Legal status of slaves in ancient Rome. Life of ancient Rome Slaves of Rome who could become a slave

Vallon A. History of slavery in the ancient world. OGIZ GOSPOLITIZDAT, M., 1941
Translation from French S. P. Kondratieva.
Edited and with a foreword by Prof. A. V. Mishulina.

p.352 What I talked about in the two previous chapters about the sale and occupation of slaves requires addition; here I want to talk about their price, the matter is very dry, but the well-known studies of Dureau de la Malle will allow me to be brief.

The price of slaves varied over time; it had to vary depending on their number, their occupations, their merits and various other circumstances I mentioned above. We find confirmation of this both in historical facts and in laws.

We have no documents concerning the price of slaves in the first period of Roman history until the second Punic War; from this era their price approaches the prices generally accepted in Greece, as a result of more regular relations established between these two peoples. Thus, the 1,200 prisoners sold by Hannibal in Achaia were ransomed for 100 talents (this is probably the amount for which they were bought), i.e., five minas per person (about 160 rubles in gold) - a price that was once quite high for Greece, but became common among slaves in the era of Alexander's successors. After the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal, softened by the victory, and perhaps even embarrassed by his prisoners, offered them freedom on even easier terms. For the horsemen, 500 denarii with the image of a chariot were assigned, for the legionnaire - 300 and for the slave - 100. These prices, not excluding the price for a free person, were lower than the usual price of slaves, since Titus Livius says that the Senate, having neglected these prisoners, bought 8 thousand slaves to make soldiers out of them, and paid for them more than what prisoners would have cost him.

For subsequent times, we, first of all, have the testimony of Plutarch, which states that Cato never paid more than 1,500 drachmas for slaves, while he meant slaves who were healthy, fit for work, capable of driving oxen and walking behind 353 horses. But Plutarch probably replaced the drachma with the denarius, the value of which in his contemporary era was approximately equal to the value of the drachma, but was lower during the period of the Republic. One can even assume that the price of these slaves did not reach this maximum limit. In fact, they say that Cato, when he was a censor, valued slaves ten times higher than their actual value, in order to impose a tax of 3 asses per thousand on those slaves who were under twenty years old and worth more than 10 thousand asses (about 310 rubles in gold) , which translated into Greek money would be a little less than 900 drachmas. With this event, Cato wanted to strike not at work, but at luxury. It is very likely that the prices he fixed in his law were higher than the usual prices for rural slaves. At the same time, Cato's law also shows that the thirst for luxury significantly raised the prices of slaves needed to satisfy the needs it generated. The comedies of Plautus could provide evidence of this. Nevertheless, these texts should be used with a certain caution, and not precisely because Plautus imitates the Greeks - after all, a new comedy appeared approximately half a century before him, and slaves of this category could not cost more in Greece than in Rome. Moreover, Plautus is very free in his imitations; he without any hesitation introduces Roman morals into purely Greek scenes. As for the figures indicating the prices of slaves, he did not consider it necessary to adhere to the market prices that existed at that time in Rome or in any other place. This can be judged by the diversity they represent. In the comedy Prisoners, a kidnapped child was sold in 6 minutes; in another place, two little girls - one four, the other five years old - were given away with their wet nurse for 18 minutes, but without guarantee. A young girl was bought in 20 minutes; for another they paid 20 minutes and resold it for 30 minutes; so is the price of Philomachus' mistress in the Apparition. Another one, for which they asked either 30 minutes or one talent, was sold at the first price with an additional 10 minutes for her dresses and jewelry. During a comic bargaining between father and son over a slave, whom both sought without daring to admit it to each other, her price rose from 30 minutes to 50, and the father assured that he would not refuse her, even if the price she will be 100 min (about 3500 rubles in gold). One captive was bought for 40 minutes, a harpist for 50 (it should be added that she was bought by her lover). Finally, a young girl, passed off as a captive and distinguished by grace and intelligence, was bought for 60 minutes by the owner of a brothel, who believed that he had secured his fortune in this way. This variety of prices and their increase could, no doubt, occur in real life, just as we see it on the stage for slaves of this category. But there are other examples that allow us to convict the poet of obvious exaggeration. Philocrates, a captive slave, leaving to carry out the assignment entrusted to him, must leave a deposit of 20 minutes; the servant of the Demon p.354 receives freedom for the 30 minutes due to him for opening the box in Kanata. Finally, the two cooks in Treasure value themselves at no less than one talent for both; the cook, as we know from Greek comedies, was predominantly a fanfaron (braggart), ἀλαονικός. Sometimes this sum was mentioned with a certain shade of contempt: “I won’t buy Milesian Thales for talent!” One honored courtesan does not want to give up her daughter for less than two talents, or 20 minutes a year. True, for this price she offers, as a guarantee, to make all the slaves in the house eunuchs:

But soon the highest prices of Plautus were surpassed. They wanted to have not only beautiful slaves, they wanted to have slaves who came from a people known for their friendliness and cheerful disposition - from Greece and Alexandria. True, since these countries were turned into provinces, it became more difficult to obtain slaves from there, but the thirst for luxury, stronger than all the laws directed against it, took possession of all the nobility. Her bizarre fantasies, which became more demanding and numerous, raised, of course, the prices for this kind of slaves. Cato was already indignant at the fact that they paid more for a handsome servant than for a piece of land. Martial mentions entire inheritances spent on the purchase of women and teenagers, for whom they paid 100 thousand sesterces. Pliny gives a very typical example of such a sale, naming the names of the seller and the buyer.

The Romans were driven to this extravagance not only by the pursuit of sensual pleasures, but also by mental demands, interest in literature and art: these were the noble fruits of civilization, freely ripening under the sun of Hellas, but in Rome they still required the constant guidance of foreigners to occupy them. However, noble persons sometimes considered it beneath their dignity to engage in these arts personally, believing that they had every right to force them to serve themselves for money. Merchants tried in every possible way to satisfy these needs: for this purpose, they instructed to educate writers and artists for themselves. Among them were many worthless singers and grammarians, such “riffraff” as the singer who was sold along with Aesop for a thousand obols, and the grammarian for whom they paid 3 thousand obols, or five minas. But it was not always possible to find the kind of slaves they wanted, and training them was very expensive. This is confirmed by the example of Sabinus, about whom Seneca has just told us, and who, in order to have his slave Homer, his slave Hesiod and his slave Pindar, had to pay 100 thousand sesterces for each. They paid even more to own a slave who had already gained fame. Quintus Lutatius Catulus bought Daphnis for 700 or 800 thousand sesterces - proof of respect and wealth. He reserved only the right of patronage and the right to transfer his name to him - Lutatius Daphnis.

p.355 So, in this area we cannot establish any maximum standards, and therefore no average data. However, in other cases, assessments are more moderate, and therefore they may seem more common; but they are all the more dangerous; Therefore, it is here that criticism must take into account all the circumstances so as not to get lost in the labyrinth of false induction. Thus, estimating a fisherman slave at 6 thousand sesterces, they refer to Juvenal: this is the cost of the halibut fish (turbo), which the author made so famous. True, he adds: “...Perhaps it would be cheaper to buy the fisherman himself than to buy this very fish.” But, in fact, can this estimate of 6 thousand sesterces be considered common for all fishermen? Of course not, just as it is impossible to attribute to Pliny a similar assessment of the former slave-squire only because he claims that in his time nightingales were more expensive, adding that 6 thousand sesterces were paid for one of them. These texts in themselves do not have such meaning. And in all these cases one should beware of drawing too hasty conclusions from the particular to the general. Who would think of determining the usual price of gladiators based on the testimony of Suetonius that Saturninus once left 30 gladiators for 9 million sesterces? Since the good praetor fell asleep during the sale of slaves, Caligula, for fun, took the shaking of his head as an expression of consent to the bonus. When valuing a good winegrower slave at 8 thousand sesterces, they refer to the more serious testimony of Columella. He begins by asserting that, as a rule, winegrowers are chosen among the cheapest slaves, but that, on the contrary, he ranks them among the most valuable; that he does not consider the price too high if he pays 8 thousand sesterces for a good winegrower, the same as for 7 jugeras of a vineyard. This, so to speak, is more of an arbitrary price than a real assessment; it does not provide any guidance for the required calculations.

But there are a number of other estimates that do not raise such doubts. Martial, talking about the sale of one woman, says that if the merchant had not made some mistake, then 600 denarii could have been given for her; elsewhere the reference is to a slave bought for 1,300 denarii. One passage of Petronius, quoted, like the previous one, by Dureau de la Mallem, has, it seems to me, a more general meaning and a wider application. A thousand denarii are promised to the one who brings or indicates the whereabouts of a runaway slave. This is, of course, a mere reward, not the price of the slave, and Dureau de la Mallle suggests that the reward must be less than the price of the slave in order for his master to be interested in the return of his unfaithful servant. But we should not forget that he could be doubly interested. The runaway slave represented for him his personal value, and in addition, the reward that could be demanded from the one who sheltered him: let us remember Letronne's witty commentary on the Alexandrian advertisement concerning the runaway slave. p.356 Rome in all eras imposed fines of this kind on concealers: the law of Constantine condemns them to pay double the value of a slave, so the master could well promise the equivalent of the real value to the one who informs. I know that in this case there is no distinction between a reverse drive and a denunciation: this is a simple case of an action for damages. But, on the other hand, we note that we are talking about a slave for luxury, about a young handsome slave. To get it back, the gentleman will not stop at paying the full price; and if it were worth more, then the amount offered to the one who returned it could be no less than the cost of simpler slaves. The assessment given by Horace in the above passage applies to a slave of the same category. He is young, handsome, educated, modest and, despite this, prone to escape; but the defect, declared without providing a guarantee, is so cleverly disguised by praise that the buyer thinks that he has made a good deal by buying it for 8 thousand sesterces. The price is higher than in the previous case, but this should not surprise anyone, since for this group of servants the average cost must be allowed to rise.

These prices and prices close to them are also found in some inscriptions. The custom of freeing slaves under the guise of selling them to a deity continued in Greece until the era of Roman rule. Not to mention prices, which, on the basis of a gradual increase alone, can be attributed to a given era (10, 15 and 20 minutes), there are other indicators that define the era by the currency in which they are expressed and the type of coins in which they are marked. Thus, in Tiphoraeus we find a slave valued at a thousand denarii, and in another inscription - two women ransomed together for 3 thousand denarii. This ransom, as we have seen, given through the mediation of God, represented the value of the slave; and the price must have been more or less the same in Rome and Greece for the same era.

NOTES

In Ancient Rome, between the 3rd century. BC e. and II century. n. e. The slave system reached its greatest development. Therefore, the emergence, flourishing and decline of slave society can best be traced by studying the history of Ancient Rome.

Slaves appeared in Rome from time immemorial, when it was a small city, the center of a primitive agricultural people. The Romans then lived in large families - surnames. The family was headed by the “father of the family.” He controlled all the family's property, as well as the labor, fate and very lives of his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and the few slaves who belonged to the family. Slaves were not yet very different in status from free members of the family, subordinate to its head. Both of them could not have their own property; they were represented before the law by the “father of the family”; they all participated in the cult of the patrons of the family - the Larov gods. At the altar that existed in every house, Larov the slave sought salvation from the wrath of his master.

The difference between free and unfree members of a family appeared only after the death of its head: the free themselves became the full-fledged “fathers” of their families, and slaves, along with other property, passed to the heirs of the deceased head of the family. At that time, slaves were still recognized to some extent as people. They themselves were responsible for crimes committed against strangers, even if done on the orders of the owner. In a subsistence economy, when each family provided for its own economic needs and rarely bought anything from the outside, there was no need to over-exploit slaves who worked together with the master and his family. However, gradually the situation changed. Continuous victorious wars for land and spoils turned Rome into the center of a huge power.

The influx of material wealth, exposure to the high culture and more refined lifestyle of ancient Greece and the eastern states over time changed the old peasant Rome. Wars and participation in the exploitation of conquered provinces enriched many Romans. They bought land, built new city houses and rural villas for themselves, acquired works of art and luxury goods, and gave their children a good education.

All this required money. They could make money by selling agricultural and handicraft products. The strength of family members for its growing production was no longer enough, and besides, rich people began to despise physical labor. The free poor people preferred to enlist in the army, work on large construction projects undertaken by the state, or live on state benefits, which were paid to poor citizens from military booty and tribute from the provinces. Therefore, slaves became the main labor force in agriculture and crafts, and their number was increasing. It was in these industries that the bulk of Roman slaves were used.

But slaves were needed not only for the production of goods. The Romans' passion for spectacle, especially gladiator fights, grew, and gladiator schools were replenished with slaves. Rich Romans acquired numerous servants, among whom were not only cooks, pastry chefs, barbers, maids, grooms, gardeners, etc., but also artisans, librarians, doctors, teachers, actors, musicians. Politicians needed sufficiently dexterous and educated trusted agents who were entirely dependent on them. Slaves penetrated into all spheres of life, their numbers grew, and their professions multiplied.

Children of slaves became slaves. Provincials who owed money to Roman businessmen fell into slavery. Slaves were bought in the provinces and brought from abroad. They were supplied to special markets by pirates who captured people on ships and in coastal villages. In slave markets, natives of Greece and Asia Minor, trained in crafts and sometimes sciences, were most valued. They paid for them several tens of thousands of sesterces.

But the main number of slaves in the III-I centuries. BC e. Rome received as a result of wars of conquest and punitive expeditions. Captives captured in battle and residents of rebellious provinces were enslaved. Thus, during the reprisal against the rebel Epirus, 150 thousand people were simultaneously sold into slavery. Italics, Gauls, Thracians and Macedonians worked in agriculture. On average, a simple slave cost 500 sesterces, about the same as the cost of 1/8 hectares of land.

In the 3rd century. BC e. a law was passed equating a slave to a domestic animal. The slave was called a “talking instrument.” From now on, his master was responsible for any actions of the slave. The slave was obliged to obey him blindly, even if the master ordered him to commit murder or robbery. The owner could kill him, put him in chains, imprison him in a home prison (ergastul), turn him into a gladiator, or send him to work in the mines. And, of course, only the owner himself determined how many hours a day a slave should work and how he should be maintained. The situation of rural slaves was especially difficult. Famous figure of the 2nd century. BC e. Cato the Censor, who created a guide to farming, reduced the diet of slaves to the necessary minimum. He believed that a slave should work enough during the day to fall asleep dead in the evening: then unwanted thoughts would not come into his head. The slave was forbidden to go beyond the boundaries of the estate, communicate with strangers, or even participate in religious ceremonies. According to the law, a slave could not have a family; his family ties were not recognized. Only as a special favor could the master allow the slave to start some kind of family and raise his children.

The position of slaves in urban crafts was somewhat different. Skilled craftsmen, whose products met the tastes of the discerning buyer, could not be forced to work only under pressure. They were often given some independence and were given the opportunity to raise money for ransom. Urban slaves interacted with free artisans and the working poor on a daily basis, sometimes joining their professional and religious associations - collegiums.

Educated slaves occupied a special place. They were well maintained, often released, and in the last two centuries of the republic, many figures of Roman culture emerged from their number. Thus, the freed slaves were the first Roman playwright and organizer of the Roman theater of Libya, Andronicus, and the famous comedian Terence. The majority of doctors and teachers of grammar (including literary criticism) and oratory were freedmen.

The position of this or that group of slaves also determined its place in the class struggle. Urban slaves usually performed together with the free poor. Rural slaves had no allies, but, as the most oppressed, they were the most active participants in the uprisings of the 2nd-1st centuries. BC e. In these centuries of rapid development of slavery and especially cruel exploitation of slaves, the class struggle was very acute. Slaves fled beyond the borders of the Roman state, killed their masters, during wars they went over to the side of the opponents of Rome, which they hated, and in the 2nd century. BC e. there were rebellions more than once.

In 138 BC. e. in Sicily, where at that time there were many captive slaves from Syria and Asia Minor, the first great slave war began. The rebels chose Eunus as their king, who took the name Antiochus, usual for Syrian kings. Their second leader was a native of Cilicia, Cleon. The leaders had an elected council. The rebels managed to capture a significant part of Sicily and within six years, until 132 BC. e., successfully repel the onslaught of the Roman legions. Only with great difficulty did the Romans capture the rebel fortresses of Enna and Tauromenium, suppress the uprising and deal with its leaders.

Remains of an ancient Roman mill.

But already in 104 BC. e. A new slave revolt broke out in Sicily. A council and two leaders were again elected - Tryphon and Athenion, who was proclaimed king. They captured a vast territory. Only in 101 BC. e. The rebels were defeated and their capital, Triokalo, was captured. The Sicilian uprisings also caused an echo among the slaves of Italy, who rebelled in several cities.

Agricultural work. Roman mosaic. North Africa. III century n. e.

The struggle of the slaves reached its highest tension in the uprising of Spartacus. In 74 BC. e. 78 gladiators, among whom was the Thracian Spartacus, fled from the gladiator school in Capua; The fugitives managed to capture carts with weapons for the gladiators. They settled on the Vesuvius volcano, where slaves who had fled from the surrounding estates began to flock. Soon their detachment reached 10 thousand people. Spartak, a most talented organizer and commander, was elected leader. When a detachment of three thousand under the command of Clodius marched against the slaves, occupying the approaches to Vesuvius, Spartacus’ warriors wove ropes from vines and unexpectedly descended along them from an impregnable steep slope to Clodius’s rear, from where they dealt him a crushing blow. New victories allowed Spartak to take possession of a large part of southern Italy. In 72 BC. e., already having 200 thousand people, he moved north. Armies under the command of both Roman consuls were sent against the rebels. Spartacus defeated them and reached the city of Mutina in northern Italy.

Interior view of the Roman Colosseum. The service premises for gladiators and cages for wild animals located under the arena are visible.

Some historians believe that Spartacus sought to cross the Alps and lead slaves to lands still free from the Roman yoke. Others believe that he intended, increasing his army even more, to march on Rome. And indeed, although the path to the Alps was open from Mutina, and the Roman government did not yet have the forces to block Spartacus’ path to the north, he turned south again. He planned to go through all of Italy, attracting new rebels, then cross on pirate ships to Sicily and raise numerous slaves there. Meanwhile, the government managed to assemble an army, headed by Crassus, a prominent politician and the richest man in Rome. With cruel punishments, resorting to decimation - the execution of every tenth soldier in units that turned out to be unstable, Crassus restored discipline in his troops. Moving after Spartacus, he pushed the rebels back to the Bruttian Peninsula. They found themselves between the sea and the Roman army. The pirates deceived Spartacus, did not provide ships and thwarted the plan to cross to Sicily. In a heroic outburst, Spartacus managed to break through the fortifications of Crassus into Lucania. Here the last battle with Crassus took place. Spartacus was killed and his army was destroyed. Thousands of rebels were crucified on crosses. Only a few escaped; they continued to fight for several more years and were eventually killed. V.I. Lenin called Spartacus one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the largest slave uprisings. Why couldn't the slaves win? A victorious revolution is possible only when the existing method of production has already become obsolete, when it is replaced by a new, more advanced one. The slave-owning mode of production was then in its prime and was still developing. The slaves did not have any program for the reconstruction of society. Rome was at the height of its military and political power. And although there was a sharp struggle between the Roman poor and the rich nobility (see article “Struggle for land in Ancient Rome”), rural slaves did not find allies among Roman citizens. The uprisings of rural slaves, on whose labor the main branch of the Roman economy was based, frightened not only the rich, but also the poor. Finally, the slaves themselves, placed outside the law, outside the society of citizens, disunited, without any organization, natives of different countries, could not recognize themselves as a single class.

Gladiators. Roman mosaic.

After the death of Spartacus, Rome no longer saw major slave uprisings. But the slaves never stopped their struggle, which took place in different forms. Repression against slaves intensified at the end of the 1st century. BC e., when after civil wars sole ruler of the state in 27 BC. e. became Emperor Augustus. Under him, slaves who escaped during civil wars were executed or returned to their masters; on pain of death, slaves were forbidden to enlist in military units, which was sometimes allowed during civil wars. A law was passed: if a master was killed, all the slaves of the murdered man who were under the same roof or within shouting distance were tortured and executed for not coming to the rescue. “For,” the law said, “a slave must put the life and good of the master above his own.”

The events of the last years of the republic showed that individual masters were no longer powerless to resist the slaves. With the establishment of the empire, the state took upon itself the function of suppressing them. At the same time, fearing the protests of slaves driven to despair, the emperors were forced to increasingly limit the arbitrariness of their masters. Slaves of particularly cruel masters could ask imperial officials to be forcibly sold to more humane owners. The masters were deprived of the right to kill slaves, give them to gladiators and mines, and constantly keep them in ergastuls and shackles. From now on, only the court could impose such punishments.

In the 1st century BC e.-I century n. e. agriculture and crafts in Italy have reached very high level. However, the heyday of slave production was short-lived. Despite all the efforts of the owners, the productivity of slave labor increased little. Slaves still hated their masters, killed them on occasion, joined bands of robbers, fled beyond the borders of the empire, and went over to its enemies. “Agility and intelligence are in the slave,” wrote the 4th century agronomist. n. e. Palladium, “are always close to disobedience and malicious intent, while stupidity and slowness are always close to good nature and humility.” And another agronomist of the 1st century AD. - Columella, advising not to spare 8,000 sesterces to buy a learned winegrower, notes that such winegrowers, due to their more lively minds and obstinacy, have to be kept in ergastuli at night and driven out to work in stocks. Slaves could not be forced to work with the care dictated by agronomic experience. Agriculture stopped progressing. The same Columella wrote: “The point is not in heavenly wrath, but in our guilt. We hand over agriculture like an executioner to the most worthless of slaves.”

The larger the estate, the more difficult it was to keep track of the slaves, so large farms - latifundia - fell into decline earlier than others. It is not surprising that in the II-III centuries. n. e. Vast expanses of land in the latifundia remained uncultivated and fell into disrepair.

Life forced the slave owners themselves to change the living and working conditions of slaves not only in crafts, but also in agriculture. To interest a slave in the results of his labor, landowners often allocated him his own farm - peculium, which included land, tools of production, and sometimes other slaves. Formally, the master remained the owner of the peculium, but the slave, the owner of the peculium, gave him only part of the product, saving the rest for his family. Even more often, the slave was released free of charge or for a ransom, but with the intention that the freed person would work for the master part of the time. In the II-III centuries. n. e. Most of the land in the latifundia was divided into small plots, leased to slaves, freedmen and freemen. Such tenants were called colones. Large workshops were also split into parts and rented out.

By the end of the Roman Empire, slaves did not disappear, but were pushed into the background by the colonists. At the same time, the colons became increasingly dependent on the landowner, and at the beginning of the 4th century. n. e. they were attached to the ground. And regardless of whether the colon (holder of the plot, planted on the land) was a slave or freeborn, he was sold along with his plot.

Colonies now became the main participants in the class struggle. They raised uprisings that lasted from the 3rd to the 5th centuries. n. e. By weakening the empire, these uprisings made it easier for the peoples neighboring the empire to defeat it.

Colonies were already the predecessors of medieval serfs. With the crisis of the slave-owning mode of production, new feudal relations arose (for more information on this, see the article “Europe at the turn of antiquity and the Middle Ages”). Slavery, which initially contributed to the flourishing of agriculture, crafts, political power and culture of Rome, ultimately, due to irreconcilable contradictions between slaves and slave owners, led to the final decline and death of the Roman state.

INTRODUCTION

SLAVERY IN ANCIENT ROME

1 Slave system in Rome

2 Sources of slavery

SLAVES IN ANCIENT ROME

1 Stratification of slaves

2 Treatment of slaves

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

The main productive class of Roman society was the slave class. In the II-I centuries BC. The need for slaves for the slave farms of Italy was satisfied through the enslavement of the peoples of the Mediterranean conquered by the Romans. In the II-I centuries. BC. The Roman empire extended to the Atlantic Ocean in the West, the Sahara desert in the South, the impenetrable forests of Central Europe in the North, and in the East the powerful Parthian power set the limit to Roman conquests. Large wars of conquest, throwing huge masses of slaves onto the slave market, are becoming more and more rare. Roman emperors of the 2nd century. BC e. fought many border wars, which, although they replenished the empire's market with slaves, however, the total number of slaves received from this source was reduced compared to previous times. And this happened at a time when expanding slave-holding economies were increasingly in need of slave power. The discrepancy between supply and demand led to an increase in prices for slaves (from 400-500 arboretums in the 2nd-1st centuries BC to 600-700 arboretums in the 2nd century BC). In the II-I centuries. BC. it was more profitable to buy a slave on the market than to raise him on his own farm. In the II century. BC. The role of internal sources of slavery increased, therefore, slave owners interested in increasing their slave army were forced to change the living situation of slaves: in rural estates and in cities the number of female slaves increased, slaves were allowed to create a semblance of a family. Encouraging family relationships among slaves replaced the former semi-barracks life. The sources report on child slaves, their upbringing, their buying and selling. Some slave families had many children. Such children, born in slavery (they were called Varnas), were obedient, trained in some task, tied to the place of residence of their parents, and were highly valued. The development of family relationships among slaves increased the slave population of the Empire.

Encouraging family relationships forced slave owners to allocate some property for the slave family: several heads of cattle, a plot of land, a hut, tools for practicing some craft, a small shop, etc. this property, allocated by the master and transferred for the use of slaves, was called peculium. The master could take away the granted peculium at any time. For II century. BC. characteristic distribution of peculium.

When victorious wars threw huge crowds of cheap slaves onto the market, and the slaves themselves were kept in barracks, the slave owner tried to squeeze out a larger surplus product from the slaves as quickly as possible. An exhausted or sick slave was sold or simply thrown away, since the slave owner could buy a new slave on the slave market at cheap price. In the II century. BC. It was not profitable for the slave owner to bring the exploitation of the slave to such an extent that he would quickly lose strength and health. In this regard, not only the everyday, but also the legal status of slaves changes.

In Roman law, the view is widespread that human freedom is declared to be a “natural state” inherent to man as such, and therefore to a slave. Slavery is contrary to nature, although it is recognized as an institution of all peoples, in other words, one is not born a slave, but becomes one.

The problem of slavery, slaves, in the life of ancient society has always aroused interest among domestic and foreign scientists.

Among them, domestic historians V.P. Kuzishchin, E.N. Shtaerman, S.A. Zhebelev, Ya.Yu. Zaborovsky, A.V. Koptev, V.V. Kuritsyn and others stand out. Foreign historians M. Finley, R Duncan - Jones, K. Green, K. Polanyi.

One of them is Finley. R. Duncan-Jones consider the ancient economy to be primitive, without phenomena. Others - K. Gonkins “Masters and Slaves” believe that ancient society develops according to the sociological laws of the capitalist world. Domestic historians of classical antiquity dealt little with socio-economic problems ancient Rome. In the article by V.V. Kuritsyn “Economics and Politics in Ancient Society,” the problem of the peculiarities of the functioning of the economy of ancient Roman society was first posed. It notes that classical slavery, having arisen, began to have a huge, largely determining impact on the future fate of the ancient world. The development of the slave economy led to the development of trade and money. Therefore, the choice of topic is not accidental.

Object of the course work: slavery in Ancient Rome.

Subject of course work: history of Ancient Rome.

The purpose of the course work is to consider the features of classical slavery in Ancient Rome.

Research objectives:

-describe the features of life in Ancient Rome;

-consider the social stratification of slaves in Ancient Rome;

-consider economic and non-economic methods of coercion;

-consider the treatment of slaves in ancient Rome.

Research hypothesis: the assumption that the relations of classical slavery could not but lead to an increased role of non-economic methods of domination, which were intertwined with economic ones, forming their organic unity, constituting a feature of classical slavery as a social system.

Theoretical significance in the collected material, which can be useful to everyone interested in this problem.

The structure of the course work corresponds to the purpose and objectives of the study and includes an introduction, two chapters, four paragraphs, a conclusion and a list of sources used.

1. SLAVERY IN ANCIENT ROME

1 Slave society in Rome

Development of slavery in Rome. Land concentration and formation of latifundia. From the second half of the 2nd century. BC. The period of the highest development of the slave-owning mode of production in Roman society begins. The wars of conquest that the Romans waged for about 120 years in the western and then eastern Mediterranean basin contributed to the influx of huge masses of slaves into the slave markets. Even during the first Punic War, the capture of Agrigentum (262) gave the Romans 25 thousand prisoners, who were sold into slavery. Six years later, the consul Regulus, having defeated the Carthaginians at Cape Ecnome (256), sent 20 thousand slaves to Rome. In the future, these numbers are steadily growing. Fabius Maximus, during the capture of Tarentum in 209, sold 30 thousand inhabitants into slavery. In 167, during the defeat of the cities of Enira by the consul Aemilius Paulus, 150 thousand people were sold into slavery. The end of the III Punic War (146) was marked by the sale into slavery of all the inhabitants of the destroyed Carthage. Even these fragmentary, scattered and, apparently, not always accurate figures given by Roman historians give an idea of ​​the many thousands of slaves who poured into Rome.

The enormous quantitative growth of slaves led to qualitative changes in the socio-economic structure of Roman society: to the predominant importance of slave labor in production, to the transformation of the slave into the main producer of Roman society. These circumstances marked the complete victory and flowering of the slave-owning mode of production in Rome.

But the predominance of slave labor in production inevitably led to the displacement of the small free producer. Since Italy at this time continued to maintain the character of an agrarian country, here this process, first of all, most clearly unfolded in the field of agricultural production, and it consisted of two inextricably linked phenomena: the concentration of land and the formation of large slaveholding estates (so called latifundia) and at the same time the dispossession and pauperization of the peasantry.

Before 2nd century BC In Italian agriculture, small and medium-sized farms predominated, distinguished by their natural character and based mainly on the labor of free producers. As slavery developed in Rome, these farms began to be replaced by farms of a completely different type, based on a system of mass exploitation of slave labor and producing products not only to satisfy their own needs, but also for sale. The Roman historian Appian depicts this process as follows: “The rich, having occupied most of this undivided land and, due to the long-standing seizure, hoping that it would not be taken away from them, began to annex neighboring plots of the poor to their possessions, partly buying them for money, partly taking them away by force, so that in the end, instead of small estates, huge latifundia ended up in their hands. To cultivate the fields and guard the herds, they began to buy slaves...” (10;52)

Such an economy, designed for the development of commodity production and based on the exploitation of slave labor, is an exemplary villa, described by the famous Roman statesman Cato the Elder in his special work “On Agriculture.” Cato describes an estate with a complex economy: an oil grove of 240 yugers (60 hectares), a vineyard of 100 yugers (25 hectares), as well as grain farming and pasture for livestock. The organization of labor on such an estate is based, first of all, on the exploitation of slaves. Cato points out that at least 14 slaves are required to care for a vineyard of 100 jugeras, and 11 slaves for an olive garden of 240 jugeras. Cato gives detailed advice on how to more rationally exploit the labor of slaves, recommending keeping them busy on rainy days, when work is being done in the fields, and even on religious holidays. At the head of the management of the estate is a vilik, chosen from among the most devoted and knowledgeable slaves in agriculture; the vilik’s wife performs the duties of a housekeeper and cook.

Cato is extremely interested in the question of the profitability of individual branches of agriculture. “If they ask me,” he writes, “which estates should be put in first place, I will answer this way: in first place should be put a vineyard that produces wine of good quality and in abundance, in second place - an irrigated vegetable garden, in third - a willow planting ( for weaving baskets), on the fourth - an olive grove, on the fifth - a meadow, on the sixth - a grain field, on the seventh - a forest." From these words it is clear that grain crops, which were predominant in the old type of farms, are now retreating far back in comparison with the more profitable branches of agriculture (horticultural crops and livestock breeding).

Thus, the problem of the marketability of the economy during the time of Cato comes to the fore. It is no coincidence that, when considering the issue of purchasing an estate, Cato immediately gives advice to pay attention not only to the fertility of the soil, but also to the fact that “there is a significant city, sea, navigable river or good road nearby,” meaning the transportation and sale of products. “The owner should strive,” says Cato, “to sell more and buy less.”

Cato describes in his work a medium-sized estate, typical of an average one. Italy. But in the south of Italy, as well as in Sicily and Africa, huge latifundia arose, numbering hundreds and thousands of jugers. They were also based on the exploitation of slave labor on a massive scale and pursued the goal of increasing the profitability of agriculture.

The downside of the process of development of the latifundia, as already mentioned, was the dispossession and ruin of the peasantry. From the above words of Appian it is clear that small and medium-sized peasant farms perished not so much as a result of the economic competition of latifundial estates, but as a result of the seizure of land by large slave owners. The continuous wars of the 3rd-2nd centuries, waged on the territory of Italy, also had a destructive effect on peasant farms. During the war with Hannibal, according to some sources, about 50% of all peasant estates in central and southern Italy were destroyed. Long campaigns in Spain, Africa, and Asia Minor, tearing peasants away from their farms for a long time, also contributed to the decline of small and medium-sized landownership in Italy. (12;102)

Landless peasants partially turned into tenants or hired laborers, agricultural workers. But since they resorted to hiring the latter only during times of need (rest, harvest, grape harvest, etc.), the farm laborers could not count on any secure and constant income. Therefore, huge masses of peasants poured into the city. A minority of them took up productive work, that is, they turned into artisans (bakers, cloth makers, shoemakers, etc.) or construction workers, some took up petty trade.

But the overwhelming majority of these ruined people could not find permanent work. They led the lives of vagabonds and beggars, filling the forum and market squares. They did not disdain anything in search of casual income: selling votes in elections, false testimony in courts, denunciations and theft - and turned into a declassed layer of the population, into the ancient proletariat. They lived at the expense of society, lived on the pitiful handouts that they received from the Roman rich or political adventurers seeking popularity; and then through government distributions; ultimately, they lived off the barbaric exploitation of slave labor.

These are the most significant changes in the Roman economy and social life of the Roman state in the 2nd century. BC. However, the picture of these changes will be far from complete if we do not dwell on the development of trade and money-usury capital in Rome.

Development of trade and money-usurious capital. The transformation of Rome into the largest Mediterranean power contributed to the widespread development of foreign trade. If the needs of the Roman population for handicraft items were mainly satisfied by local small industry, then agricultural products were imported from the western provinces, and luxury goods from Greece and the countries of the Hellenistic East. He played an outstanding role in world trade in the 3rd century. BC. Rhodes, after the fall of Corinth, Delos emerged as the largest trading center, which soon attracted not only all Corinthian, but also Rhodian trade. On Delos, where merchants from different countries met, trade and religious associations of Italian merchants, mainly Campanian Greeks, arose (they were “under the patronage” of one or another deity). (14;332)

Roman conquests ensured a continuous influx of valuables and monetary capital into Rome. After the first Punic War, the Roman treasury received 3,200 talents of indemnity (1 talent = 2,400 rubles). The indemnity imposed on the Carthaginians after the second Punic War was equal to 10,000 talents, and on Antiochus III after the end of the Syrian War, 15,000 talents. The military spoils of the victorious Roman generals were colossal. Plutarch describes the triumphal entry into Rome of the victor at Pydna, Aemilius Paulus. The triumph lasted three days, during which captured works of art, precious weapons, and huge vessels filled with gold and silver coins were continuously carried and transported on chariots. In 189, after the Battle of Magnesia, the Romans captured as war booty 1,230 elephant tusks, 234 gold wreaths, 137,000 pounds of silver (1 Roman pound = 327 g), 224,000 Greek silver coins, 140,000 Macedonian gold coins, a large number products made of gold and silver. Up to the 2nd century. Rome experienced a certain shortage of silver coins, but after all these conquests, especially after the development of the Spanish silver mines, the Roman state was fully able to provide the silver basis for its monetary system.

All these circumstances led to the extremely widespread development of monetary and usurious capital in the Roman state. One of the organizational forms of development of this capital was companies of tax farmers, which farmed out various types of public works in Italy itself, as well as, and mainly, farmed out taxes in the Roman provinces. They were also engaged in credit and usury operations, especially widely in the provinces, where laws and customs supporting the sale into slavery for debts remained in force and where the loan interest was almost unlimited and reached 48-50%. Since representatives of the Roman equestrian class were engaged in trade, taxation and usury operations, they turn into a new layer of the Roman slave-owning nobility, into a trading and monetary aristocracy.

Such significant changes in the economy and social life of Rome confirm the idea that the Riga slave-owning society was moving to a new, higher stage of its development, which K. Marx defined as “... a slave-owning system aimed at the production of surplus value.” This definition reveals the true nature and historical significance of the phenomena discussed above: the victory of the slave-owning mode of production and the transformation of the slave into the main producer, the development of commodity production, the growth of trade and money-usurious capital, as well as the formation of new social strata of the Roman slave-owning society - the ancient lumpenproletariat, with one on the other hand, and the layer of the trading and monetary aristocracy (horsemen), on the other.

Bourgeois falsifiers of history, starting from the “patriarchs of modernization” of the ancient world, Mommsen and Ed. Meyer and up to their modern epigones, persistently talk about the development of capitalism in ancient Rome. Seizing on purely external analogies, they talk about the presence of capitalist forms of economy, about the “banking system,” about the formation of the capitalist class and the proletariat. However, all these statements, which are ultimately an apology for the capitalist system, do not stand up to serious criticism. Modernizers of ancient history ignore the question of the method of production, ignore the basic fact that under the slave-owning mode of production, in which the basis of production relations is the slave owner’s ownership of the means of production, as well as the production worker, i.e., the slave, the latter’s labor power is not sold and not bought, i.e., is not a product. Consequently, the basis of the slave-owning mode of production is a non-economic, natural method of appropriation of labor power, which distinguishes this method of production in principle and quite clearly from the capitalist mode of production. (24;98)

Marx repeatedly emphasized that “events strikingly similar, but occurring in different historical circumstances, lead to completely different results.” Thus, speaking about the influence of trade and merchant capital on ancient society, Marx specifically notes that due to the dominance of a certain method of production, it “... constantly results in a slave economy.” J.V. Stalin in his work “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” wrote: “They say that commodity production, under all conditions, must and will definitely lead to capitalism. This is not true". And further: “Commodity production is older than capitalist production. It existed under the slave system and served it, but did not lead to capitalism.”

This is the true essence and historical significance of the changes that occurred in the economy of Roman slave society in the 2nd century. BC.

The crisis of the political forms of the Roman Republic. The profound processes and fundamental changes that occurred in the economic basis of Roman slave society could not but influence the political relationships and forms of government of the ancient Romans. The political superstructure of Roman society no longer corresponds to its economic basis - it becomes conservative and hinders its development. This circumstance should inevitably lead to a crisis of the political superstructure, to a crisis of the old forms and institutions of the Roman slave-owning republic. Moreover, this circumstance should inevitably lead to the replacement of the old political superstructure with new political and legal institutions that correspond to the changed basis and actively contribute to its formalization and strengthening.

The political superstructure of the Roman slave society, i.e. The republican forms of the Roman state arose and took shape at a time when Rome was a typical city-state, resting entirely on a natural economic system. It met the interests and needs of a relatively small community of citizens built on primitive foundations. Now, when Rome has become a great Mediterranean power, when profound changes in the economic basis of Roman society and, above all, the slave-owning mode of production triumphed, the old political forms, the old republican institutions turned out to be unsuitable and no longer meeting the needs and interests of the new social classes.

The provincial system of government developed gradually and largely spontaneously. There were no general legislative provisions relating to the provinces. Each new ruler of a province, upon taking office, usually issued an edict in which he determined what principles he would be guided by in governing the province. As rulers or governors of provinces, the Romans sent first praetors, and then high magistrates, at the end of their term of office in Rome (proconsul, propraetor). The governor was appointed to govern the province, as a rule, for a year and during this period he not only personified the fullness of military, civil and judicial power in his province, but in fact did not bear any responsibility for his activities before the Roman authorities. Residents of the provinces could complain about his abuses only after he handed over his affairs to his successor, but such complaints were rarely successful. Thus, the activities of the governors in the provinces were uncontrolled; the management of the provinces was actually handed over to them “at the mercy of.”

Almost all provincial communities were subject to direct and sometimes indirect taxes (mainly customs duties). The maintenance of provincial governors, their staff, as well as Roman troops stationed in the provinces also fell on the shoulders of the local population. But the activities of Roman publicans and moneylenders were especially devastating for the provincials. Companies of publicans, who took charge of collecting taxes in the provinces, contributed predetermined amounts to the Roman treasury, and then extorted them with huge surpluses from the local population. The predatory activities of publicans and moneylenders ruined entire countries that had once flourished, and reduced the inhabitants of these countries to the status of slaves, sold into slavery for debts. (16;77)

Such was the system that led to the predatory exploitation of the conquered regions, which could no longer meet the interests of the ruling class as a whole, but which was a consequence of the complete unsuitability and obsolescence of the state apparatus of the Roman Republic. Of course, in the Roman slave-owning society, with any change in its political superstructure, the state apparatus could not be replaced by a completely perfect apparatus, i.e., in other words, it was impossible to create a strong centralized empire due to the lack of a single economic base, due to the natural at its core slave farming. As is known, the largest empires of antiquity could only rise to the level of temporary and fragile military-administrative associations. The development of the Roman state was directed toward the creation of such a unification at the time under review, but even to achieve this goal there were no real conditions as long as too large and irreconcilable a gap continued to exist between the renewed economic basis of the Roman slave society and its dilapidated, conservative political superstructure. This gap made inevitable the crisis of the old political forms, that is, the crisis of the Roman Republic.

Class struggle in Roman society in the 2nd century. BC. However, replacing the outdated government system of the Roman Republic with some new one could not happen in a painless and peaceful way. Behind the old, dilapidated political forms there were certain classes, certain social groups with their narrow class interests, but no less fiercely defended by them. The old political superstructure could not be removed easily and peacefully; on the contrary, it steadfastly and actively resisted. Therefore, the crisis of the Roman Republic was accompanied by an extreme aggravation of the class struggle in Rome for several decades.

Roman society until the 2nd century. BC. presented a motley picture of warring classes and estates. Within the free population there was an intense struggle between the class of large slave owners and the class of small producers, represented in Rome primarily by the rural plebs. It was basically a struggle for land. Within the slave-owning class itself there was a struggle between the agricultural nobility (nobility) and the new trading and monetary aristocracy (equestrianism). In this era, the horsemen were already beginning to strive for an independent political role in the state and in this struggle against the politically omnipotent nobility sometimes blocked with the rural, and then with the urban plebs. By this time, the urban plebs were turning into a political and social force that, although it had no independent significance, could, as an ally or an enemy, have a decisive influence on tilting the needle of the political scales in a certain direction. All these complex, often intertwined lines of struggle are reflected in the turbulent political events of the period of crisis and fall of the republic, from the Gracchi movement to the years of civil wars.

As a result of the intensified development and victory of the slave-owning mode of production, the main contradiction of Roman society, the contradiction between antagonistic classes: slaves and slave owners, became extremely acute. Slaves are still a politically powerless class. They are still deprived of civil rights and personal freedom. From the point of view of Roman law, they are a thing belonging to the owner, an animate instrument. But at the same time, this is the main producing and, perhaps, the most numerous class of Roman society. Therefore, slaves turn into a decisive social and political force. The aggravation of contradictions between slaves and slave owners leads to the highest form of class struggle in ancient times, to a slave uprising. At first these were separate and isolated outbreaks, such as the slave conspiracy during the second Punic War, silently mentioned by Livne, or the slave conspiracy in Latium (198), as a result of which 500 instigators were executed, or, finally, the uprising slaves in Etruria in 196, an entire legion had to be sent to suppress it. But later these separate, isolated outbreaks flare up into a huge fire of “slave wars”; such are the grandiose Sicilian uprisings and the great “slave war” under the leadership of Spartacus, “the true representative of the ancient proletariat” (Marx). (3;27)

Hellenistic influences undoubtedly contributed to the spread of education in the upper strata of society and the growth of culture. A circle is created around one of the largest political figures of this time, Scipio Aemilianus, which includes philosophers and writers. Among them, the most prominent place belongs to the famous Greek historian Polybius, who lived for about 16 years as a hostage in Rome, and the Greek philosopher Panaetius. Both of them preached the teachings of the Stoics (the so-called middle Roman Stoa), adapting it to the needs and demands of Roman society. In Scipio's circle, not only philosophical, but also political problems were debated, ideas for reforms were hatched, which later had an undeniable influence on the agrarian legislation of the Gracchi.

The appearance of the city of Rome itself is also changing. It becomes a huge city in terms of territory and population. It is believed that in the 2nd century. BC. it already had about half a million inhabitants. The population of Italy flocked to it in droves; in addition, many foreigners settled in Rome, mainly Greeks, Syrians, and Jews. Rome becomes a major international center, the capital of a great Mediterranean power. The city is being built with magnificent buildings. The forum loses its appearance as a peasant market, surrounded by warehouses and cattle stalls, and turns into a square of a large city, decorated with temples, basilicas, porticoes, arches, and sculptural sculptures. The streets are starting to be paved and the squares are being covered with stone slabs. Along with the luxurious quarters, where public buildings and rich private houses are located, a whole series of miserable quarters arises in Rome, in which the city plebs live and where miserable shacks alternate with multi-story ones apartment buildings cheap apartments that were built by enterprising businessmen. The very structure of life and way of life of the Roman wealthy classes changed. Every rich family developed the custom of keeping a huge number of slaves as domestic servants. The furnishings of the rooms and table settings become luxurious and pretentious. From the beginning of the 2nd century. Women's outfits made of expensive fabrics, fans made of peacock feathers, and fantastic ladies' hairstyles appear. The life of rich people includes luxurious feasts with invited guests, dancers, singers and harpists. At these feasts, expensive wines and foods were served, all kinds of foreign and exotic dishes; Entire fortunes were spent on organizing such feasts. It is not without reason that all Roman writers who describe this era mourn the loss of ancient Roman virtues, the oblivion of the customs of their ancestors, the hopeless corruption of morals and the decay of Roman society. One of the representatives of the Roman Stoa, Posidonius, even developed a whole theory of the decline of morals as the main reason for the future inevitable death of the Roman state. (13:49)

These were the most significant changes that occurred in the ideology of Roman society, as well as in the everyday life and private life of the Romans in the 3rd-2nd centuries. BC.

2 Sources of slavery

The main source of slavery in ancient times was always war. But in Rome, due to the peculiarities of its history, war as a source of general reproduction of slaves played a greater role than in the East and Greece.

The second source of slavery was debt. True, in relation to Roman citizens, debt slavery was virtually abolished by the law of Petelius and Papiraeus. But in the provinces the situation was different: provincials did not have the right to citizenship, and Roman moneylenders sold them into slavery in droves for debts. During preparations for the fight against the Cimbri and Teutones (around 105), Marius received from the Senate the right to invite allies from among the outlying states to his aid. Marius addressed this request to the king of Bithynia, Nicomedes. He replied that most of the Bithynians, taken away by Roman tax farmers, were languishing in slavery in the provinces. Nicomedes probably exaggerated the story somewhat, but, be that as it may, the Senate decreed that none of the freeborn allies should be enslaved. Based on this decree, the Sicilian praetor released more than 800 people within a few days. This fact, reported by Diodorus, vividly illustrates the state of affairs on the Roman periphery at the end of the 2nd century.

The third source of replenishment of the mass of slaves was piracy, which in the Roman era reached unprecedented proportions. In the last three centuries of the republic, on the sparsely populated coasts of the eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea - Illyria, Cilicia, Cyprus - pirates created entire states with fortresses and fleets. It happened that because of pirates, maritime trade was suspended, and in Rome the price of bread rose greatly due to the impossibility of transporting it from the provinces. The Roman government waged a stubborn fight against the pirates. For some time, military measures produced results, but as long as the slave system existed, it was impossible to completely eliminate piracy. On the one hand, a significant part of the pirates consisted of runaway slaves. It is no coincidence that after the suppression of major slave uprisings, piracy increased enormously. On the other hand, the slave system itself was partly fueled by maritime robbery, since pirates were large suppliers of live goods in slave markets.

The fourth source of slavery was the natural reproduction of slaves. The son of a slave became a slave, and it was beneficial for each master that his slaves had as many children as possible. Such slaves, born and raised in the home, were valued by slave owners as they were considered more obedient. Therefore, masters took various measures to encourage the birth rate of slaves, for example, exemption from work, emancipation, etc. (15;54)

However, it was impossible to solve the problem of the general reproduction of slaves in this way, since their birth rate was generally low due to the harsh regime, the lack of a legal family, the barracks lifestyle, the reluctance of slaves to have children, and so on. Roman slave owners even resorted to organizing special slave nurseries. Slaves were bred there for sale, and slave owners bought the labor they needed there in batches. One of the aspects of the reproduction of slaves was their training, improving their skills. Cato was an exemplary slave owner. He also trained young slaves, later selling them at a profit. Crassus, a major Roman rich man of the first half of the 1st century, was also involved in training slaves.

Along with these four main sources of slavery, there were several minor ones that were of little importance. Thus, a free person could be sold into slavery as punishment for certain crimes. The father could sell his son into slavery three times, and only after the third sale did the son leave the power of his father. However, in recent centuries the right of fathers to sell their children seems to have virtually disappeared. (21;43)

Slaves were usually acquired in two ways: either obtained directly from war booty, or bought on the market. The first method was practiced in the army. The commanders were almost uncontrollable managers of military spoils and had every opportunity to acquire any number of slaves for free. But ordinary soldiers could also profit from something. Thus, Caesar often gave his soldiers one slave per person.

However, the main source of private reproduction was the purchase of slaves on the market. Slave markets existed in all urban centers of the Roman Empire. In Rome itself, the market was located near the Temple of Castor. The most famous was the slave market at Delos, where, according to Strabo, sometimes up to 10 thousand workers were sold per day.

Slaves who were brought to the market were exhibited naked so that the buyer could clearly verify the good quality of the goods offered. They usually had distinctive markings: either white-painted legs or a woolen cap on the head. Prisoners of war brought out for sale had a wreath on their heads. The seller had to inform the buyer about all the shortcomings of the slave. Sometimes a plaque hung around the slave's neck, on which his tribal origin, age, etc. were indicated. The law provided that if, after the sale, hidden defects were discovered in the slave, the transaction was terminated. (26;71)

The prices of slaves in Rome were subject to very large fluctuations. Incredibly high prices, which were not even suspected before the Roman era, were determined by the development of luxury and non-productive costs. Huge sums of money were spent on beautiful dancers. Hundreds of thousands were paid for actors and representatives of other highly skilled professions.

Sharp drops in slave prices are observed during periods of major conquests. In 177, prices for Sardinian slaves fell so much that the saying appeared: “Cheap as sards.” In the 1st century, during the conquest of the Pontic kingdom, slaves were sold for 4 denarii per head, while the average market price for a slave was 300-500 denarii. (24;32)

2. SLAVES IN ANCIENT ROME

slavery rome stratification antique

2.1 Stratification of slaves

Consider the life of artisan slaves. Apparently, the labor of slave artisans, their own or hired, was used not so much in the house or estate of the owner, but in specially organized ones, was used not so much in the house or estate of the holyam na, but in specially organized workshops belonging to large owners who conducted the business through proxies, or to free artisans who worked together with their slaves.

Already in the last days of the republic, slave owners understood the need to attract economic interest to slave artisans, at least the most qualified ones. This is partly explained by the fact that the rich owners who owned the workshops did not want or were unable to manage them themselves and had to entrust this work to experienced and knowledgeable slaves, whose loyalty had to be ensured by appropriate conditions. Unlike relations in agriculture, a significant part of the slaves had to be interested. A slave-craftsman, who had a certain qualification, certainly had to make efforts to create those high-quality, and often highly artistic, things that the increasingly sophisticated taste of buyers demanded. It was impossible to force him to show all these qualities under pressure. Brute coercion managed to drive a slave into the field, into the mines, into the mill, but with threats of beatings and stocks it was impossible to force him to carve an elegant gem, paint a vessel, embroider a cloak with gold, or forge the finest surgical instruments. In order to instill in him a love for work, it was necessary to open up prospects that the rural worker did not have, to give him hope for freedom and prosperity, and to ensure greater independence.

Probably, slave artisans who had their own workshops and wealth were a minority, and most of them were completely dependent on the master or the owner of the workshop for whom the slaves worked for hire. But still, the stratification that emerged among the artisan slaves put them in a different position than the one in which the rural slaves found themselves.

Their living conditions were also different. A city slave, who worked in a workshop under certain conditions, could not be isolated either from other slaves, or from free hired workers, or in general from the free plebeians, most of whom consisted of the same artisans, small traders, and day laborers. Rural slaves did not participate in social and religious life. Urban slaves were members of various colleges, either including only slaves and freedmen, or of a mixed composition. (19;21)

Apparently, the rural and urban plebs had different attitudes towards slaves. For the rural plebs, slaves seemed to be an alien and even hostile element. On the contrary, the urban plebs did not disdain slaves and willingly accepted them into their organizations. This difference can be explained by a number of reasons. In rural areas, the spread of slavery deprived the free not only of land, but also of income: farm laborers were gradually replaced by slaves, and they did not want to hire free shepherds at all. The slave administration of the villas that supervised them could also cause discontent among the free workers. Finally, a certain psychological factor should be taken into account. Even the poorest peasant was proud of his status as a freeborn citizen and clung to those illusory rights (family name and tribal membership) that distinguished him from a slave. In rural areas, the number of libertines (freedmen) who joined the ranks of the peasants was small, which contributed to the preservation of the lines that separated free farmers and slaves. In the cities, conditions were different. Of course, here too there could have been competition between the labor of free and unfree artisans, but it was unlikely to be more intense than competition between free ones. In any case, it was not reflected in the sources. The urban plebs were constantly and very significantly replenished by libertines, which in itself moderated the difference between freeborn and unfreeborn citizens. Finally, the ruling classes, by their attitude towards artisans, themselves pushed them towards rapprochement with slaves. If in the previous century they treated wage earners with contempt, then in the last century of the republic they looked upon everyone engaged in handicraft work with disdain, as “rabble.” The following example is interesting: according to Seneca, Posidonius taught that the sages ruled in the Golden Age and that they invented the arts and crafts necessary in everyday life: agriculture, construction, weaving, metallurgy, grain grinding, bread baking. Seneca attacks Posidonius' theory with unusual vehemence. According to him, he degrades wisdom who ascribes to it an interest in low and unworthy activities. It was impossible, exclaims Opeka, for anyone with a great and exalted soul to invent a hammer, pincers and other iron tools, and in general one should look for it by bending the body and looking at the ground. And in our time, he says, something is constantly being invented: mirrors, shiny tiles embedded in the walls of baths, pipes that heat them, light and elegant supports for porticos, a way to blow the finest glass products, shorthand and much more, but all these are inventions the most despicable slaves, and there is no doubt that they made such discoveries in ancient times.

The attitude towards the craft of Posidonius and Seneca is sharply different. For the latter, craft is the lot of a slave, and therefore unworthy of a sage. If, he says, Democritus made the inventions attributed to him, it was not as a sage, but in spite of the fact that he was a sage. (17;84)

Seneca wrote at the time of the highest flowering of Italian crafts, when the labor of slaves and freedmen in this branch of production far left behind the labor of the free. But Cicero, a younger contemporary and student of Posidonius, is more likely to side with Seneca on this issue, although he is less categorical. He recognizes agriculture as a noble and worthy occupation for a free person. He considers the position of wage earners to be the lowest. But he also classifies the professions of all artisans as low, because a noble person may have nothing in common with the workshop. Only medicine or architecture can be considered respectable by those who are suited to their class. Cicero's reasoning, which occupies a certain middle position between the views of Posidonius and Seneca, shows that contempt for artisans and craft labor as the lot of slaves in his time had already taken shape, although it had not yet reached its culmination point. When Cicero speaks about artisans not in theoretical, but in practical terms, he treats them as restless, dangerous, close to slaves, the scum of the city.

With the development of crafts, conditioned by the growth of commodity-money relations, and the increase in the proportion of slave labor among slave artisans, a rather intensive differentiation begins. There is a layer of slaves who became owners of the means of production, and slaves-vicars (labor). Over time, many of them became wealthy freedmen, but even while they were still slaves, their position was closer to the free owners of craft workshops based on the labor of slaves than to ordinary slaves. (13;54)

The situation of slaves who worked in the mines was completely different. The bulk of the miners were concentrated in the provinces, primarily in Spain, but a certain number of slaves were also employed in Italy. According to Pliny the Elder, an ancient Senate decree forbade the development of the mines of Italy, despite their wealth; the Censorial Law on the gold mines in the land of Vercellus forbade the publicans to employ more than five thousand people. Most likely, we can assume that the government was afraid of concentrating large masses of slaves in one place in Italy, especially slave miners, whose fate was the most terrible, and therefore the readiness to rebel was greatest. According to Diodorus, the workers of the mines bring incredible profits to their masters, but are quickly exhausted and die due to the exceptional difficulties they experience working underground under the blows of their overseers. According to Strabo, slaves sold by their masters as punishment were usually used to work in the mines. Free plebeians were exiled to the mines for serious crimes. Apparently, prisoners who deserved the special disfavor of the winner also ended up there.

The intelligentsia slaves, who were classified as “urban families” and served the personal needs of their masters, did not constitute a special group in terms of their place in production. But still, they should be singled out in a special category, since from a social point of view, household servants, which formed the main core of “urban families” during the period of the last republic, as well as the early empire, played a very large role, especially in the homes of persons of any kind prominent by origin, wealth, position in the state.

According to Roman authors, the “ancestors”, renowned for their modesty and simple life, were content with a small number of servants. Pliny the Elder's reasoning about the happy life of the ancients, who each had one Marznpora or Lucipora, is known. According to him, before the war with Perseus (171 - 167 BC), the Romans did not have bakeries or cooks among their slaves, who were hired in the market when needed. Cato the Elder went to Spain with only three slaves. These figures to some extent reflect the fact that back in the 2nd century. BC. the number of servants was relatively small. However, even then they were already in a special position. Slave servants allow themselves various entertainments: they visit barbers, where, as is known, the Romans exchanged holy news and gossip, participate in the ball game beloved by young men, go to the theater and taverns.

It is possible that in the rich houses of that time there were not as few servants as later panegyrists of the “morals of the ancestors” tried to imagine. In a comedy that lived in the 3rd century. BC. The singing of the poor man, who serves himself at meals, is contrasted with someone whose table is surrounded by numerous slaves during the meal. Polybius mentions a large number of male and female slaves who accompanied the wife of Scipio Africanus during the festivities. Already at that time, the fashion for expensive house slaves began to penetrate into everyday life, as can be seen from Catonan’s complaints of wasteful people who paid according to their talent for a beautiful slave. The luxury tax he introduced during his censorship provided, in particular, for payments for slaves under 20 years of age purchased for more than 10 thousand asses (1000 denarii), and this tax affected many and significantly replenished the treasury. According to Livy, the troops returning from the East after the war with Ligiochos began to use luxurious clothes, utensils, and meals, and then “cooks, who were considered by the ancients to be the lowest of slaves both in cost and in use, began to be highly valued, and then “What used to be reserved for servants has become an art.”

Slave servants, just like artisans, had a peculium. In both Plautus and Terence, slaves complain about masters who extort gifts from them for any reason: on the occasion of a birthday, the birth of children, the coming of age of a son, etc. Consequently, the master did not take away the peculium from the slave, although he had every right to do so, but only, under various pretexts, demanded that the slave give him part of his modest property. In Plautus, every “efficient”, “good” house slave boasts that he has a peculium, his most important difference from the “worthless” slave. (2;18)

The rapid growth in the number of "city surnames" mainly falls at the end of the 2nd and 1st centuries. BC, when luxury takes on catastrophic proportions. In Cicero's time, a large and well-chosen "surname" was considered a necessary sign of a "respectable" house.

Exposing Piso’s vices, Cicero, among other things, says: “He has nothing elegant, nothing refined... he is served by unkempt slaves, some of them even old men; he has the same slave and cook and gatekeeper, there is no baker in the house, no cellar, his bread and wine come from a petty merchant and innkeeper.” We do not know what the number of Yurod families of wealthy people was.

Urban families included another category of slave-educated people, the slave intelligentsia. She appeared quite early. From time immemorial actors have been slaves. Slaves of actors and musicians even in the 2nd century. BC. not only noble Romans had, but also ordinary residents of Italian cities. The custom of having slave teachers also began early. Cato had an educated slave teacher. Mari did not want to study Greek literature, citing the fact that it was taught by slaves.

In the 1st century BC. educated slaves became an indispensable part of the family. Cicero's friend and publisher Atticus had numerous scribes, readers, and librarians. Cicero mentions his slaves Gilarius, the calculator, reader and biliotskar Dionysius, Azollonius - the former slave of Crassus, “a learned man, devoted to the sciences from childhood.”

Among the slaves were stenographers, for example the famous Tyrone, a slave, then a freedman of Cicero, and doctors. Some of these educated slaves, later freedmen, became famous writers, scientists, and rhetoricians. (11;109)

In the last centuries of the Roman Republic, the intelligentsia, born from slaves, was very numerous, and its contribution to the creation of Roman culture was enormous. The slave origins of such famous comedians as Terence and Caecilius Statius are well known. The slave was one of the most popular mimographers, Publilius Sir, who left far behind other mime authors at the games organized by Caesar for the people. Pliny the Elder mentions the freedman Pompey Lipaeus, who was the first in Rome to write a work about beneficial properties plants, Manilius Antiochus, founder of Roman astrology, brought to Rome and sold at the same time as the grammarian who became the teacher of Brutus and Cassius. Almost all the grammarians and some of the rhetoricians whose biographies Suetonius gives came from slaves. According to him, the study of grammar in Rome began after the third Punic War. It developed quickly, and soon 20 famous schools arose in Rome. The first person to achieve fame by teaching grammar was the freedman Sepius Niknor Pot. He also wrote grammatical comments. JI. Ataeus Philologus, a freedman of one of the jurists, was in close friendship with Sallust, and then with Asinius Pollio. Suetonius reports that when both of them decided to write historical works, The philologist taught Sallust how to choose the most necessary from Roman deeds, I Asinius Pollio taught the basics of the art of writing, He himself also wrote on historical topics. The famous grammarian Verrius Flaccus, who wrote a number of books on various topics, was also a freedman. He became so famous for his teaching method that Augustus appointed him teacher to his grandchildren. The famous Julius Hyginus, the author of various works on grammar, geography, history, etc., was a slave of Caesar, who was then freed by Augustus, who made him caretaker of the Palatine Library. Hyginus was friends with Ovid. Orator L. Voltacilius Pilut, being a slave, sat chained at the entrance to his master's house. Then, for his talents and knowledge of literature, he was released into the field and helped his patron, who acted as a prosecutor in court. He taught rhetoric to Pompey and described the deeds of his father in many books.

Educated slaves, as a rule, occupied a special position in the family. Judging by Cicero, the masters made a sharp distinction between simple and educated slaves. The owners encouraged capable slaves in every possible way, trying to give them an education, were proud of them and looked for strong patrons for them. This is probably explained not so much by humanity as by vanity, mainly by the rapidly growing need for mental workers generated by the development of culture and the complexity of the economy, a need that could not yet be satisfied at the expense of the free. Under the empire, when a sufficiently large intelligentsia is created from free-born Romans and Romanized provincials, the role of the intelligentsia who came from a slave environment declines. (8;248)

Rural slaves occupied the lowest place among the slave population. Already in Plautus, there is usually a contrast between the rude hard worker and the rural slave and the clever, crafty city slave who has picked up all sorts of information and some polish.

The futility of the position of an ordinary rural rowan and, accordingly, his disinterest in the results of labor, determined the crude and naked system of forcing him to work, as well as the desire of the masters to completely suppress such a slave as a person, to deprive him of the opportunity and ability to think about anything other than food and sleep.

The 15 rural estates excavated near Pompeii invariably contain rooms for slaves. They are small (6-8-9 m). It’s easy to find them in a complex of buildings: bare walls, a simple brick floor, usually not even filled with mortar that would make it even and smooth. On a wall, roughly plastered, or even without plaster at all, sometimes a well-plastered square 1 m in size is a kind of notebook on which the slave scratches out some of his notes with a nail. The utensils in these closets, judging by the remains found, are poor: shards of cheap dishes, pieces of a wooden trestle bed. Judging by the inventory of the olive store compiled by Cato, eleven slaves had at their disposal 4 beds with belt nets and 3 simple trestle beds.

The common room intended for the entire “rural family” (as the slaves of the estate were called) was the “village kitchen”, where the slaves could warm up and relax; This is where food was prepared, and this is also where the slaves dined. On long winter evenings and in the mornings until dawn, they work right away: they twist ropes, weave baskets, and trim stakes. Almost all the estates found near Pompeii have such kitchens with an oven for baking bread and a hearth. The owner was interested in ensuring that the slave did not spend the entire winter night sleeping, and arranged this only warm room for the slave half. (5;170) During the Republic, many rich and noble people formed gladiatorial troops from their slaves. Future gladiators were trained in special “gladiator schools.” Capua was a favorite location for these schools. This is where the school was located, from which in 74 BC. 200 slaves fled with Spartacus as their leader. You could sell your gladiators or rent them out to someone who organized the games. Atticus, a friend of Cicero, a businessman who unmistakably sensed where he could make money, once bought a well-trained detachment. Cicero wrote to him that if he hired out these gladiators, he would get his money back after just two performances. In addition, gladiators were a good personal ocher during the terrible time of the end of the republic. Those who aspired to power kept them precisely for this purpose: Sulla, Caesar, and Catiline had them.

In addition to these people who stood high on the social ladder, there was a whole category of people for whom buying, resale, and sometimes training gladiators was their profession. They were called lapists (the name comes from the same root as lanius - butcher). Atticus and the people of his circle did not disgrace commercial transactions with gladiators, but the lanista was considered a tainted person, and his occupation was vile. By the very nature of his activity, he had to deal not only with official slave traders, but also with pirates and robbers who grabbed travelers along the roads and sold them as their slaves. In this dark world, the lanista was his own man, which further increased the disgust for him and her activities.

Lanists were of two categories: sedentary and wandering. The first acquired premises and set up an office for selling and hiring gladiators. Wandering lanistas moved with their gladiators from city to city, arranging games wherever and whenever necessary, and if luck smiled on them, they gradually amassed capital with the expectation of moving to the position of a settled lanista. (18;130) The gladiator's craft was despicable. A free person who voluntarily became a gladiator found himself in the position of almost a slave. Juvenal considers the gladiatorial school the last stage of human decline. A free man who became a gladiator forever lost his civic dignity, falling into the category of “dishonored.” Whatever wealth later befalls him, he will never enter the class of horsemen, he will never become a municipal magistrate. He cannot act as a defense attorney or witness in court. He is not always given a decent burial. But these outcasts are spoken of with admiration in the humble workshops of artisans and in the mansions of senators. Horace and Maecenas discuss the merits of their two opponents. Poets write poems about gladiators, artists and craftsmen immortalize episodes from their lives in their creations, women of the aristocratic circle fall in love with them, sons of noble fathers take fencing lessons from them. It is enough to look at volumes of inscriptions from Pompeii alone to be convinced of the lively interest these people arouse in themselves: they know their names, their careers, their fights are painted on the walls.

Gladiatorial fights were usually combined with baiting of animals. The first “lion and panther hunt” was organized in 186 BC. In 58 BC. one of the aediles “brought out” 150 “African animals”, i.e. panthers and leopards. At the same time, the Romans saw hippos and crocodiles for the first time; 5 of them were delivered and a pool was dug especially for them. Augustus, among those of his deeds that he considered necessary to immortalize in a long inscription, mentions that he organized animal persecution 26 times and 3,500 animals were killed. The end to animal persecution came only in the 6th century AD.

In addition to overseas animals, for hunting in amphitheaters he acquired European animals and his own, Italian bears, wild boars, and bulls. Sometimes the hunter's task was only to kill the angry animal. But already under Caesar, the “Thessalian hunt” entered the customs of the amphitheater: the hunter rode on a horse next to the bull, grabbed it by the horn and twisted its neck. This required both dexterity and exorbitant strength. Under Claudius, another method came into fashion: riders drove bulls around the arena until they were exhausted; then the rider jumped onto the bull, grabbed him by the horns and, leaning his whole body on his head, threw him to the ground. (20;52)

The hunter is sometimes required to perform acrobatic tricks. He goes out with a pole in his hands one on one against the beast, and at that moment when he, having crouched to the ground, is ready to rush at the man, with the help of the pole he makes a huge leap, flying over the beast, gets to his feet and runs away. Sometimes a kind of turntable was placed in the arena: four wide doors with strong bars inserted into them were hung on a pole. The doors revolved around a post, and the hunter, having teased the beast, hid behind the door, looking through the bars, pushed a pinwheel in front of him, ran out of one door and hid behind another, “fluttering,” as an eyewitness put it, “between lion claws and teeth.”

A slave who has gained legal freedom continues to be dependent on his patron in many respects.

Once upon a time, writes the lawyer Guy, a freedman was allowed to circumvent his patron in his will with impunity. Then this “injustice” was corrected: patrons were excluded from inheritance only if the freedman had children of his own and bequeathed his property to them. But in all other cases, even if the freedman was beaten by such legal heirs as his wife, adopted children, or daughter-in-law, the patron inherited. The property of the deceased freedwoman, who was considered to be in the patron's care, passed entirely to him; She could not have any other heirs. The patrons made some claims to the property of the Libertines during their lifetime. But we don’t know what these claims were.

In a number of cases, a freed slave swore an oath to work for a certain number of days in favor of the patron. The demands of the patrons gradually increased so much that the praetors were forced to intervene, taking upon themselves the judgment of the labor due from the freedmen. (9;193)

What were the libertines of the Republican era? From the point of view of their contemporaries, they were a special class. This is what Cicero called them, although in later comments on the Verrines there is doubt whether, when speaking about libertines, it is possible to use a term that applies only to noble people. This doubt, apparently, arose only at a later time. Tacitus, like Cicero, calls freedmen a class. Approaching the issue with the criteria familiar to us, they can be considered an estate only very conditionally, since one of the important signs of an estate is hereditary affiliation, while the children of freedmen were already considered freeborn citizens. On the other hand, some signs of class, i.e. a legally defined set of rights and restrictions on rights were inherent in the category of libertines. They were considered Roman citizens with the right to vote, first in those tribes to which their patron was assigned and to which they were assigned, and subsequently only in four city tribes. They were deprived of the right to hold elective government positions and serve in the army, except in cases where extreme need for soldiers forced this rule to be violated. Finally, the freedmen remained dependent on their patrons and were obliged to perform a number of duties. These are the common features that unite all libertines. But in its composition this class was very variegated, perhaps more variegated than any other class group in Roman society. To a large extent, the position of a freedman was determined by his position in slavery.

From literary and epigraphic sources we can learn little about the simple slaves who were freed. They were for the most part too poor to leave inscriptions, and the authors were not very interested in them. Such slaves could receive freedom as a reward for some merits to the master, a motive common in comedies, where freedom is the cherished dream of every slave. (1:27) However, the slave, who received freedom and did not possess the peculium, which the master left him when he was released, was forced to think about his future fate. One of Plavtov’s slaves tells his owner that he is not so eager for freedom, since while he is a slave, he is under the responsibility of the master, and when he is free, he will have to live at his own peril and risk. This joke contains a grain of truth.

As Epictetus later wrote, the slave prays for freedom and thinks that, having received it, he will become happy. Then he is released and, in order not to die of hunger, he must either become someone’s hanger-on, or get hired and endure slavery even more severe than the previous one. According to the commentator Terence, the patron's duty was not to abandon, but to feed the freedmen who became his clients. It is unlikely, however, that the number of freedmen who lived solely at the expense of the patron’s favors was large.

2 Treatment of slaves

The army of slaves brought truly enormous income to the Roman slave owners, but at the same time it was fraught with no less danger to the life and health of the owners. The greater the influx of slaves into the country, the stronger the fear of them became. Few were able to handle slaves as calmly and skillfully as Cato did; the majority fluctuated between weakness and cruelty. The weak-willed master, with gentle treatment, gave the slaves what he feared more than anything else in the world - strength and power. It is not surprising, therefore, that most slave owners tried to keep their “two-legged cattle” in line through cruel punishments.

The slave had to pay for the slightest dissatisfaction of the owner. The sentence, which was not subject to any appeal, was passed by the angry slave owner himself, and no one and nothing could stop him from even torturing the slave to death. (7;21)

Common punishments included flogging with various “instruments”, which was carried out by a domestic executor. Depending on the severity of the punishment, it could be a hollow stick, a leather whip or a whip with knots, or even barbed wire. The victims were also given leg, hand and neck shackles (leg shackles with remains of bones embedded in them were discovered during excavations in Chieti). The weight of the chains that the unfortunate were forced to wear reached ten pounds.

For lighter offenses, such as petty theft, the slave was put on a “furka” - a fork-shaped block in which the criminal’s neck was enclosed, and his hands were tied to the ends. In this form, he had to walk around the neighborhood and loudly talk about his guilt, which was considered a great shame.

Common punishments included sale outside the country, as well as imprisonment in a rural ergastul, most often underground, where the outcasts were used for hard labor, and they were often put in shackles, which was supposed to prevent escape. It was no easier for the slaves who ended up in the mills, for there they had to turn the millstones. Here special collars were put on the necks of the unfortunate people so that they could not reach the flour with their mouths.

Particularly difficult was the fate of slaves who ended up doing hard labor in quarries and mines, revered in all countries, including Egypt, for “death in installments.” According to Diodorus, miners brought incredibly high incomes to their masters, but due to the extremely difficult daily norms, their strength was quickly exhausted. The cause of death could be very difficult working conditions underground, poor treatment, and constant kicking by supervisors.

And no limits could limit the owner’s personal rage if it did break out. Slaps on the head and punches were the most harmless and widespread. Even noble ladies were not shy in their choice of means. They not only handed out slaps right and left, but sometimes they were not averse to pricking a topless maid with a long needle just because she awkwardly pulled her hair while combing her mistress’s hair. (4;70)

The prevalence of such bullying can be judged by the fact that Emperor Augustus himself, a strict master of his slaves, once in anger ordered his manager to be nailed to the ship's mast, and also to break the leg of one of his secretaries who sold the master's letter. Emperor Hadrian (117-138) gouged out a slave's eye with a stylus.

The rich Roman horseman, himself the son of a freedman, treated the slaves even more monstrously. Publius Vedius Pollio, who for the slightest offense threw his slaves to be eaten by moray eels in his fish tank. Such antics were condemned even by his friend Emperor Augustus, who, however, did not want to interfere with the rights of the slave owner.

The information that has come down to us about such treatment of slaves is fragmentary and random, and the reader can consider them as cases of exceptional cruelty.

However, ordinary punishments were by no means mild. The slave owner could apply any measures to the slave, including attempts and mutilation of members, cutting off his arms or legs, breaking his bones. Having decided to use a young slave as a eunuch, the master could castrate him. Other unfortunates had their tongues pulled out.

There were no limits to torture and punishment, and slave owners thoughtlessly used this entire terrible arsenal. The decision to sell a slave to a gladiator school and a slave to a brothel was considered a fairly mild punishment.

Torture was also used in the investigation of crimes in which slaves were involved, because the Romans believed that a slave could only tell the truth under torture. One suspect could be left hanging on a cross overnight, the body of another would be stretched on a special machine so that his limbs would pop out of their joints (the wooden goats to which the alleged criminal was tied were equipped with weights and devices for twisting the limbs for this purpose). A wooden torture machine in the shape of a horse was often used, as well as various types of torture using fire. (8;100)

CONCLUSION

Having traced the development of the economy of Ancient Rome, and the role of classical slavery in its fate, we can draw the following conclusions:

The development of the slave economy led to the development of trade and money to such an extent that it began to act destructively on the system of ancient civil communities, its individual structures and systems. The development of communities is accelerating, the master's power over slaves is limited by the state, personal relations between master and slave take on a material appearance.

The rise of classical slavery meant the widespread introduction into the social body of new, more rigid relations of domination and subordination.

These relations were regulated not so much economically as by political means, accelerating the process of development of a large state apparatus.

Slaves become the property of the owner and at the same time the main productive force, the strength of Roman society.

I showed in my work that some slave artisans had their own property, were members of colleges, participated in public life, and were wealthy freedmen. Rural slaves and slaves in mines lived differently.

Servant slaves also lived in privileged conditions, having their own pickles, giving gifts to their masters.

Many were educated slaves. The contribution of slave intellectuals to the culture of Rome is enormous. This is Tyrone, Cicero, Verrius Flaccus.

A unique feature of Rome were the gladiator slaves. This craft was considered despicable, cruel, leading to death.

Among the slaves there are also freedmen who have received legal freedom, but are economically dependent on the patron.

Thus, it can be seen that these facts confirm the hypothesis that non-economic methods were intertwined with economic ones, forming their limited unity. A huge army of slaves needed state regulation of relations with their patron. This was also a feature of slavery in Rome.

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p.246

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Without the slave, his labor and skill, life in ancient Italy would have come to a standstill. The slave works in agriculture and in craft workshops, he is an actor and gladiator, a teacher, a doctor, the master's secretary and his assistant in literary and scientific work. As varied as these occupations are, so are the lifestyles and lives of these people; It would be a mistake to represent the slave masses as something united and uniform. But what do we know about this way of life and this life?

We are least aware of the life of a slave artisan. Archaeological finds, frescoes, images on monuments and sarcophagi introduced us to the structure of various workshops and the techniques of various crafts. But neither these finds nor the inscriptions say anything about the life of slave artisans. The organization of work in workshops, their management, the relationship between slave and free labor, the management of all production - all these issues require special development and go beyond the scope of real work.

We are better informed about the life of agricultural slaves (the common name for them was familia rustica); Cato, Varro, and Columella wrote about them. The life of these slaves is spent in tireless work; they have no real holidays; on holidays they perform only lighter work (Cat. 2.4; 138; Col., II.21). “When it rains, look for something you can do. Clean things up so they don't sit idly by. Realize that if nothing is done, the expense will not be any less” (Cat. 39.2). Let the slave work until he drops, let him work to the point of exhaustion when a person dreams of one thing: to lie down and fall asleep. “A slave must either work or sleep” (Plut. Cato mai, p. 247 29); a sleeping slave is not scary. And two centuries later, Columella orders the fork to go out with the slaves into the field at dawn, return to the estate when it gets dark, and make sure that everyone completes the lesson assigned to him (Col. XI. 1. 14-17; 25).

The food and clothing of slaves have already been discussed. What was their housing like?

Among the rooms that the contractor must build in the estate, Cato mentions “rooms for slaves” (14.2). Columella also speaks about them, advising them to be located in that part of the estate that is flooded with sun in winter and in the shade in summer (I. 6. 3). Rural estates excavated near Pompeii invariably contain rooms for slaves; they are small (6-8-9 m2); There were probably two, or maybe three, people living in them. It is easy to find them in a complex of buildings: bare walls without any painting, a simple brick floor, usually not even filled with mortar that would make it even and smooth. On a wall, roughly plastered, or even without plaster at all, there is sometimes a well-plastered square 1 m2 in size: this is a kind of notebook on which the slave scratches out some of his notes with a nail.

The utensils in these closets, judging by the remains found, are very poor: shards of cheap dishes, pieces of a wooden trestle bed. Judging by the inventory of the olive farm compiled by Cato (10.4), his 11 slaves had at their disposal 4 beds with belt nets and 3 simple trestle beds. It’s hard to say how 11 people were accommodated in 7 beds; one thing is clear: a slave does not always have such basic convenience as a separate bed.

The common room intended for the entire “rural family” was the “village kitchen”, where slaves could warm up and relax; food was prepared here and slaves dined here (Var. I. 13. 1-2; Col. I. 6. 3). On long winter evenings and in the mornings until dawn, they immediately work: they twist ropes, weave baskets and beehives (they were sometimes made from twigs), trim stakes, make handles for household tools (Col. XI. 2. 90-92). Almost all the estates found near Pompeii have such a kitchen with an oven for baking bread and a fireplace. The owner was, of course, interested in ensuring that the slave did not spend the entire winter night sleeping, and therefore arranged this only warm room in the estate (not counting the master's half), where the slaves, having warmed up, worked and were p.248 under supervision (brazier , which heated the owner’s rooms, the slaves did not have them in their closets).

In addition to the “untied slaves,” that is, those who walked without chains and lived in their own little rooms, there were also chained ones in the estate. At Cato they formed a permanent contingent (56); Columella writes that the vineyard workers usually work as wells (I. 9. 4). A special room has been built for them - an ergastul: this is a deep basement with many narrow windows, pierced so high that they cannot be reached with your hand; They also imprisoned guilty slaves there. Columella recommended making sure that this basement was as healthy as possible (I. 6. 3): apparently, this condition was not always remembered.

Vilik occupied a special position among agricultural slaves. As the owner, busy with public service and various city affairs, paid less and less attention to his land, the vilik became the real owner of the estate and, of course, used his position to his advantage. Due to his position, he enjoyed a number of legal advantages. One of the heroes of Plautus, explaining why he wants to marry his wife’s servant to a fork, says: “...she will have firewood, and hot water, and food, and clothing” (Casina, 255-256); Horace's groom envies the fork, who manages the firewood, livestock, and vegetable garden (epist. I. 14. 41-42). Both his food and his accommodation were, of course, better than those of other slaves. And besides, Vilik knew how to find other sources of income: resale of livestock, concealment of seeds intended for sowing. All this, of course, was strictly prohibited, but Vilik was excellent at circumventing all prohibitions.

As for the “urban family” (familia urbana), here people of mental work occupied a position different from that of a footman or a cook. A certain mental and cultural level raised the slave in the eyes of the owner, and if this slave became a close person for him, then his life became completely different from the life of other slaves (Tiro, Cicero’s secretary and friend of his entire family; his doctor Alexion; Alexius, right hand of Atticus, Melissus, Maecenas's slave, who became his beloved friend). These intelligent people in the slave “family” constituted, of course, a small group, although generally in the 3rd and 2nd centuries. BC e. the number of household servants was small. Mark Antony, consular, p.249 had only eight slaves; Carbon, a rich man, has one less. Manius Curius (victor of Pyrrhus) was followed on the campaign by two grooms. Cato said that when he went to Spain as proconsul, he took three slaves with him (Apul. Apol. 17). In the 1st century n. e. There was no such simplicity in everyday life anymore. Milo and Clodius surrounded themselves with a retinue of armed slaves; when their tragic meeting took place, Clodius was accompanied by 30 slaves, and Milo was traveling with a large detachment of them (Ascon, arg. pro Mil., p. 32, Or.). Horace is served by three slaves at the table, on which there is cheap earthenware and pancakes, peas and leeks are served for lunch (sat. I. 6. 115-118). Martial, who tirelessly repeated that he was a poor man, had a fork and a dispensator, which means that in his Nomentan estate there were slaves, whom the fork disposed of, and there was a household, the payment part of which was carried out by the dispenser. In a rich house there were slaves of different categories: a gatekeeper, who in the old days sat on a chain; footmen - “sleepers” - cubicularii, who served the owner personally and sometimes enjoyed weight; Seneca at least speaks of “the anger and pride (supercilium) of the footman” (de const, sap. 14.1); lecticians who carried stretchers; a nomenclator who suggested to the owner the names of the people he needed; pedisequus, who accompanied the owner to dinner, on a visit and stood behind him; “butler” (atriensis), housekeeper, cook, baker, slaves, so to speak, without a specialty, who cleaned the premises, served as errands, etc. It was possible to acquire your own barber, your own doctor, your own home chapel.

Not having a single slave was a sign of extreme poverty (Mart. XI. 32); even the poor man Simil (Ps. Verg. Moretum) had a slave. People who were rich and not constrained by housing acquired slaves only in order to give themselves pomp and splendor. Livy wrote that “foreign luxury came to Rome with the army returning from Asia” (XXXIX. 6), and among the items of this luxury he named artists playing various stringed instruments and actors. Choirs of house singers (symphoniaci) should also be included among them; Seneca argued: “There are now more singers at our feasts than there once were spectators in the theaters.” Some slaves were in charge of cleaning the rooms, others were in charge of the owner's wardrobe, and others were in charge of his library. The mistress had her own servants, p.250 who dressed her, tidied up her hair, looked after her jewelry. Both in our aristocratic society of the 18th century, and in the Roman high society of the 1st century. n. e. love for fools and dwarfs was widespread. They paid a lot of money for them. Martial was playfully indignant that he paid 20 thousand for the fool, but he turned out to be a rational being (VIII. 13). Seneca called his wife’s fool “a burden inherited.” He continues: “I personally am disgusted by these degenerates; if I want to have fun at stupidity, then I don’t have to go far: I laugh at myself” (epist. 50.2). Next to the fools stood dwarfs and dwarfs; “for these ugly, in some way sinister figures, others pay more than for those who have an ordinary dignified appearance” (Gai. II. 5. 11). Propertius talks about the pleasure that such a freak gave to the audience, dancing to the sound of a tambourine (V. 8. 41-42).

Crowded servants in rich houses, even with a cruel owner, lived in relative ease: there was little work. The crowd of slaves, rushing into the master's quarters early in the morning with rags, sponges and brooms, having finished cleaning, was free; the barber, having cut and shaved the owner and his adult sons, could continue to dispose of himself as he wished; the reader was busy for some time at lunch, and sometimes also in the morning, until the owner came out to the assembled clients. In poor houses, slaves were more busy, but even then not to capacity, as far as one can judge from Horace’s household. Dove and his comrades were supposed to feel excellent at the time when the owner indulged in his favorite solitary walks or went to “an estate that returned him to himself” (epist. I. 14. 1). Seneca called urban slaves idlers (de ira, III. 29. 1) and contrasted them with rural slaves. A slave who was part of the familia urbana had an incomparably easier life than a slave employed in agriculture, and it was not without reason that Horace threatened Davout with sending him to the Sabine estate for his bold speeches (sat. II. 7. 119). The slave on the estate worked from dawn to dusk and saw no real rest; The city dwellers often led a semi-idle existence. “They are a carefree, sleepy people,” Columella writes, strongly advising the owner not to fork a slave from a “city family”: “they are accustomed to idleness, p.251 walks on the Campus Martius, to the circus, theaters, gambling, taverns and indecent houses" (I. 8. 2; cf. Hor. epist. I. 14; 19-26). This crowd, poisoned by idleness and city life, usually dissatisfied and having reason to be dissatisfied, could not but inspire fear (Tac. ann. XIV. 44).

The main supplier of slaves to the Italian market was war, and the period of great wars of conquest and territorial expansion of Rome was precisely the time when the number of slaves, constantly replenished, reached large proportions. It is enough to give a few figures: over a period of four years (205-201 BC), Scipio sent more than 20 thousand prisoners of war to Sicily from Africa for sale (Liv. XXIX. 29. 3); in 176 BC e. after the suppression of the Sardinian uprising, about 80 thousand were killed and captured (Liv. XLI. 28.8); in 167 BC e. by order of the Senate, one hundred and fifty thousand were sold from seventy cities of Epirus (Polyb. XXX. 15; Liv. XLV. 34. 5-6). T. Frank (Economic Survey, 1. 188) believes that during the period from 200 to 150 BC. e. the number of prisoners of war who ended up in Italy reached 250 thousand. To this number we must add the by no means small number of people kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery (Roman tax collectors also did the same thing). The slave market was replenished at the beginning of the 1st century. BC e. and the sale of children, which the inhabitants of Asia Minor had to resort to in order to somehow cope with the payment of taxes established in 85-84 BC. e. Sulla (Plut. Lucul. 20). A large number of prisoners of war resulted from Caesar's war in Gaul: approximately 150 thousand people, 53 thousand were sold from the Aeduatuci tribe (b. g. II. 33), the entire Veneti tribe (b. g. III. 16); after the siege of Alesia, each soldier received a prisoner (b. g. VII. 89).

The situation changed dramatically under the empire, when major wars ceased and piracy was eliminated. Selling large numbers of prisoners in bulk became a rare event. In 25 BC. e. Augustus sold the entire Salass tribe into slavery: 44 thousand people (Suet. Aug. 21; Dio Cass. LIII. 25); after the capture of Jerusalem and the end of the Jewish War, 97 thousand people were taken captive, most of whom were sold (Flav. c. I. VI. 9. 3). Now they sell mainly slaves born at home (vernae), their own children, abandoned and picked up children, p.252 condemned to slavery by the court. Sometimes neighboring barbarian tribes brought slaves: Dacians, Sarmatians, Germans.

The order to sell prisoners was given by the military commander. It was in his power to kill them, leave them as state slaves, distribute them, at least in part, to soldiers, as Caesar did after the capture of Alesia, or sell them at auction. The sale could take place either near the place where the prisoners were taken (Augustus sold the Salassi in Eporedia), or in Rome. Prisoners were sold with wreaths placed on their heads, hence the expression: Sub corona vendere; the sale was in charge of the quaestor, and the proceeds usually went to the state treasury.

Under the empire, the slave trade was carried out primarily by private individuals; one such mango, Toranius, was especially famous in the time of Augustus (Suet. Aug. 69.1; Pl. VII.56); This occupation was considered despicable, but apparently gave a good income.

The slave market was located near the Temple of Castor; people were sold at auction, and the herald (praeco) called out the virtues of those being sold, accompanying his speech with jokes and jokes common among people of this profession (Mart. VI. 66). The slaves stood on a rotating platform (catasta) or on a high stone (hence the expression: “de lapide comparari; de lapide emere - buy from a stone”). Slaves brought from foreign lands had their feet smeared with chalk - “this is what people saw at the cataste of Chrysogonus” (Sulla’s favorite, who enjoyed great influence under him - Pl. XXXV. 199). The buyer ordered the slave to undress, examined him from all sides, felt his muscles, forced him to jump down to see how dexterous and agile he was. Beautiful young slaves were “kept in secret catastes”: they were hidden from the eyes of the crowd in the back of the shops of Caesar’s Bazaar (Saepta Iulia) (Mart, IX. 59. 3-6). The sale was supervised by the curule aediles; there was their special decree “on the sale of slaves”; the seller had to hang a sign (titulus) on the slave’s neck and indicate in it whether the slave was sick with any disease, whether he had a physical defect that interfered with his work, whether he was guilty of any crime, whether he was a thief or prone to to flight (Gell. IV. 2; Cic. de off. III. 17). Slave traders were considered first-class deceivers and, presumably, were excellent at hiding the illnesses of those they sold. Rufus from Ephesus, a physician and contemporary of Trajan, in his treatise “On the Purchase of Slaves p.253” gave advice on how to detect those hidden diseases that the seller kept silent about in the hope that the buyer would not notice anything. The sign also indicated the nationality of the slave: “we buy more expensive than the slave who belongs to the best people” (Var. I. 1. IX. 93); “...the nationality of a slave usually either attracts a buyer or repels him” (Dig. 21.1; 31.21). The Gauls were considered excellent shepherds, especially for horse herds (Var. r. r. II. 10. 3); tall, hefty Cappadocians were bought to carry stretchers to rich houses (Mart. VI. 77. 4); the Dacians were suitable as shepherds (March. VII. 80. 12); doctors, readers, teachers, and generally educated slaves were most often Greeks.

Prices for slaves in Rome in the 1st century. n. e. were as follows: 600 sesterces for a slave was considered a cheap price (Mart. VI. 66. 9). For his Dove, who, taking advantage of the freedom of Saturnalia, reprimanded his master, pointing out his shortcomings, Horace paid 500 drachmas (sat. II. 7. 43); a capable young man, born at home and knowing Greek, was worth four times as much (Hor. epist. II. 2. 5-60); an experienced winegrower cost the same (Col. III. 3. 12). Slaves were very expensive and were bought as a luxury item. For handsome young men they paid 100 and 200 thousand (Mart. I. 58. 1; XI. 70. 1; 62. 1); a slave, “bought on the Sacred Road,” cost 100 thousand (Mart. II. 63. 1). Caesar once paid so much money for a young slave that he was embarrassed to enter this amount in his income and expense books (Suet. Caes. 47).

How was this number of slaves distributed? A significant part worked in agriculture, a significant part - in various workshops; part was part of the “urban family” or became the property of the state. In the estates where field, grape and oilseed farming was carried out, there were relatively few slaves, judging by the testimony of Cato and Varro for the times of the Republic, according to the testimony of Columella for the 1st century. empires. The estates that both Cato and Varro write about do not occupy a huge area of ​​land. Cato, whose lands were located in Campania and Latium, owned a vineyard of 100 and an olive grove of 240 jugers (juger about ¼ hectare); its ideal is a possession of 100 jugers, where all economic sectors are represented (10; 11; 1.7). He employs 14 people in the vineyard and 11 in the olive farm (not counting Vilik and his wife in both cases). They carry out all the current work on both estates and are loaded with it to capacity; people from outside are invited to photograph grapes and olives (23; 144; 146); the field wedge is rented to sharecroppers (136). Even in order to cope with a flock of sheep of a hundred heads, one’s own hands are not enough (150). A hundred years later, Varro, who had in mind mainly Sabinia (and probably Umbria), considers an estate of 200 iugera normal; “Latifundia” seem to him to be an exception (I. 16. 3-4). Work such as harvesting hay, reaping, even collecting ears of corn is carried out by hired force (this is quite natural: there is no point in keeping people who will be busy with work only during busy times; Roman owners usually took well into account what was profitable for them). The “poultry farms” that Varro talks about employ several people. Southern (writer of the late 2nd - early 1st centuries BC), who had an estate in the valley of the river. Poe takes as a standard a plot of 200 jugeras, which requires 8 people to cultivate; Columella, when calculating working days, has in mind just such an estate (II. 12-7). Excavations near Pompeii introduced us to a number of farms in which the amount of land rarely reached 100 jugers, and the number of slaves up to ten.

Nomadic cattle breeding required a large number of people (and due to the climatic conditions of Italy, large herds of sheep and cattle had to be driven from the south, from Apulia and Calabria, where the grass burned out in the summer, to the Abruzzos, and then go with them back to the south for the winter). According to Varro, a thousandth flock of coarse-wool sheep was entrusted to 10 people (II. 2. 20), a horse herd of 50 heads was entrusted to two (II. 10. 11), and one owner had several such flocks and herds. The scale of Italian cattle breeding was very large, and the number of shepherds in total amounted to thousands; Livy says that in 185 BC. e. in Apulia there was no life from the shepherds who were robbers along the roads and in the pastures (XXXIX. 29). The praetor managed to catch about 7 thousand people, and many escaped.

Crowded “urban families” have already been mentioned. It would be a mistake, however, to think that household servants usually numbered in the hundreds of people. Pedanius Secundus, prefect of Rome (61 AD), who lived in a mansion-palace, could keep 400 slaves (Tac. ann. XIV.43); Owners of mansions located on the city periphery could also have hundreds of them. If they had a large area of ​​land, it was possible to build a separate barracks of two or three floors for the slaves; it was possible to place them in some part of the huge house. In a house like the House of Menander in Pompeii, one half could be reserved for household needs and for slaves. But where was it possible to settle not just a few hundred, but several dozen slaves in such apartments of a multi-story insula, in which the majority of the Roman population lived? An ordinary apartment with an area of ​​about 100 m2 consisted of two front rooms, which occupied most of the total area, and two or three much smaller bedrooms, sometimes another small kitchen room and a rather narrow corridor.

Neither the front rooms nor the master's bedrooms were intended for slaves. All that remained was the kitchen and the corridor, in which even ten people could not turn around. We will not find any indication that the slaves who served in the house settled separately from their owners, in some specially hired or designated barracks. The cries of Horace, calling on his not very agile “guys” to help him get dressed and escort him to the Esquiline to Maecenas, who unexpectedly, late in the evening, invited the poet to visit, indicate that Dove and his comrades live together with the master. Given the high cost of Roman apartments, renting another room for slaves would be expensive for a person, even of good income. The inhabitants of the insula were forced to limit the staff of their servants for the very simple and very motivating reason that there was nowhere to put these servants.

The relocation from the mansion to the insula made a whole revolution in the life of not only the owner, but also his slave. The mansion had a kitchen, a fireplace on which food could be cooked; in the insula there is a brazier for the owner and his family; let the slave feed on the side. He receives a month: according to Seneca, five modii of grain and five denarii (epist. 80.7). The slave could use the money to buy various seasonings for bread: olive oil, salted olives, vegetables, fruits. Sometimes the bread ration was issued not monthly, but daily, and in this case, in all likelihood, not in grain, but in baked bread: weighing grain every day would be too troublesome, but buying standard bread of the same weight is easy. It is possible that the daily ration was given simply in money.

p.256 If the living conditions of a rural slave were bad, then those of a city slave were even worse. There was no special room for him in the insula; slaves stuck around wherever they could, just to find a free place. There was nothing to think about beds. Martial, laying the slave on a “miserable mat,” apparently wrote from life (IX. 92. 3).

This bitter life was made even more bitter by the complete legalized dependence of the slave on the master - on his mood, whim and caprice. Showered with favors today, tomorrow they could be subjected to the most severe tortures for some insignificant offense. In the comedies of Plautus, slaves talk about flogging as something common and everyday. Rods were considered the mildest punishment; the most terrible were the belt whip and the “three-tailed whip” - a terrible whip with three belts, with knots on the belts, sometimes intertwined with wire. It is precisely this that the owner demands in order to flog the cook for an undercooked hare (Mart. III. 94). Ergastul and stocks, work in a mill, exile in quarries, sale to a gladiator school - any of these terrible punishments could be expected by a slave, and there was no protection from the master's tyranny. Vedius Pollio threw the guilty slaves into the pond to be devoured by moray eels: “only with such an execution could he watch how a person was immediately torn into pieces” (Pl. IX. 77). The mistress orders the slave to be crucified, having first cut out his tongue (Cic. pro Cluent. 66.187). This was not the only case; Martial mentions the same thing (II. 82). Punching and slaps were the order of the day, and people like Horace and Martial, who were by no means evil monsters, considered it quite natural to give free rein to their hands (Hor. sat. II. 7. 44; Mart. XIV. 68) and beat a slave for bad behavior. cooked lunch (March. VIII. 23). The owner considers himself entitled not to treat a sick slave: he is simply taken to the island of Asclepius on the Tiber and left there, relieving himself of any concern about caring for the sick. Columella saw owners who, having bought slaves, did not care about them at all (IV. 3. 1); the robber Bulla tells the authorities that if they want to put an end to robbery, then let them force the masters to feed their slaves (Dio Cass. LXXVII. 10. 5).

Much, of course, depended on the owner, on his character and social status. A slave, whom a soldier brought as spoils of war to his home, to his old peasant yard, immediately turned out to be an equal among equals; ate the same food p.257 as everyone else, and at the same table, slept with everyone else in the same hut and on the same straw; He went into the field with his owner and worked equally with him. The owner could turn out to be angry with the work and not give up on it, but he himself worked, sparing no effort and not sparing himself; he could shout at the slave, but he also shouted at his son, and there was nothing offensive or humiliating in his demands. In a simple working environment there were no stupid whims and evil tyranny when some senator demanded that a slave not dare open his mouth until he was asked, and punished a slave for sneezing or coughing in the presence of guests (Sen. epist. 47. 3).

There were more than just monsters among the Roman slave owners; We also know kind, truly humane and caring owners. Such were Cicero, Columella, Pliny and his entourage. Pliny allows his slaves to leave wills, religiously carries out their last wishes, and seriously cares for those who are sick; allows them to invite guests and celebrate holidays. Martial, describing the estate of Faustin, recalls the little vernae seated around the blazing hearth, and dinners at which “everyone eats, and a well-fed servant will not even think of envying a drunken dinner companion” (III. 58. 21 and 43-44). At Horace's Sabine estate, the "frisky vernae" sat at the same table with the owner and his guests and ate the same thing as them (sat. II. 6. 65-67). Seneca, outraged by the cruelty of his masters, behaved with his slaves, probably in accordance with the principles of Stoic philosophy, which he proclaimed.

We cannot establish statistically whether there were more bad or good owners, and in the end it does not matter so much; in both cases the slave remained a slave; his legal and social position remained the same, and it is natural to raise the question of how the slave state influenced a person and what mental disposition it created. What grounds did Tacitus and Seneca have for speaking about the “slave soul” (ingenium ser vile)?

A stranger in the country where evil fate has brought him, the slave is indifferent to its well-being and its misfortunes; he is not pleased with her prosperity, but her sorrows will not weigh heavily on his soul. If he is recruited as a soldier (during the war with Hannibal, two legions were composed of slaves), then he does not go to defend this land that is indifferent to him, but to gain his freedom: he thinks about himself, and not about everyone. People have taken away from him everything that makes life special: his homeland, family, independence, and he responds to them with hatred and distrust. He does not always feel a sense of camaraderie even with his brothers in fate. In one of Plautus’s comedies, the owner of the house orders his servants to break the legs of every neighbor’s slave who would think of climbing onto his roof, except for one, and this one is not at all concerned about the fate of his comrades: “I don’t care what they do with the rest” (Miles glorios 156-168). The unification of gladiators who left with Spartacus, or those Germans who, having been captured, strangled each other so as not to act for the amusement of the Roman mob, is a rare phenomenon - usually something else: people who live under the same roof meet each other every day, they talk, joke, tell one another about their fate, their troubles and aspirations, cold-bloodedly thrust a knife into a comrade’s throat. Circus drivers will not stop at any trick, they will turn to witchcraft just to destroy a fellow rival. In the peaceful atmosphere of a rural estate, the owner expects that the slaves will spy on each other and inform on each other. The slave is isolated from others, cares only about himself and relies only on himself.

A slave is deprived of what constitutes the strength and pride of a free person - he does not have the right to free speech. He must hear not hear and see not see, but he sees and hears a lot, but does not dare express his judgment on this matter, his assessment. A crime is being committed before his eyes - he remains silent; and gradually evil ceases to seem evil to him: he has become accustomed to it, his moral sense has become dull. And someone else’s life is interesting to him only to the extent that his own depends on it; in this world, the only thing he has is himself, and his future depends only on him. By a strange irony of fate, this person, having become a “thing,” turns out to be the smith of his own destiny. He needs to get out of his slave state, and he chooses the path that seems most faithful and safe to him: he entangles the master’s soul with lies and flattery - he diligently carries out all his orders, obeys p.259 his most vile whims; “Whatever the master orders, nothing is shameful,” says Trimalchio. Smart and observant, he quickly notices the master's vices and weaknesses, deftly indulges them, and soon the master can no longer do without him: he becomes his right hand, adviser and confidant, the boss of the house, the threat of the rest of the slaves, and sometimes a misfortune for the whole. family (the story of Statius, a slave, and then a freedman of Cicero’s brother Quintus). He bends before his master: the master is strength, and is arrogantly insolent with everyone who lacks strength. If it is beneficial for him to betray his owner and inform on him, he will betray and inform. Moral hesitations are unknown to him; the laws of morality do not bind him: he does not suspect their existence. “How many slaves, so many enemies” - the saying arose on the basis of experience and observation.

Not all slaves were like this, of course. There were people who did not put up with their slave fate, but they could not and did not know how to throw it off through servility and groveling. Their life became a continuous protest against the laws of the evil and unjust world, which subjugated them. This protest could be expressed very differently depending on the moral disposition and mental level. Some became simply “desperate”: neither the whip, nor the stocks, nor the mill could do anything with them; they drank, they were rowdy, they were insolent: it was their way of expressing their hatred and their contempt for their surroundings. Others skillfully hid this hatred, accumulated it in themselves, waiting for their time, and when it came, they brought it down on anyone, as long as they were well-fed and clothed, on those who resembled the person who pushed them around and trampled them into the dirt. They dealt with the owner, ran away, joined bandits, eagerly listened to see if there was an uprising somewhere. There were many of these in Spartak's army.

People who were more peaceful and had a small supply of inner strength put up with their lot and only tried to arrange themselves so that the yoke of slavery would not rub their necks too hard. They adapted to the house and the entire household system and lived from day to day, without looking further than today, little by little trying to gain for themselves at least a tiny piece of life’s comforts and pleasures. To admire the gladiators, to run into a tavern and chat with a friend, to eat a piece of meat, to taste a fatty flatbread, to visit a cheap corrupt woman - the poor man, robbed by people, dreamed of nothing more. If he was caught doing some not-so-innocent trick, like adding water instead of drinking wine or stealing several sesterces, and he couldn’t get away with it, he bravely endured the beating: troubles in life cannot be avoided, and the skill of life is to slip through between them, without very much skinning. Comedy loved to produce such slaves; Plautus can hardly do without them.

The slave took revenge on his master, and slave uprisings were perhaps the least terrible form of this revenge. His life was disfigured - he made the owner's life ugly; his soul was crippled - he crippled his master's. Since childhood, the owner has become accustomed to the fact that there are no obstacles to his desires and all his actions are met only with approval - control over himself is lost, the voice of conscience becomes silent. A crowd of these powerless, voiceless people is in his power, he can do whatever he wants with them - and the terrible dark instincts living in his soul break free: he enjoys the suffering of others, and in an atmosphere that is not poisoned by cruelty and arbitrariness, he can no longer breathe. He despises slaves, and respect for man and for himself quietly dies in his soul; in it, as in a mirror, the “slave soul” is reflected; the master becomes the double of his slave: he grovels and lies, he trembles for his life and his destiny, he is cowardly and insolent. A senator behaves with Caligula or Nero, and a free client with his patron is no better than the meanest slave behaves with his masters.

It was impossible not to see this corrupting influence of the slave environment. Quintilian, an intelligent, excellent teacher, warned parents about the danger for children of “communication with bad slaves” (I. 2. 4); Tacitus considered the main reason for the decline of morals to be the fact that his contemporaries entrust the upbringing of children to slaves, and the child spends his time in their society (dial. 29).

There was, however, another category of slaves whom the owners, in the blindness of their slave-owning worldview, considered to be good and faithful slaves. These people were endowed with a large share of common sense, they believed that a whip could not break a butt and did not dream of p.261 the kingdom of justice. They did not have the heroic spirit of their indomitable comrades, who rushed with their bare hands to storm the terrible Roman state. They thought about themselves, arranged their destiny, dreamed of freedom for themselves and believed that they would most likely pave the way to it through work. They were disgusted by the roundabout paths of servility and baseness that many followed in a slave environment. They were decent people and conscientious workers who often brought creative inspiration to their work. These nameless Atlanteans, both in a slave state and when they became free, supported the entire economic life of Rome on their strong shoulders. Homer’s words “the slave is careless” do not apply to them. We saw how many specialists the “water department” had in Rome (all slaves). These people, on whose zeal and attention the life of a huge city depended, do not deserve the name “negligent,” just like the firemen (freedmen, that is, yesterday’s slaves), who zealously carried out a difficult and thankless service. Slaves built houses and basilicas, aqueducts and temples, the remains of which still evoke amazement and delight. Trajan's Forum was not created by Apollodorus alone: ​​if he had not had thousands of slavish, diligent and intelligent hands at his disposal, his plan would never have been realized. The Italian orchard has dozens of magnificent varieties in its assortment. Who brought them out? gardener slave. Who created the excellent Apulian breed of sheep, the Reatina donkeys, for which tens of thousands of sesterces were paid, and the beautiful trotting horses? Who carried out this patient work of crossing, observing, raising young animals in the wilderness of remote pastures? slave-shepherd. The craftsmen who created light Pompeian tables, skillfully scattered lovely ornaments across the wide field of the cartibule, and worked on a wooden chest or bronze brazier, turning modest utensils into a true work of art, were not “careless.” We treat Spartacus and his comrades with respectful admiration, but we also think about these unnoticed, forgotten workers with love and respect.

Human life and human relationships are very complex and multifaceted; they do not freeze into a single, uniform form. Their appearance changes; As the years pass, something new comes into life; the old goes away altogether or is processed, p.262 slowly at first, perhaps barely noticeable. It was the same in relation to the slave - along with the old, the sprouts of the new emerge. Roman law recognized slavery as a legal international institution (iure gentium) and nevertheless considered it unnatural (contra naturam). Legislators never thought about how to reconcile this contradiction, but they never proclaimed the position that Aristotle based his doctrine of slavery: there are not only people, but entire peoples who, by their very nature, by their entire mental make-up ( φύσει) are destined for slavery and must be slaves. For the Roman legislator, a slave was movable property, a thing (res), but when this “thing” received freedom, it immediately turned into a person and very soon into a Roman citizen. From the experience of everyday encounters and daily communication, the Roman had to recognize that this “thing” has properties that force one to treat it differently than a donkey or a dog, and which are sometimes such that their owner cannot be considered a “thing”. Most of the outstanding grammarians that Suetonius talks about were freedmen: these slaves were set free by their owners “for their talents and education.” The freedmen were Livius Andronicus, the founder of Roman literature, and Terence, a recognized master of Latin comedy. A “thing” could turn into a person every minute, and this could not be ignored. Cato himself had to admit this, and he did not have a glimmer of human feeling towards the slaves. This man, who really considered the slave only as an income item, was forced, however, to write down the advice: “please the plowmen so that they take better care of the oxen” (the word “plowman” does not convey the full meaning of bibulcus: it was really a plowman, but it was his duty This included not only plowing, but also the entire care of the oxen.) We can trace in one area, namely, in agriculture, how this attention to the human slave grows; We had here documentary information from two centuries: Cato (mid-2nd century. BC BC), Varro (late 1st century BC) and Columella (second half of the 1st century AD). Cato considers the slave only as labor, from which it is necessary to squeeze as much as possible; it is impossible to allow, p.263, that the costs of this force exceed the income that it provides: therefore, a sick and old slave must be sold, therefore, if a slave is temporarily unable to work, he must have his ration reduced for this time, therefore both rainy and holidays should, as far as possible, be filled with work; the work must be done at all costs: no “objective reasons” are taken into account. There is nothing to look for in Cato for any interest in the slave as a person, the idea that his work and its productivity depend on some kind of human feelings.

We already see something completely different in Varro: the need to interest the slave in his work is recognized quite clearly. Life sets ever greater demands: we need more generous harvests, greater incomes than those with which our grandfathers were satisfied. The owner’s wealth is created by the slave’s labor, and the owner begins to think about what to do to make the slave’s work more productive, how to create a system of relationships in which “enemies” (“how many slaves, so many enemies”) would not focus their energy on undermining the owner’s well-being , but would work on its creation and success. The owner begins to understand that work is performed not only by the slave’s muscular strength, that one can work “with the soul” and that only such work is good. Incentives and rewards are introduced, the slave is allowed to have some property (peculium), and is allowed to start a family. Vilik is ordered to control his words and give free rein to his hands only as a last resort. Cato legalized paid prostitution in his household, and it never occurred to him or his future admirers that the vir vere romanus (“true Roman”) was here to some extent acting as a pimp selling his slaves. The shepherds Varro talks about already have a real family and, as far as possible in a nomadic life, a real home with its, albeit simple, but comfort and peace. The “thing” turned into a person. What was the reason for this? The impoverishment of the slave market in comparison with the time of Cato, when tens of thousands of prisoners of war were brought up for sale over and over again? Westerman, of course, is right in citing this reason, but it was by no means the only one, just as economic considerations were not the only ones. By the time Varro wrote his treatise on agriculture, slaves had managed to prove themselves both in the public life of Rome and in domestic life, as a force that could not be ignored. Spartak gave a lesson that is well etched in my memory. Sulla, freeing 10 thousand slaves, counted on them as a reliable bodyguard. Milo and Clodius are surrounded by a retinue of armed slaves, who are both protection and support for them (Cic. ad Att. IV. 3. 2-4). After Caesar's assassination, both sides try to secure the support of slaves; recruit them into their troops and promise freedom. Tyrone was a good assistant to Cicero, Statius was the evil genius of his brother. The doctor, secretary, farm manager - slave owner every minute, at every step, came across a slave and was forced by force of circumstances to enter into personal, close relationships with him. All this brought the “thing” closer to the owner, forced him to look at it, and persistently explained to the gentlemen what the “thing” could be. The explanations were remembered. Columella went further than Varro: he consults with slaves about what and how to do, talks and jokes with them, encourages them with rewards. Vilik is prohibited from corporal punishment: he must act not out of fear, but with his authority; he must be respected, but not feared. You cannot demand work too assertively: even if the slave pretends to be sick for a few days and rests; the more willingly he will get to work later. The attention with which all the needs of the slave must be treated - his health, food, clothing - is strongly emphasized. In all of Columella’s instructions, there is an attitude towards the slave as a person: he demands from him not only work, he wants his benevolence, such an attitude towards the owner that will make him work willingly, and thinks through a whole system of relationships that will ensure this benevolence. Moreover, he makes concessions that will improve the existence of the slave.

According to the letter of the law, a slave could not have any property: everything he had belonged to the owner. Life has made its own amendments to legal norms. The owner quickly realized what would be the benefit for him if he allowed the slave to have something of his own: firstly, the slave would work more willingly and better, hoping to earn money for his ransom, and secondly, what he acquired for himself, will still remain as a ransom in the owner's hands. Only completely unscrupulous owners laid their hands p.265 on this slave property (it was called “peculium”), and the slave collected it “by ounce” (Ter. Phorm. 43-44), by penny, tearing off what was necessary, often going hungry (ventre fraudato, 80), just to collect the required amount. Varro recommended that “every effort should be made to ensure that the slaves have a peculium” (r. r. I. 17), and the shepherds he talks about have several sheep of their own in their master’s flock. Sometimes slaves received “tips” from guests or clients, sometimes they managed to steal something and “secretly increase the peculium” (Apul. met. X. 14). Sometimes the owner gave the slave money at interest, and he put it into circulation, paying off the debt to the owner and keeping the profit for himself. It also happened that a slave conducted business on behalf of the owner, acting on his behalf, and the owner either paid him a certain salary or rewarded him with some gifts. All this went to the peculium. A slave who did not have a peculium was considered suspicious and unfit. “You want to give the girl to this slave, a nonentity and a scoundrel, who to this day does not have a peculium for a copper penny!” - the old owner is indignant in Plautus’s “Casin”. Cicero characterizes Diognotus, a city slave, as a slacker - “he has no peculium at all” (in Verr. III. 38. 86). The slave's peculium could sometimes reach such a sum that he was able to acquire “substitutes,” his own slaves (vicarii), who helped him fulfill his duties.

And the family, which the law denied the slave, actually had, although, from a legal point of view, it was not a marriage, but only “cohabitation” (contubernium). The owner understands that marriage relations in a slave environment are beneficial for him: they tie the slave to the house (it is not for nothing that Varro so persistently recommended marrying the shepherds who roamed Italy with the master's flocks: in a slave environment, shepherds were the most independent and formidable element, and the family was very reliable a means of keeping these people in line), make him more pliable and obedient, and the children born from these unions, “home-grown slaves” (vernae), increased the slave familia and were considered the most devoted and faithful servants. In everyday life, the marriage of a slave, especially under the empire, is both recognized and respected: according to the law, family members cannot be separated (Dig. XXXIII. 7. 12, § 7). In practice, this law was sometimes circumvented, and therefore wills often emphasized the will of the testator p.266 for children and parents to remain together (Dig. XXXII. 1.41, § 2; CIL. II. 2265).

The state also intervenes in the life of a slave: a number of laws appear that limit the rights of the owner. Lex Petronia de servis (19 AD) prohibits a master from sending a slave without permission “to fight the beasts” in the amphitheater; such a punishment can be imposed upon consideration of the owner's complaint in Rome by the prefect of the city, and in the province - by its governor (Dig. XLVIII. 8. 11, § 2). According to the edict of Emperor Claudius, a sick slave, brought by his owner to the island of Asclepius and abandoned there, receives freedom if he recovers; the murder of an old or crippled slave is considered a criminal offense (Suet. Claud. 25.2; Dio Cass. LX. 19.7). Hadrian “forbade masters from killing a slave; only judges could sentence them to death if they deserved it. He forbade the sale of a slave or maid to a pimp or lanista... he destroyed the ergastuli” (Hist. Aug. Adr. 18. 7-10). For cruel treatment of slaves, he sent one Roman matron into exile for five years. A slave could turn to the prefect of the city, “if the owner is cruel, merciless, starves him, forces him to debauchery” (Dig. I. 12.1, § 8); according to the rescript of Antoninus Pius, a cruel master is forced to sell his slaves (Gai. I. 53).

One should not think, of course, that the life of a slave under the empire changed radically, but some changes undoubtedly took place in it. The passionate indignation with which Juvenal attacks cruel masters, Seneca’s reflections on the fact that a high soul can live not only in a Roman citizen, but also in a slave (epist. 31.11), Columella’s behavior with his slaves, a deliberate system of kind treatment Pliny the Younger's slave, the caustic and angry words thrown by Martial in the face of the masters who tyrannize their slaves - all this indicates that some changes have occurred in the attitude towards the slave. These shifts were caused by different reasons: there were purely economic, political, and moral-philosophical considerations. Legislation did not lead society, it expressed its mood.

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Slavery in Rome became most widespread compared to other ancient states, but, often, this met the interests of the society of that time, serving as an important catalyst for its development.

The main source of slaves was capture. It was captive foreigners who made up the overwhelming majority of slaves in Ancient Rome, as evidenced by the analysis of numerous written sources, in particular, tombstone inscriptions. For example, as the famous French historian Claude Nicolet points out, most slaves in Sicily at the end of the 2nd century BC. e. (when slavery on the island reached its greatest extent) were natives of Asia Minor, Syria, Greece, who had previously been captured by Rome.

Another source of slaves was sea robbery, which reached its climax during the era of the first triumvirate (mid-1st century BC), which in certain periods of Roman history also significantly contributed to the increase in the number of slaves.

The third source of slaves was the right of a creditor to enslave his debtor. In particular, such a right was legalized by the Laws of the Twelve Tables (5th century BC). Upon expiration of the loan term, the debtor was provided with one month of benefits; if the debt was not paid, the court handed the debtor over to the creditor (lat. iure addicitur) and the latter kept him in chains at home for 60 days. The law determined for such cases the amount of bread that the prisoner received (at least 1 pound per day) and the weight of the shackles (no more than 15 pounds). During the conclusion, the creditor could bring his debtor to the market three times and announce the amount of the debt. If no one expressed a desire to ransom him, he turned into a slave (Latin servus), whom the creditor could sell, but only outside Roman territory. The same Laws of the Twelve Tables gave the father the right to sell his children into slavery.

At the same time, in the 4th century BC. e. In Rome, the law of Petelius was adopted, which prohibited the enslavement of Roman citizens - from now on only foreigners could be slaves, and only in exceptional cases (for example, the commission of a serious crime) could citizens of Rome become slaves. According to this law, a Roman who publicly announced his insolvency (bankruptcy) was deprived of all his property, which was taken away to pay debts, but retained personal freedom. K. Nicolet writes in this regard about “ abolition of debt slavery"in Rome in 326 BC. e. Although there are references to the fact that this law was subsequently circumvented, historians believe that we are not talking about debt slavery, but about some forms of working off debt, without formal slavery.

During the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean in the 2nd-1st centuries. BC e. Debt slavery again became an important source of replenishment of slaves - but at the expense of the inhabitants of the conquered countries. There are many known cases of mass enslavement in territories conquered by Rome for failure to pay high Roman taxes (see below).

There have also been cases when the state subjected a citizen maxima capitis diminutio, that is, turned him into a slave for the crimes he committed. Criminals sentenced to execution were classified as slaves (lat. servi poenae) because in Rome only a slave could be handed over to the executioner. Later, for some crimes, the punishment was commuted, and the “punishment slaves” were sent to the mines or quarries.

If, finally, a free woman entered into a relationship with a slave and did not stop it, despite the threefold protest of the master (lat. dominus), she became the slave of the one who owned the slave.

To all the listed sources of slavery, it is necessary to add some natural increase in the unfree population due to the birth of children from slaves. Due to the slowness of this growth and demand, the slave trade was established. Slaves were imported to Rome partly from Africa, Spain and Gaul, but mainly from Bithynia, Galatia, Cappadocia and Syria. This trade brought great income to the treasury, since the import, export and sale of slaves were subject to duties: 1/8 of the value was charged from the eunuch, 1/4 from the rest, and 2-4% were charged on sales. The slave trade was one of the most profitable activities; the most notable Romans were engaged in it (in particular, Cato the Elder, who recommended buying and training slaves for resale for the sake of greater profitability). The first place in the slave trade belonged to the Greeks, who had the advantage of experience. Numerous measures were taken to protect the interests of buyers. The prices of slaves fluctuated constantly depending on supply and demand. The average cost of a slave under the Antonines was 175-210 rubles. [ ] ; but in some cases, such as for beautiful young slaves, up to 9,000 rubles were paid. [ ] In the late empire (IV-V centuries), the price of healthy adult slaves averaged 18-20 gold solidi (for comparison: for 1 solidi in the 5th century you could buy 40 modius = 360 liters of grain). But the price of slaves was much lower on the borders of the empire, where captive barbarians came from. Child slaves were also worth much less, typically only a few solidi.

The Dutch scientist Pomp (“Titi Pompae Phrysii de operis servorum liber”, 1672) counted 147 functions performed by slaves in the house of a rich Roman. Currently, after new research, this figure has to be increased significantly.

The entire composition of slaves was divided into two categories: familia rustica and familia urbana. In each estate, at the head of the familia rustica there was a manager (lat. villicus)), who monitored the performance of the slaves’ duties, sorted out their quarrels, satisfied their legitimate needs, encouraged the hardworking and punished the guilty. Managers often used these rights very widely, especially where the masters either did not interfere in the matter at all or were not interested in the fate of their slaves. The manager had an assistant with a staff of overseers and foremen. Below were numerous groups of workers in the fields, vineyards, shepherds and cattlemen, spinners, weavers and weavers, fullers, tailors, carpenters, joiners, etc. On large estates, each such group was divided, in turn, into decuria, at the head of which stood the decurion. Sometimes the familia urbana was no less numerous, divided into managerial personnel (lat. ordinarii), who enjoyed the trust of the master, and personnel for serving the master and madam both in the house and outside it (lat. vulgares, mediastini, quales-quales). Among the first were the housekeeper, cashier, accountant, managers of rental houses, buyers of supplies, etc.; the second group included the gatekeeper, who replaced the watchdog and sat on a chain, watchmen, doorkeepers, furniture keepers, silver keepers, cloakroom attendants, slaves who brought in visitors, slaves who lifted the curtains for them, etc. A crowd of cooks and bakers crowded into the kitchen bread, pies, pates. One service at the table of a wealthy Roman required a considerable number of slaves: the duty of some was to set the table, others to serve food, others to taste, and others to pour wine; there were those on whose hair the gentlemen wiped their hands; a crowd of beautiful boys, dancers, dwarfs and jesters entertained the guests at mealtimes. For personal services, valets, bathers, house surgeons, and barbers were assigned to the gentleman; in rich houses there were readers, secretaries, librarians, scribes, parchment makers, teachers, writers, philosophers, painters, sculptors, accountants, commercial agents, etc. Among the shopkeepers, peddlers, bankers, money changers, moneylenders there were many slaves who were engaged in this or that business for the benefit of their master. When a master appeared somewhere in a public place, a crowd of slaves (lat. anteambulanes) always walked in front of him; another crowd brought up the rear of the procession (Latin pedisequi); the nomenclator told him the names of those he met who were to be greeted; distributores and tesserarii distributed handouts; there were also porters, couriers, messengers, handsome young men who made up the mistress’s honor guard, etc. The mistress had her own guards, eunuchs, a midwife, a nurse, cradles, spinners, weavers, and seamstresses. Betticher wrote a whole book (“Sabina”) specifically about the state of slaves under the mistress. Slaves were mainly actors, acrobats, and gladiators. Large sums were spent on training educated slaves (lat. litterati) (for example, Crassus, Atticus). Many masters specially trained their slaves for this or that task and then made them available for payment to those who wished to do so. Only poor houses used the services of hired slaves; The rich tried to have all the specialists at home.

In addition to slaves owned by private individuals (lat. servi privati), there were public slaves (lat. servi publici), owned either by the state or a separate city. They built streets and water pipelines, worked in quarries and mines, cleaned sewers, served in slaughterhouses and in various public workshops (military weapons, ropes, gear for ships, etc.); They also occupied lower positions under the magistrates - messengers, messengers, servants in courts, prisons and temples; they were state cashiers and scribes. They also formed a retinue that accompanied each provincial official or commander to his place of office.

Ancient writers have left us many descriptions of the terrible situation in which Roman slaves found themselves. Their food was extremely meager in quantity and unsuitable in quality: just enough was given out so as not to die of hunger. Meanwhile, the work was exhausting and lasted from morning to evening. The situation of slaves was especially difficult in mills and bakeries, where a millstone or a board with a hole in the middle was often tied to the slaves’ necks to prevent them from eating flour or dough, and in mines, where the sick and mutilated worked under the whip until they fell from exhaustion . If a slave fell ill, he was taken to the abandoned “island of Aesculapius,” where he was given complete “freedom to die.” Cato the Elder advises selling "". Cruel treatment of slaves was sanctified by legends, customs, and laws. Only during Saturnalia could slaves feel somewhat free: they put on the cap of freedmen and sat down at the table of their masters, and the latter sometimes even showed them honors. The rest of the time, the arbitrariness of their masters and managers weighed heavily on them. The chain, shackles, stick, and whip were in great use. It often happened that the master ordered the slave to be thrown into a well or oven or placed on a pitchfork. An upstart freedman ordered a slave to be thrown into a cage with moray eels for breaking a vase. Augustus ordered the slave who killed and ate his quail to be hanged from the mast. The slave was seen as a rude and insensitive creature, and therefore punishments for him were invented as more terrible and painful as possible. They ground him in millstones, covered his head with resin and tore the skin from his skull, cut off his nose, lips, ears, arms, legs, or hung him naked on iron chains, leaving him to be devoured by birds of prey; he was finally crucified on the cross. " I know“, says the slave in Plautus’s comedy, “.” If the master was killed by a slave, all slaves who lived with the master under the same roof were subject to death. Only the position of slaves who served outside the master's house - on ships, in shops, as heads of workshops - was somewhat easier. The worse the life of the slaves was, the harder the work, the harsher the punishments, the more painful the executions, the more the slaves hated the master. Aware of the feelings the slaves had for them, the masters, as well as the state authorities, cared a lot about preventing danger from the slaves. They tried to maintain disagreements between slaves and to separate slaves of the same nationality.

It is interesting that outwardly slaves were no different from free citizens. They wore the same clothes, and in their free time they went to baths, theaters, and stadiums. At first, slaves had special collars with the name of the owner, which were soon abolished. The Senate even made a special provision on this matter, the meaning of which was to ensure that slaves did not stand out among citizens, so that they (slaves) did not see and know how many there were.

From a legal point of view, the slave did not exist as a person; in all respects he was equated to a thing (lat. res mancipi), placed on a par with land, horses, bulls (“servi pro nullis habentur,” the Romans said). The Law of Aquilius makes no difference between wounding a domestic animal and a slave. At the trial, the slave was interrogated only at the request of one of the parties; the voluntary testimony of a slave had no value. Neither he can owe anyone, nor can anyone owe him. For damage or loss caused by a slave, his master was liable. The union of a slave and a slave did not have the legal character of marriage: it was only cohabitation, which the master could tolerate or terminate at will. An accused slave could not seek protection from the tribunes of the people.

However, over time, life forced the authorities to somewhat soften the arbitrariness of slave owners, partly because the cruel treatment of slaves in many cases led to major slave uprisings, for example, in Sicily, partly out of people's disgust for cruelty, which should not be underestimated.

Since the establishment of imperial power, a number of legal measures have been taken to protect slaves from the arbitrariness and cruelty of their masters. Lex Claudia (47 AD) gives freedom to those slaves who were not cared for by their masters during their illness. Lex Petronia (67) prohibits sending slaves to public fights with animals. Emperor Hadrian prohibits, under pain of criminal punishment, the unauthorized killing of slaves by the master, their imprisonment (ergastula), and their sale for prostitution ( see also Prostitution in Ancient Rome) and gladiatorial games (121). Antoninus legalized the custom that allowed slaves to seek salvation from the cruelty of their masters in temples and statues of emperors. For the murder of a slave, he ordered that the master be punished under the lex Cornelia de sicariis, and in cases of cruelty to the slave, he should be sold into other hands. They were also prohibited from selling children and handing them over as hostages when borrowing money. The Edict of Diocletian prohibited a free person from giving himself into bondage. The law removed the unpaid debtor from the hands of the creditor. The slave trade continued, but the frequent mutilation of boys and young men was punishable by expulsion, exile to the mines, and even death. If the buyer returned the slave to the seller, then he had to return his entire family: the cohabitation of the slave was thus recognized as marriage.

Thus, the Romans during this period turned into a “nation of masters”, which was served by an entire army of slaves - mainly foreigners enslaved during the Roman conquest of Europe and the Mediterranean. And this army was replenished through new robberies and arbitrariness in the conquered territories. In Italy, slaves during this period were used in large numbers not only in the household, but also in agriculture, construction and crafts.

However, outside Italy there were very few slaves even in that era, and they played practically no role in economic and social life. Thus, the famous Russian historian Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtsev, in his unique work on the social and economic history of the early Roman Empire, points out that in the vast majority of provinces, with the exception of Italy, Sicily and some regions of Spain, there were practically no slaves or they were in small numbers , repeating this conclusion also in relation to specific provinces of the Roman Empire. The French historian A. Grenier came to the same conclusion in his work on Roman Gaul.

In general, if we proceed from existing estimates of the population of the early Roman Empire - 50-70 million people - and from estimates of the number of slaves by leading historians, then the number of slaves even at the very beginning of the imperial period (end of the 1st century BC - mid-1st century . AD) in proportion to the entire population of the empire should have been only about 4-8%. This is at odds with the conclusions of Soviet and Marxist historians, who gave the topic of slavery an exaggerated character and took into account the proportion of slaves in the population of only Italy itself, and not the entire Roman Empire.

The most formidable uprising was the uprising of Spartacus (73-71 BC), whose army consisted of about 120 thousand people. However, according to the testimony of the Roman historians Appian and Sallust, not only slaves, but also free proletarians, of whom there were quite a lot in the “army of slaves,” took part in the Spartacus uprising. In addition, having heard about the successes of Spartacus, the cities of Roman allies in Italy rebelled against the power of Rome, which significantly increased the scope of the uprising. As S. Nicolet writes, “Spartacus’s war was also a war against the rule of Rome, and not just a slave uprising.”

In general, slaves did not play a major role in the class battles of Ancient Rome, except in certain areas, notably Sicily, where slaves at one point formed a very significant part of the population. But even in Italy the role of slave social movements was small, with the exception of the period from 135 to 71. BC e. (when it was significant), not to mention the other Roman provinces. The uprising of Spartacus, being only partly a movement of slaves, in turn, constituted only a small episode in the civil wars of the 80s-70s. BC e., lasting two decades (when the leaders of the warring parties were Marius, Sulla, Sertorius, Pompey). And during subsequent civil wars: 49-30. BC e. (Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, Augustus, Pompey, Anthony), 68-69. n. e. (Galba, Vitellius, Vespasian), 193-197. (Albin, Niger, North), 235-285. (“the century of 30 tyrants”) - it is not at all known about any independent mass movements of slaves.

The above facts refute the claims of Soviet and Marxist historians that slaves in Ancient Rome constituted the main “exploited class,” which played a leading role in the class struggle against the “exploiter class.” Slaves were generally only a small social stratum, playing a rather modest role in class battles, with the exception of the period from 135 to 71. BC e. ; .

In subsequent centuries, when the influx of prisoners of war decreased, and the inhabitants of the conquered territories increasingly approached the citizens of Rome in their status, the number of slaves began to decline rapidly. As S. Nicolet points out, there are signs of some decrease already from the end of the 1st century. BC e., and even more so during the 1st century AD. e. . In the II-III century. n. e. slaves, both in the empire as a whole and in Italy itself, made up a small percentage of the population. As noted by the famous English historian A. H. M. Jones, who specially studied this issue, the number of slaves in these centuries in proportion was negligible, they were very expensive and were used mainly as domestic servants by rich Romans. According to his data, the average price of a slave by this time compared to the 4th century. BC e. increased 8 times. Therefore, only rich Romans who kept slaves as domestic servants could afford to buy and maintain slaves; the use of slave labor in crafts and agriculture in the 2nd-3rd centuries. n. e. lost all meaning and practically disappeared.

Throughout this period, land cultivation was carried out by free tenants - colones. Soviet historians argued, in an effort to prove the Marxist thesis about the existence of a “slave system” in antiquity, that the colonat was one of the types of slave relations. However, all the colons were formally free; their dependence on the latifundists had a completely different character than the dependence of a slave on his master. There are many examples in history of the same dependence of peasants on large landowners - Ancient Egypt, Persia in early antiquity, India and China on the eve of colonial conquest, France on the eve of the French Revolution, etc. The position of peasants in these countries was similar to the position of slaves or serfs, but in fact they were neither one nor the other, since their formal freedom was preserved. In any case, the coloni were not slaves, but were free citizens, and were in no way subject to Roman slave laws, which clearly established the legal status of a slave, the rights of a slave owner, etc.

The disappearance of mass slavery in this era is evidenced, in addition to the available facts, by the transformation of the Roman word “slave”. As the German historian Eduard Meyer wrote, the Latin word “servus” (slave) changed its meaning by the end of antiquity; it was no longer used to call slaves (of which there were very few), but began to be called serfs.

According to the testimony of Constantine Porphyrogenitus

During the 4th century, by decrees of the Roman emperors, a significant part of the population of the Roman Empire was converted into serfs (see below). Accordingly, it is in this meaning (“serf”) that this word (“serf”, “servo”) entered all Western European languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, which were formed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. And for slaves a new term was later introduced - slave, sklav. This can also serve to confirm the conclusions of historians about the disappearance of slavery as a mass phenomenon in the 2nd-3rd centuries. n. e. .

The transition to serfdom began already in the 2nd-3rd centuries, when a new type of slave appeared - casati. The owners of the estates endowed such a slave with a plot of land, and he, living a more or less independent life away from his masters, enjoyed greater rights than ever before: he could marry, he was actually given much greater freedom to dispose of the products of his labor ; he essentially had his own farm. In fact, by their status, casati slaves were no longer so much slaves as serfs.

The history of slavery in antiquity finally ended with the official introduction of serfdom or some version of it in the Roman Empire. As A. H. M. Jones points out, this happened during the reign of Emperor Diocletian (284-305), who, without exception, prohibited all peasants - both tenants of land (colons) and land owners -, under pain of severe punishment, leave your place of residence. During the 4th century. Diocletian's successors further tightened these measures and extended them to the vast majority of the population. By the laws and decrees of Diocletian and the emperors of the 4th century, almost all citizens of the central and western provinces of the Roman Empire were assigned either to a certain piece of land or to their place of residence, as well as to a certain profession, which was inherited: the son of a blacksmith could now only become a blacksmith, and the son of a merchant is only a merchant. In addition, now the son of a blacksmith could only marry the daughter of a blacksmith, and the son of a peasant could only marry the daughter of a peasant, and from his own village or locality. In fact, this meant the introduction of serfdom for all or most of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, with the exception of senior government officials and wealthy owners of land and real estate. Even for people of free professions (including hired workers, servants, etc.), a rule was introduced according to which, after a certain number of years spent in one place, they could no longer leave it.