Roman Society to host a colloquium on Ancient Enslavement: Fresh Perspectives

Myles Lavan, Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies, writes: On Saturday 10 June 2023, the Roman Society hosted a colloquium on Ancient Enslavement: Fresh Perspectives (https://www.romansociety.org/Events).

Slavery was fundamental to Greco-Roman society, yet the enslaved are often invisible in the literary texts that provide many people with their first encounter with the Classical world – because those texts’ wealthy male authors took their presence for granted. It has taken decades of hard and careful work to make slavery visible, and to bring its study to the heart of the field. We take this opportunity to make free-to-access a small selection of papers from the Journal of Roman Studies that illustrates how research has advanced our understanding of the lives of the enslaved, and how slavery’s effects pervaded Roman society and culture.

Keith Bradley has done as much as anyone to put slavery at the centre of Roman history, and to debunk old myths about slavery being more ‘humane’ in the ancient world than in the Americas. His now classic ‘Animalizing the slave: The truth of fiction’ (2000) is a reading of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, the famous novel in which Lucius is transformed into an ass and endures much suffering and indignity before eventually regaining human form. Bradley argues that the Metamorphoses can be read as dramatising a strategy, ‘animalization’, that ancient slave owners used to control the people they enslaved, stripping them of their personal identities and trying to reduce them to mute subservience and compliance. ‘The Metamorphoses, perhaps uniquely in classical literature,’ he argues, ‘captures the essence of the process of enslavement and what that process meant in human terms’.

Kyle Harper’s ‘The Greek Census Inscriptions of Late Antiquity’ (2008) might seem more remote from the institution of slavery, but it includes a ground-breaking analysis of an extraordinary new inscription from the Aegean island of Thera (Santorini) that provided a unique glimpse onto the enslaved population of a rural area. The vast majority of our evidence for slavery comes from urban contexts, but we suspect that most of the enslaved population lived in the countryside. Harper discusses an inscribed copy of a document recording the tax liabilities of a landowner that includes a list of around 150 persons who were declared as rural slaves, with their names and ages. Harper shows how the document can be mined for invaluable insights into rural slavery in this period, including for example the slight predominance of females (surprising for those who have assumed that males predominated in agricultural slavery) and the evidence for small, family-type groups. 

Tom Geue’s ‘Soft Hands, Hard Power: Sponging Off the Empire of Leisure (Virgil, Georgics 4)’ (2018) presents a provocative new interpretation of a canonical work of literature. Geue reads Vergil’s Georgics as the product of a slave-owning society, asking what it says about labour: who works, and who does not have to? Geue argues that the poem can be read as ‘a story of how the Roman elite got to the point of not having to get their hands dirty’ – where work can be left to third persons and where ‘with the help of a mysterious automation and universal voluntarism, the work seems simply to “do itself”’.

Lastly, and still hot off the press in academic time, Katherine Huemoeller’s  ‘Freedom in Marriage? Manumission for Marriage in the Roman World’ (2020) is a brilliant study of the practice of male slave-owners manumitting enslaved women for the purpose of marrying them. The practice has often been sentimentalised as an expression of love and intimacy, but Huemoeller presses us to ask whose interests it served, and how much freedom these women really had. It is striking, for example, that this institution forced Roman jurists to compromise one of the fundamental principles of the Roman law of marriage, namely that marriage required the consent of both parties. There was just one exception: when a man manumitted a female slave for the purpose of marriage, her objection was not an obstacle.

Of course, all these papers raise as many questions as they answer, and we hope that they will inspire young scholars of scholars to take this important subject forward. We look forward to publishing their work in the future pages of the Journal. 

Myles Lavan is Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. The papers mentioned above are free to access until the end of June 2023.