Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's wrong for you to beat me because I am a citizen and that gives me certain protections. So that notion of citizenship is something that I think the Romans really emphasize and becomes a legacy to a lot of civilizations today where citizenship means something. It's a special status.
Well, Roman slavery, a couple just reminders at the beginning. First of all, it's not racial slavery. So for people in the United States, you tend to think of slavery through this kind of racial lens. So slaves in ancient Roman society could be any color, ethnicity, gender, origin, whatever. It's an economic status.
Now, having said that, slavery is fundamentally horrific to human dignity because it is defining a human being as an object. And very famously, a Roman agricultural writer who's writing about farms, just as a kind of aside says, you know, on your farm, you have three types of tools. You have dumb tools, and by dummy means can't speak.
So that's like shovels, you know, picks, things like this, wagons. You have semi-articulate tools, which are animals, and you have articulate tools, which are human beings, slaves. And for him, these are all just categories of tools. It's so intensely dehumanizing to view people in that way. So Roman slavery is odd in that it doesn't have this racial component.
It's horrible in the way all slavery is horrible. But the other thing about it is it's not a hard line. It's a permeable membrane. And many people move back and forth across it. So you have many people in the Roman world who were born a slave who gained their freedom through one means or another. And you have many others who were born free and become slaves.
And you have some who go back and forth. There's a great Roman tombstone of this guy who says, I was born a free man in Parthia. I was enslaved. Then I gained my freedom and I became a teacher or something and I had a life and now I'm a Roman citizen. So it's this whole like back and forth across all these boundaries multiple times.
The most common source of slaves in the Roman world was war. So wherever the Roman army went, in its wake would be literally a train of slave traders. So you're in war. You capture an enemy city. You whack the people over the head, and you turn around if you're a soldier, and you sell them to one of these slave traders that's following the army around, literally.
So that's probably the biggest source of slaves. Another big source is just children of slaves or slaves. Yeah. And some people could literally sell either themselves or their children into slavery due to economic necessity or privation or something. So as terrible as that sounds, a father could sell a child if he needed money.
Once you were a slave, though, the experience of slavery varied a lot because – A lot of the slaves were agricultural slaves, so they would work sort of like in the American South, big plantations. They might be chained. They were probably abused.
That's very similar to slavery as we think of it in, let's say, the Caribbean, South America, or the United States prior to the Civil War, that kind of slavery. But a lot of Roman slaves were also some of the more skilled people. And this seems a little weird. So if you're a rich person, you have slaves, it's actually a good investment for you to train your slaves in a profession.
So a lot of Roman doctors, scribes, accountants, sort of, all this sort of thing, barbers were slaves. Because if you train this person and then they produce a lot of money for you, you get that money. And those slaves would sometimes be given an incentive to work hard where they could – and this is just sort of an agreement between the master and the slave.
If they earned a certain amount of money, X amount of money, they could then buy their own freedom from the master. So this was your incentive to work harder if you were trained, let's say, as a doctor. I work really hard. I can buy myself out of slavery. Or a lot of masters would free their slaves and their wills. So when they died, they would say, I manumit this slave and that slave.
So it was a weird institution in that it was – Elements were just as horrible as what we think of as slavery and just as exploitative. And like I say, the overall notion of slavery is intensely dehumanizing. But yet there was this wide range of types of slaves.
And the odd thing is in the city of Rome, many of the worst jobs – so if you're just a laborer hauling crap around at the docks or things like that, you might well be a free person and a slave would hold a skilled job. And that seems a little strange or counterintuitive to us, but you see how in the Roman economy it sort of works.
There's a big debate. How many slaves were there? What percentage of the populace, let's say, in the city of Rome were slaves? This is something historians like to argue about a lot. We keep coming back to this theme of sometimes it's the little things that illustrate stuff well. For slaves, the one that always gets me
is some slaves, and these would be sort of the more abused slaves, they would literally put little bronze collars on them with a tag that said, hi, my name is Felix. I'm the slave of so-and-so. I've run away. If you catch me, return me to the temple of so-and-so and you'll get a reward. So it's a dog tag, right? Except this is a human being. And you can see these in museums.
I mean, you can go to a museum today and see this little bronze collar with a tag on it That's talking about a human being as if they're this kind of animal that's run away. And this is very telling too. We're talking about Roman law. Under Roman law, technically, when a slave runs away, the crime that he's committing is theft because he's stolen himself from his master.
So again, it's this very dehumanizing view of it.
I mean, just to build on that, I'd say the othering of others is a morally corrosive thing to do.
Oh, boy. Okay, so... The Roman Republic, on the one hand, is incredibly successful, right? In a short period of time, it's expanded wildly, it's conquered the Mediterranean world, it's gained tons of wealth. The contradiction here is that Rome's very success has made almost every group within Roman society deeply unhappy and boiling with resentment. This is the contradiction.
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