Slavery in History

by Adam Gurowski

In fact, the Roman oligarchs were far more degraded than their chattels. "Turpis adulatio Senatus," said Tacitus; and the names of Druses, Germanicus, Britannicus, Chærea, Trasea, and a few others, can never redeem the infamy of a whole community.

The numbers of slaves owned by the wealthy, was, as it were, proportionate to their degradation. Athenæus says that some rich men had from ten to twenty thousand slaves, and the statement is confirmed by Seneca. Cæcilius Isidorus, a rich particulier living under Augustus, lost a great part of his fortune in the civil wars, and yet left by will 4116 chattels; Elius Proculus, on his estates in Liguria, had two thousand slaves able to bear arms; Scaurus, a wealthy senator, owned 4116 chattels, exclusive of shepherds and tillers; Eumolpus, a simple citizen—not one of the oligarchs or F.F.V.'s of that time, but rather a parvenu—had so large a number of slaves on his estates in Numidia, that with an army of them he could have stormed and taken the city of Carthage, which, although reduced from its former grandeur, was still among the first cities of Africa. Under Nero, half of Africa was owned by six slaveholders: Nero slaughtered them and inherited their estates.

Such was the rapidly developed internal condition of the Roman state when Pliny dolefully exclaimed: "Latifundi perdidere Italiam moxque provincias:" "Large extended estates (cultivated by slaves), ruined Italy, and soon after the provinces," as even Spain and Gaul were quickly devoured by the large slaveholders.

The condition and treatment of the slaves inspired pity even in a Claudius. He prohibited the custom of starving to death the old and disabled slaves, who had generally been exposed on an island in the Tiber, upon which was a temple of Esculapius. By the Claudian edict, such exposition was equivalent to emancipation. Even Nero had some pity for the slaves, though he had none for their masters. The emperors were terrified at the increased ravages of slavery, which spread in continually wider and wider circles over Gaul and Spain as well as in Africa and in the east. Edicts were issued by several emperors—as Adrian and the Antonines—designed to stay the spread of slavery and alleviate the condition of the chattels. These edicts encouraged manumissions either absolute and immediate, or gradual, and conferred the same municipal rights as were enjoyed by the enfranchised. The latifundia, or large estates, nevertheless, still increased their size; and the condition and relations of landed property required new laws and new legal definitions, which were gradually introduced into the jus civile. First in order were the common usages of the people, and then the legalization of their customs. Thus it is not till toward the end of the second Christian century that there are found in the Roman law definitions of slaves as persons attached perpetually to the soil. But their classification was so complicated, that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to define distinctly the various grades, or to exhibit clearly the features in which one differs from another. The necessities of the imperial treasury were probably the cause of such divisions as those of adscriptitii, censiti, perpetui, conditionales, coloni, inquilini—both of old republican origin—simplices, originarii, homologi, tributari, addicti glebæ, agricolæ, aratores, rustici actores, etc. In course of time, also, all these names were merged under the general denomination of serfs, which again assumed various degrees of oppression and servitude.

Augustus is proverbially said to have pacified the world; and indeed, with few exceptions, the Roman empire enjoyed internal peace during the first two Christian centuries. But under Claudius, during the war with Tiridates of Pontus, the entire population of some of the captured cities was sold into slavery, as were also one hundred thousand Jews, when Jerusalem fell under Vespasian. There were now, however, no more rich cities or cultivated countries to be conquered, no peoples to be enslaved by millions, as there had been under the republic; wars now were waged only on the outskirts of the empire, and generally with barbarous nations. Prisoners of war, captives and subdued barbarians, were no longer sold into slavery, but the emperors colonized the waste lands with them. They thus attempted to repeople Italy and the provinces, and to revive the ancient mode of rural economy, as also to increase the revenue of the imperial treasury. Such colonizations were frequent after the time of Marcus Aurelius. But all this could not stop the growth of the social cancer. Chattelhood, encouraged, as will be shown by political slavery and taxations, was wildly rampant, and overleaped every barrier to its progress which the emperors attempted to raise.

During the whole epoch of the growth and maturity of domestic slavery in Rome, no one of her moralists, philosophers, poets, priests or satirists ever preached or sang of the idyllic beauties of slavery; none of her statesmen considered it as the foundation, corner-stone or cement of society or of the empire, or even as "ennobling"[15] to the slaveholder, and orations and discourses in exaltation of human bondage were unknown. Pliny, Seneca and Plutarch only spoke of it in extenuating language.

The Roman jurisconsult of the better times of the empire crystallized into legal form the sense of justice and equity inherent in the Roman, nay, in human society. He expounded the law for the de facto existing society, and therefore generally in favor of the owner, slaveholder, etc., and against the thing, the res, which was the chattel. The object of the Roman law was only to regulate existing relations, and such was domestic slavery. But with all its unbending severity, the Roman law, through the conscientious voice of the Roman jurisconsult, declared slavery a condition, "qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subiicitur," and rarely missed an occasion to favor the slave, to alleviate his status, and to facilitate his emancipation. No clause or decision of the law re-enslaved, in any case, the chattel once emancipated. Even if a will provided for the emancipation of a slave in terms like these: "I will and command that my slave A becomes free; but upon condition that he live with my son, and if he refuses or neglects to do this he returns to slavery," the law decided, that "A, being emancipated by the first paragraph of the will, cannot be re-enslaved by the subsequent conditional paragraph; therefore A is free, and he may or may not fulfil the condition."

The child also followed the condition of the mother when born from illicit intercourse, nisi lex specialis alius inducit. If the father was a slave and the mother a free woman, the child was free, quia non debet calamitas matris ei noceri qui in utero est—"the misfortune of the mother shall not bear on the product of the womb." A change of the status of the mother from liberty to slavery during pregnancy was always construed favorably to the child, who thus might be born free if the mother was free for even the shortest time during the period of pregnancy.

Under the emperors, freemen began to sell themselves into slavery—a thing unknown during the existence of the republic. But a freeman who sold himself into slavery, if afterward manumitted, could not become again a full citizen. And whoever was once emancipated could on no pretence be re-enslaved, under penalty of death.

Modern pro-slavery legislators and jurisconsults boldly overthrow all these Roman ideas of justice and equity.