle of Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, he offered to ransom the prisoners back to Rome. The Roman Senate refused to pay. After the even more catastrophic Battle of Cannae the following year—where Rome lost somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 men in a single day—Hannibal again offered terms for ransoming captives.

Again, the Senate refused. They sent a message to their own soldiers: victory or death. No third option.

Hannibal sold the prisoners to Greek slave traders. Some of these Roman citizens remained enslaved for twenty years, until a later war brought Roman armies back to Greece. When the general Flamininus liberated them, he recovered 1,200 survivors—men who had spent two decades as property because their own government wouldn't pay for their freedom.

The eastern frontier proved even more dangerous. In 53 BC, the Roman commander Marcus Crassus—the same man who had defeated Spartacus—led an army against the Parthian Empire. It was a disaster. Crassus died, his army was destroyed, and the Parthians captured 10,000 Roman survivors. They marched these prisoners 1,500 miles east to Margiana, in what is now Turkmenistan.

What happened to them? No one knows. The poet Horace, writing thirty years later, imagined them married to "barbarian" women, serving in foreign armies, too dishonored ever to return home. The Roman military obsessed for decades over recovering the legionary standards lost at Carrhae. They showed considerably less interest in recovering the men.

In 260 AD, the Emperor Valerian became the first Roman emperor captured in battle—seized by the Persian king Shapur I after the Battle of Edessa. According to hostile Christian sources (Valerian had persecuted Christians), the aging emperor was treated as a slave and subjected to elaborate humiliations. Persian victory monuments at the sacred site of Naqsh-e Rostam, in modern Iran, still show Roman emperors kneeling in submission and Roman legionaries paying tribute.

Shapur's inscriptions boasted that his Roman slaves came from every corner of their empire. The conquerors had become the conquered.

The Legal Death of a Citizen

When a Roman citizen was enslaved by a foreign enemy, they suffered what amounted to civil death. Their property rights evaporated. Their marriage was automatically dissolved. If they were a paterfamilias, their legal power over their dependents was suspended.

This made a kind of harsh sense to the Roman legal mind. Citizenship meant belonging to the Roman state. A slave belonged to a foreign master. You couldn't be both.

If such a person was eventually freed or ransomed, their citizenship could be restored through a legal process called postliminium—literally, "returning across the threshold." They could reclaim their property and their authority over dependents. But their marriage? That was gone. Both parties would have to agree to marry again, as if starting fresh.

Not everyone qualified for restoration. Under the Emperor Hadrian, investigators examined returned soldiers to determine whether they had been captured honorably or had surrendered without a fight. Traitors, deserters, and those who had a chance to escape but didn't try—these men remained legally dead even if physically alive.

Interestingly, Roman law distinguished between capture in war and kidnapping by pirates or bandits. War, under the ius gentium, was a recognized state of affairs between legitimate powers. Banditry was not. A freeborn person seized by pirates was considered illegally held; if ransomed or rescued, their citizenship remained intact, their prior status uncompromised.

Pirates, Kidnappers, and the Child Trade

From the second century BC through late antiquity—a span of nearly seven hundred years—kidnapping was a constant threat around the Mediterranean. Pirates raided coastal communities. Bandits lurked on roads. Slave traders weren't particularly careful about the origins of their merchandise.

Children were especially vulnerable. Poor families sometimes sold their children outright. Others lost them to kidnappers who knew that a child couldn't defend themselves and that provincial authorities rarely investigated missing poor children.

The slave trade was lightly taxed and barely regulated. It flourished in every corner of the Roman Empire and across its borders. Slaves moved through markets in Rome, Athens, Alexandria, and dozens of smaller trading centers. The system was sophisticated, profitable, and thoroughly integrated into the Mediterranean economy.

Even modest households expected to own slaves. Not dozens or hundreds—just two or three people to cook, clean, and help with daily tasks. Slavery wasn't something that happened elsewhere, to other people. It was woven into the fabric of ordinary Roman life at every economic level above bare poverty.

Selling Yourself

Here is something that might seem paradoxical: some people voluntarily became slaves.

Early Roman law permitted debt slavery. If you couldn't pay what you owed, your creditor could enslave you. The Twelve Tables spelled out the harsh terms. But a law in the late fourth century BC ended the practice of creditors enslaving debtors as a private action. After that, a court might still compel a debtor to work off what they owed, but the old system of personal debt bondage was gone.

Yet people still sold themselves into slavery. Why?

Because slavery to a wealthy household might be better than freedom in desperate poverty. A slave had guaranteed food, shelter, and clothing. A destitute free person had nothing guaranteed. As a slave to the right master, you might learn a trade, save money, eventually buy your freedom, and emerge better off than you started.

This calculation reveals something important about how Romans understood freedom and slavery. To elite Romans—the wealthy property owners whose writings survive—there wasn't much difference between being enslaved and being dependent on wages for survival. Both conditions meant subordination to another person's will. The day laborer who would starve without his employer's coin was, in a sense, already unfree.

This was not a view shared by slaves themselves, we can assume. But it helps explain why Romans could simultaneously value liberty so intensely and build their entire civilization on human bondage. In their minds, most people were unfree regardless of their legal status. Slavery was simply the most obvious form of a universal condition.

The Philosophy of Unfreedom

The Roman jurist Gaius, writing around 161 AD, defined slavery as "the state recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person contrary to nature."

That last phrase matters: contrary to nature.

Roman jurists recognized three categories of law. Natural law governed all living things—humans and animals alike. Civil law was the specific legal code of a particular people or nation. And the ius gentium, the "law of nations," described customs recognized universally among human societies.

Under natural law, all humans were born free. The Latin word for children, liberi, literally means "the free ones." Nature made no slaves.

But under the ius gentium, slavery existed everywhere. Every known society practiced it. Since it was universal, each nation developed its own civil laws to regulate it. Slavery was artificial—a human invention, contrary to nature—but also inescapable, woven into the fabric of human civilization everywhere you looked.

This framework meant Roman thinkers could acknowledge slavery's injustice in principle while accepting it as inevitable in practice. Very few voices called for abolition. Moral discourse focused instead on how slaves should be treated. Be humane to your slaves, philosophers urged. Don't be cruel without reason. Remember that they're human beings.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote eloquently about the common humanity shared by masters and slaves. But he never suggested that slavery itself should end. He owned slaves. So did every other Roman philosopher who wrote about the ethics of slaveholding.

Spartacus and the End of Revolt

In 73 BC, a Thracian gladiator named Spartacus escaped from a training school in Capua with seventy-seven other gladiators. They armed themselves with kitchen implements and whatever weapons they could seize, then fled to Mount Vesuvius.

What happened next terrified Rome. Slaves from the surrounding countryside flocked to join them. Within months, Spartacus commanded tens of thousands of escaped slaves. His army defeated Roman forces sent against him multiple times. For two years, he ravaged the Italian peninsula, and Rome's slave-owning elite lived in fear that their own human property might rise up and join him.

The revolt ended in 71 BC. The Roman commander Crassus crushed Spartacus's army in a final battle. Six thousand captured rebels were crucified along the Appian Way, the main road leading to Rome. Their bodies were left to rot as a message.

Spartacus's revolt was the last major slave uprising in Roman history. During the subsequent Imperial period, large-scale rebellion essentially disappeared. Individual escape became the more common form of resistance—and fugitive slave-hunting became the most organized form of policing the Roman Empire ever developed.

Why did the revolts stop? Historians debate this. Perhaps the Roman state became more effective at suppression. Perhaps the changing composition of the slave population—fewer war captives who remembered freedom, more people born into slavery—made collective resistance harder to organize. Perhaps the possibility of manumission gave slaves hope that rebellion could never provide.

Whatever the reason, after Spartacus, enslaved people in Rome mostly resisted as individuals: running away, working slowly, pilfering, performing their roles while withholding whatever inner compliance they could.

The World They Made

What did slaves think about their own lives?

We mostly don't know. Slaves rarely wrote, and when they did, their writings rarely survived. Almost everything we have comes from the perspective of owners.

But not quite everything.

Inscriptions survive—tombstones, dedications, commemorative markers—set up by slaves and freedpersons for themselves and their families. These brief texts reveal people asserting their dignity, mourning their dead, celebrating their achievements. Art and decoration from the houses of freedmen show how they wanted to be seen: as respectable, cultured, successful.

A few writers of the Roman era were themselves former slaves or the sons of freed slaves. The poet Horace's father was a freedman—something Horace mentioned openly and without apparent shame. These voices offer glimpses into perspectives that the elite sources ignore.

Scholars have attempted to understand Roman slavery through comparison to the Atlantic slave trade, which is far better documented. But the comparisons have limits. Roman slavery wasn't based on race. People of any ethnicity, any place of origin, any appearance could become slaves—including Romans themselves. The possibility of citizenship after manumission had no parallel in the antebellum American South.

No single portrait of the "typical" Roman slave emerges from the evidence. The experiences were too varied, the statuses too complex, the range of work too broad. What we can say is that millions of human beings lived in bondage in the Roman world, that their labor built an empire, and that most of their stories have been lost.

The Household God

The elder Pliny, writing in the first century AD, felt nostalgic for an imagined earlier age. The ancients, he claimed, lived more intimately in their households, without need for "legions of slaves."

But even in this idealized vision of simple living, Pliny assumed the presence of slaves. His "simpler" household still required the possession of other human beings. He couldn't imagine domestic life without them.

This might be the most revealing detail of all. Romans literally could not conceive of civilization without slavery. It was as natural to them as the sun rising—even as their own philosophers acknowledged that nature itself made all people free.

They built one of history's most influential civilizations on this contradiction. Their law codes, their literature, their philosophy, their religion, their economy—all of it rested on a foundation of human property. When their descendants eventually abandoned slavery, they had to imagine a completely different way of organizing society.

The Romans never did. They carried their slaves with them, generation after generation, until the empire itself fell and the medieval world slowly, unevenly, incompletely transformed bondage into other forms of unfreedom.

But that transformation took centuries. For as long as Rome stood, the familia included people who belonged to the house itself—human beings who were, in the eyes of the law, no different from the furniture.