Slavery in the Roman Republic, Article Review Example

As part of the online Ancient History Sourcebook, “Slavery in the Roman Republic” was originally written and edited by William Sterns Davis (1877 to 1930), an American teacher and historian who played a major role in applying scholarship to the study of history. This article appeared in Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources(Volume II: Rome and the West), published by Boston-based Allyn & Bacon between 1912 and 1913. This particular text, entitled “The Conduct and Treatment of Slaves,” provides excerpts from several primary historical sources that detail first-hand knowledge on slavery in ancient Rome, such as Act 1, Scene 2 from “Pseudolus” by the playwright Plautus; slaves and their roles in agriculture by Cato the Elder; Act 4, Scene 4 from “Menaechmi” also by Plautus; and “The Life of Crassus” by Plutarch which describes the last great slave uprising led by Spartacus. The importance of these excerpts lies in the fact that they are primary source materials or documents written at the time of the incidents described or within a hundred years or so. This is far superior to secondary source materials which tend to have been written and published long after the incidents or the lives of the historical figures described; they also tend to be based on second-hand knowledge which often cannot relied upon as truthful and accurate.

Although a work of fiction, the opening lines in Plautus’ “Pseudolus” tends to support the long-held notion by historians (and perhaps the general public) that the slaves of ancient Rome were treated quite shabbily and as mere property. Ballio, the slave owner/Master, calls his slaves “rascals” and whips them for being useless to him. Ballio also calls his slaves “asses” and then threatens them by declaring that he will mark them with thongs or slashes similar to those found on a coverlet or blanket (Davis 1). As noted, although a piece of fiction, “Pseudolus” possibly represents Plautus’ own experiences with slaves or those of other masters and puts into context the historical realities of slave life during the Second Punic War of 201 BCE.

Similarly, Cato the Elder relates that slaves working in agriculture on large privately-owned estate farms were treated equally as bad as those in Plautus’ play. Davis acknowledges that the details in this excerpt “were undoubtedly put into effect on his (Cato’s) own farms,” where as the number of slaves increased, so did the brutality. Davis adds that although Cato “does not advocate deliberate cruelty, he would simply treat the slaves according to cold regulations, like so many expensive cattle” (2). Historically then, this excerpt demonstrates that slaves were generally treated as personal property open to the whims of their masters. This is very reminiscent of what occurred on the plantations in the Old South/Antebellum years in the US via white slave owners and their often brutal treatment of their bought and sold-for African-American slaves.

The most interesting excerpt is the “Life of Crassus” which describes Crassus’ involvement in the slave uprising of 73 BCE, led by former gladiator school non-conformist Spartacus. Davis notes that if Spartacus and his band of renegade runaway slaves would have succeeded in freeing all of the slaves in Italy, the result “would have been a calamity to civilization;” however, one good outcome was that after the failure of the slave revolt, the “Romans out of sheer fear. . . began to treat their slaves less harshly than before” (3). Therefore, taken as a whole, these excerpts provide historians that specialize in ancient history a sort of window into the dim past as primary recollections written by figures like Plautus and Cato the Elder who witnessed first-hand the brutal and often short lives of Roman slaves during a time when the Roman Empire was at its height and just before the ascension of the first Roman emperor, known as Gaius Julius Caesar.

Bibliography

“Slavery in the Roman Republic.” Ancient History Sourcebook. Web. 1998. http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/ancient/slavery-romrep1.asp.