Download PDF | Kyle Harper-Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 -Cambridge University Press (2011).
628 Pages
Capitalizing on the rich historical record of late antiquity, and employing sophisticated methodologies from social and economic history, this book re-interprets the end of Roman slavery. Kyle Harper challenges traditional interpretations of a transition from antiquity to the middle ages, arguing instead that a deep divide runs through “late antiquity,” separating the Roman slave system from its early medieval successors.
In the process, he covers the economic, social, and institutional dimensions of ancient slavery and presents the most comprehensive analytical treatment of a pre-modern slave system now available. By scouring the late antique record, he has uncovered a wealth of new material, providing fresh insights into the ancient slave system, including slavery’s role in agriculture and textile production, its relation to sexual exploitation, and the dynamics of social honor. By demonstrating the vitality of slavery into the later Roman empire, the author shows that Christianity triumphed amidst a genuine slave society.
KYLE HARPER is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, where he teaches a range of courses on Greek and Roman civilization and the rise of Christianity. He has published articles on social and institutional aspects of later Roman history in the Journal of Roman Studies, Classical Quarterly, and Historia.
And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen . . . and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men . . . (John of Patmos, imagining the fall of Rome, Revelation (Authorized Version)) Lest anymore Africa be drained of its own people, and in herds and columns, like an endless river, such a great multitude of both men and women lose their freedom in something even worse than barbarian captivity . . . (Augustine of Hippo, watching the fall of Rome, New Letters )
Acknowledgments
This book is a heavily revised version of my doctoral thesis. Over the years spent working on this project, I have accrued more debts than I can mention, much less ever repay. First on this list are the readers of the dissertation, who have helped me develop the argument and presentation from a very early stage. Brent Shaw was kind enough to serve on an extramural dissertation committee, and then he was generous enough to provide comments whose detail and insight exceeded any call of duty. My supervisors at Harvard deserve special recognition.
Christopher Jones was patient beyond measure with a thesis whose virtues never included brevity. I have learned much from his guidance and been inspired by his example as a meticulous scholar. I am grateful for his constant support and friendship. Michael McCormick has been an influential mentor, a generous patron, and a great friend. His enthusiasm is contagious, and I hope I can reflect, even a little bit, his commitment to a rigorous but enterprising brand of scholarship. I am grateful to the entire team at Cambridge, and I owe special thanks to Michael Sharp, not only for his kind and efficient management of the publication process, but also for selecting such conscientious reviewers for the manuscript. Peter Garnsey is the greatest living authority on ancient slavery, and his generous and gentle suggestions have improved the final product considerably.
Noel Lenski is a scholar-saint. He too is working on a study of late antique slavery, and the thoughtful report he gave on my manuscript was truly extraordinary. In innumerable ways, this book is better because Noel combines uncommon erudition with uncommon generosity. Anyone who has finished graduate school knows how important friends are to survival. Jeff Webb has been a close comrade for many years and has read this manuscript in various forms numerous times. Jonathan Conant was assigned as my “mentor” in my first year of graduate school, and he has helped me ever since. Andrew Kinney made me smarter and provided cynical relief that kept me sane. Daniel Sargent has been my arbiter elegentiae in all matters of composition; he repeatedly read large chunks of the manuscript. Greg Smith and Scott Johnson have been trusted advisors throughout, and they remain my closest co-conspirators in the study of the late antique world. I have been fortunate to have received such strong institutional support while working on this project.
Dumbarton Oaks is the greatest scholarly sanctuary in the world, and the bulk of the research for this book was completed during a year as a Junior Fellow there. I thank Alice-Mary Talbot for her patience and support, and I will be eternally grateful to Deb Stewart, whose sharp eye brought to my attention the publication of a certain inscription from Thera. I thank William Harris for organizing the Economics Workshop for Ancient Historians, which fortuitously came just as I was making final revisions. I learned from all of the participants there, but I should single out the help of Ronald Findlay, Walter Scheidel (who has given me valuable advice on many occasions), and Peter Temin, who generously and carefully read parts of the manuscript. I thank the organizers of the Oxford Summer Epigraphy School, especially John Bodel. I am in the debt of Cam Grey, who has read parts of the manuscript and has always shared his ideas and his work. I thank Joachim Henning for teaching me so much about early medieval archaeology in general and slave shackles in particular. I am grateful for the thoughtful guidance of Daniel Smail. I thank Domenico Vera for sharing his work and for thoughtprovoking correspondence; I have learned much about late Roman slavery from him.
I have received hospitality and generous help from both the Mainz Academy and the Groupe International de Recherche sur l’Esclavage dans l’Antiquite in Besanc ´ ¸on. I am grateful for the support and friendship of my colleagues at the University of Oklahoma. I became a Roman historian because of Rufus Fears, and I am thankful that I can walk and talk about history with someone who knows so much about the ancient world. Ellen Greene is a great colleague, and she has provided invaluable help as I developed my argument in part ii. I am deeply grateful for the support of the Department Chairman, Samuel Huskey. At crucial junctures, Ronald Schleifer has proven a valuable advisor. Thanks are due to the library staff at at the University of Oklahoma, especially for the patience of the interlibrary loan department and the indulgence of the circulation team.
I thank the Honors College for funding through its research assistant program, and Jordan Shuart for her careful help with the bibliography. The office of the Vice-President for Research has provided indispensable material support, as has the College of Arts and Sciences. Last but not least, I am so grateful for the friendship and patronage of President David Boren. Any book, but especially a first book, is the result not just of the author’s effort, but of the family whose support makes such effort possible. I am infinitely thankful for my family, whose love, support, and sacrifice made possible college, graduate school, and now the long hours that go into writing. I wish my grandparents, Kenneth and Maxine Hayes, were here to hold the book, because I know how much they would have enjoyed that. Their support meant everything. I dedicate the book to my whole family, to my mom Kay, to my daughter Sylvie, and especially to my wife Michelle, whose love, care, and home cooking sustain me.
Introduction
conquest and capital: the problem of slavery in roman history The Roman empire was home to the most extensive and enduring slave system in pre-modern history. Slavery has been virtually ubiquitous in human civilization, but the Romans created one of the few “genuine slave societies” in the western experience. The other example of classical antiquity, the slave society of Greece, was fleeting and diminutive by comparison. Stretching across half a millennium and sprawling over a vast tract of space, Roman slavery existed on a different order of magnitude. Five centuries, three continents, tens of millions of souls: Roman slavery stands as the true ancient predecessor to the systems of mass-scale slavery in the New World. We cannot explain the Roman slave system as the spoils of imperial conquest.
Roman slavery was a lasting feature of an entire historical epoch, implicated in the very forces that made the Roman Mediterranean historically exceptional. Military hegemony, the rule of law, the privatization of property, urbanism, the accumulation of capital, an enormous market economy – the circulation of human chattel developed in step with these other characteristic elements of Roman civilization. This book is a study of slavery in the late Roman empire, over the long fourth century, ad 275-425 Throughout this period, slavery remained a vigorous institution. The primary spokesmen of the age provide vivid testimony to the importance of slavery. Augustine, bishop of Hippo on the coast of North Africa, could claim that “nearly all households” owned slaves. Eastern church fathers and social critics like John Chrysostom assumed that commercial agriculture, based on slave labor, was the road to riches.
Their contemporaries spoke of Roman senators with thousands of slaves toiling in the countryside. The laws, papyri, and inscriptions of the age bear out these claims. An inscription, recently uncovered, lists the names and ages of slaves belonging to a single land-owner in the Aegean. There is not a more concrete, irrefutable artefact of large-scale rural slavery from the entire Roman era. And hundreds of more humble testimonies – a receipt for a Gallic slave boy sold in the east, a reading exercise teaching young boys how to dominate their slaves, a report of a slave who broke down watching his wife being flogged – add historical plausibility and human drama to the story of late Roman slavery. When and why did the Roman slave system come to an end? These are classic questions, central in the effort to construct grand narratives of transition from antiquity to the middle ages. Did the end of imperial expansion generate a critical deficit of bodies on the slave market, leading inexorably to the decline of the system? Did the contradictions of slave labor force an inevitable crisis in the slave mode of production, ushering in the age of feudalism? This book will answer “no” to both of these traditional propositions.
The abundant and credible evidence for slavery in the fourth century sits poorly with any narrative which posits a structural decline or transformation of the slave system before this period. And yet, somehow the slave system of the later Roman empire has always been regarded as a system in decline or transition, separate from the age when Roman society was a genuine slave society, when the slave mode of production was dominant in the heartland of the empire. To understand this enduring tension between the evidence and the story of decline, we must appreciate the way that the grand narratives of ancient slavery were formed, and the assumptions their creators made about the nature of slavery, its causes and dynamics.
Let us, as a thought experiment, imagine two versions of the rise and fall of Roman slavery. The first is organized around the role of conquest. Having emerged victorious from the Second Punic War, the Romans looked outward and embarked on a campaign for Mediterranean hegemony that lasted two centuries. In the wake of conquest came slaves, the ultimate spoils of empire. Millions of captives flowed into Italy, chained into gangs and forced to work the plantations of the senatorial aristocracy. The small farmer, the backbone of the citizen army, was forced to take part in ever longer campaigns and found himself gradually displaced by slave-based estates. The countryside was overrun with plantations, a process which triggered spasms of servile unrest in Sicily and then the mainland. When the empire reached its boundaries, the expansion of slavery too had reached its limits.
The system gradually folded in upon itself. Natural reproduction stalled the decline but also modified the nature of the slave system, as masters allowed slaves to have families, installed them on plots of their own, and treated them more leniently. By the late empire an alternative form of dependent labor was required, and the state complied in the institution of the colonate, a fiscal system tying rural laborers to the land. Our second model of Roman slavery is organized around capital – shorthand for the networks of property and exchange created by Roman law and the Roman economy. In this account, the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean was a hostile takeover of the world system that Greek and Punic empires had prepared. In the crucial second century, the Romans began to create an economy on an unprecedented scale. Roman roads criss-crossed the landmass from Spain to Syria; the sea lanes were cleared of pirates; the populations on the northern shores of the Mediterranean consumed grain from the fertile fields of Africa and Egypt; cities flourished as never before. Wine became the first of history’s great cash crops.
Urban markets fostered trade and specialized production. Roman slavery matured not because captives of war glutted the western Mediterranean with cheap bodies for sale, but because this new economy created the ability to consume and exploit slave labor on an unprecedented scale. Far from being decadent by the second century ad, the slave system peaked in the pax Romana. In this model, the decline of the slave system is not encoded in its very genesis and is thus harder to explain. These two outlines are caricatures, and if this book will favor the second interpretation, any ancient historian would admit that there is an element of truth in both accounts. The caricatures are useful, though, because they can help us understand the formation of the consensus that Roman slavery was on its downward slope by the time of the late empire. The first version of Roman slavery, the conquest thesis, took shape in an era when economic history lay in the future, when legal, military, and moral themes dominated historical investigation. This narrative of Roman slavery would provide the pattern of rise and fall, the default position.
Even as the second, economic model has gained a progressively larger place in the way historians think about ancient slavery, the basic trajectory of rise and fall has scarcely changed. So not only is there a tension between the extensive evidence for slavery in the late empire and the thesis of decline, there is a deeper disjuncture between the thesis of decline and the structural dynamics within which historians describe the trajectory of the Roman slave system. In other words, if capital rather than conquest was a motive force in the Roman slave system, then why has the story of decline been written almost exclusively as though the system were a product of martial expansion? This tension goes back to the nineteenth century, when the plotline of Roman slavery’s rise and fall would be recast in economic terms. Max Weber was the axial figure in this turn. In 1896 he offered the classic formulation of the conquest thesis. In Weber’s account, the rise of the Roman empire created a system of slave labor which was a direct outgrowth of imperial conquest. Even the control of slave labor was a continuation of war, organized on plantations that were run as army barracks, with celibate male slaves chained together. The end of conquest, then, was nothing less than “the turning point” of ancient civilization.
The end of military expansion catalyzed a process in which the slave supply withered, and consequently the price of labor rose. In turn, the slave system began to mutate internally, as slave-owners allowed slaves to form families, and slaves dissolved into the undifferentiated mass of rural dependents. These changes, in step with the development of the colonate, led to the gradual emergence of medieval serfdom. In his article, Weber compassed nearly every argument which would be made for the decline of slavery over the next century, and its influence would be impossible to overstate. His model takes its reading of the evidence, its assumptions of rise and fall, from a pre-existing mold. And Weber’s account suggests that conquest moves capital, creating a “political capitalism” that temporarily displaced the natural, oikos-based society; slavery was the core feature of this political capitalism.
In the same period, a detailed Marxist interpretation of ancient slavery was taking shape. Most of Marx’s own work on pre-capitalist societies, including Roman history, was embryonic or unpublished; the details were left to Engels and the heirs of the Marxist tradition. The Marxist framework that developed in the late nineteenth century would place Roman slavery within an evolutionary model of development organized around modes of production. The late Roman empire straddled the threshold between ancient slavery and medieval feudalism. Ciccotti, who provided the first full-scale treatment of ancient slavery from a Marxist perspective, identified the putative inefficiency of slave labor as the motor of class conflict which led to the crisis of the slave system. This dogma would remain central in orthodox Marxist scholarship on Roman slavery, particularly in the Soviet bloc. In fact it was only within Communist circles that the study of ancient slavery was very active for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. An enormous body of literature accumulated, little of it edifying, seeking ever finer analysis of the “crisis of the slave-holding order” in Roman history. In this tradition, conquest created slavery; internal contradictions undermined it.
It was only in the s that serious reconsideration of Roman slavery began, informed by new approaches to economic history but also armed with piles of emerging archaeological data. These influences, in conjunction, would allow the first overt discussion of the relative importance of conquest and capital, of politics and economics, in the rise and fall of Roman slavery. This conversation would be caught, cross-wise, in the middle of a broader debate over the relative merits of “primitivist” and “modernist” views of the Roman economy. Finley described the rise of Roman slavery as the result of a structural shortage of labor created by the mass military mobilization of the Italian peasantry and the institutional protections that prevented land-owners from enslaving free citizens. Hopkins gave the finest statement of this model in a monograph with the revealing title, Conquerors and Slaves. Finley was too perceptive an empirical historian to believe that the decline of slavery was a foregone conclusion.
He stressed the endurance of the Roman slave system and scrupulously admitted that the study of later Roman slavery remained problematic. In these same years, scholars in France and Italy began to analyze Roman slavery with the categories of class and capital, but without the dogmatism that had paralyzed Marxist historiography in the Communist bloc. In diametric opposition to orthodox Marxism, the neo-Marxist school situated Roman slavery within the modern, advanced sector of the ancient economy. Slavery was a profitable institution embedded in circuits of exchange-oriented production. This shift, influenced by the contemporary work on the economics of American slavery, has been a sort of Copernican revolution in the study of Roman slavery. Equally fatefully, the neo-Marxist school advanced the debate by making use of archaeological evidence. The most obvious example is the excavation of the villa at Settefinestre, which connected a specific site, and by extension an entire settlement pattern, to the economic forms described by the Roman agricultural writers.
The archaeology of trade played a complementary role: the slave mode of production was correlated with the extraordinary distribution of containers which carried Italian wine throughout the Mediterranean in the late republic and early empire. Here it is not just military conquest, but more crucially the conquest of markets which fueled the slave system. By the s the case for emphasizing capital in the causal framework of slavery was gaining momentum. The death knell for the conquest thesis quickly followed, as for the first time research turned to ask the primary question of whether or not conquest even could have produced a slave system on the Roman scale. The answer has been a resounding “no,” which continues to echo throughout the discussion. Scheidel has shown that natural reproduction rather than military conquest was the principal source of the slave supply.
This research has kindled a serious discussion about the number of Roman slaves; only in recent years have credible figures for the dimensions of the Roman slave system been proposed. Based on little evidence, Beloch, Brunt, and Hopkins had produced estimates of the slave population that were fantastically overblown. Downsizing the Roman slave population does nothing to mitigate slavery’s significance; rather, it clarifies slavery’s role in transforming an ancient economy. The new insights into the scale and supply of the Roman slave population have a dramatic effect on the way we understand the mechanics of the Roman slave system – including the significance of females, families, child labor, etc. And cutting down the slave population to realistic size also reconfigures the way we understand the trajectory of Roman slavery’s rise and fall, the measure of decline. The current wisdom on the Roman slave system might be something like this.
The Roman conquest in the second century bc catalyzed an economic transformation of Italy. Conquest augmented a slave supply that was diverse and even in its early phases relied profoundly on natural reproduction as a source of new bodies. The growth of urban markets, the rise of wine as a cash crop, the influx of capital, and heavy demands on the free peasantry created demand for agricultural slave labor in Italy, a need for estate labor which had no precedent on this scale. Within this revisionist narrative of slavery’s rise, the destiny of Roman slavery has remained vague. As the colonate, at least in its older form as an intermediate stage between slavery and feudalism, has been exposed for the convenient historian’s myth that it always was, it is less clear than ever what happened to Roman slavery in the late empire. Old stories die hard.
Many propose that Roman slavery was gradually resorbed into an economy where more traditional forms of labor, especially tenancy, dominated. Common is the idea that slaves were allowed families and used like tenants on extensive estates, latifundia, as part of a transition from ancient slavery to medieval serfdom. The shades of Marx and Weber still stalk this corner of the past, and the history of late Roman slavery has never broken free of the intellectual coils first imposed by the conquest thesis. Building on the work that has so profoundly renovated our understanding of Roman slavery’s expansionary period, this book tries to re-frame the last phases of Roman slavery. Such a venture requires us to suspend some deep-seated assumptions about the nature and trajectory of ancient slavery, and it is worth identifying at the outset some of the principal turns introduced by this account of late Roman slavery. () We should abandon the presuppositions about slavery’s rise and fall planted by the conquest thesis, especially as these assumptions have been quietly embedded in the influential narratives outlined by Marx and Weber. A complete, critical reappraisal of the evidence for slavery is imperative. ()
The slave supply and the relative efficiency of slave labor were important determinants of the slave system, but they were hardly the only ones, and neither was as simple or uni-directional as has often been supposed. What is needed is a comprehensive model based on supply and demand, with specific focus on the occupational and demographic structures of the slave system and the institutional properties of slave labor. () The pattern of change is not to be described by “transition.” With little basis in the evidence, and less conceptual support, evolutionary models of change have dominated the study of late Roman slavery. But Roman slavery did not become medieval serfdom, and late antiquity was not an intermediate stage between antiquity and the middle ages. This book will suggest that a deep rupture runs down the middle of the period known as late antiquity. Mediterranean society remained a genuine slave society into the early fifth century, when finally the underlying structures of demand began to disintegrate in a way that brought an end to the epoch of ancient slavery.
“the rich man dances in the sand!”: the mediterranean economy in the late empire This book is a study of slavery in the territories surrounding the Mediterranean, from ad to . At the beginning of this period, the Roman empire was emerging from a half-century of political crisis and monetary chaos – a succession of ill-starred claimants to the throne, constant civil war, and continuous debasement of the currency. But emerge the empire did. The administrative foundations of bureaucratic monarchy were reinvigorated under Diocletian; Constantine added a new capital, a new religion, and a new currency, the gold solidus. Historians no longer speak of a suffocating oriental “Dominate,” and in fact the late Roman state is now seen as a rather approachable and even responsible, if always severe, public authority. A single empire, under a single civil law, held sway from northern Britain to the southern frontiers of Egypt, from Syria to Spain. And yet, a century-and-a-half later, at the end of our period, a new and more fundamental age of crisis would begin in the west. Rome was sacked, and over the next two centuries the western territories of the empire would be parceled up among Germanic successor kingdoms. The eastern empire would remain intact longer, until it too in the seventh century was dismembered by conquerors out of Arabia. Over the last generation, these pivotal centuries of the human past have been rescued from the pall of “decline” which had hung over them since before the time of Gibbon.
The idea of late antiquity, of a vital period between the age of Marcus Aurelius and Mohammed, has cleared the path to reconsider the survival and eventual demise of Roman slavery. It is no longer reflexive to view events and processes of this period as part of a transition from the bright classical past to the dark medieval future. At the same time it must be noted that the creation of an intellectual space for late antiquity has not, thus far, led to a broad reconsideration of slavery. This is understandable, not only because the notion of a mechanistic transition from slavery to feudalism is so alien to the re-conception of the age, but also because the coherence of late antiquity as a period rests on religious and cultural foundations. And yet it is increasingly possible to describe massive structural changes in the material foundations of late antique societies – changes that ultimately shaped the destiny of the slave system. Slavery is an economic phenomenon, and a history of slavery must be situated within the economic history of the ancient world. Yet anyone who would try to describe the economic foundations of slavery in the fourth century will quickly become aware that the period straddles two distinct but overlapping traditions in the discipline of ancient history. The economic historiography of the high Roman empire has turned on debates about structure and scale; in the late Roman empire the themes of continuity and change dominate.
A tradition of inquiry running through Weber and Rostovtzeff asks what kind of economy the Roman empire created. Historians of the late Roman period, from Dopsch and Pirenne onward, have looked to measure the extent of change in late antiquity: how long the east–west trade routes remained open, when a certain city or landscape declined. These traditions have not always been in dialogue, yet a history of slavery in the fourth century squarely intersects them both. We must ask, what kind of economy nurtured the Roman slave system, and how far had it changed in the late empire? The Roman economy was preponderantly agricultural. Wheat and barley, wine, oil, and textiles were its main products. Most of the output was consumed directly by its producers, while only a fraction of it entered the realm of exchange. Yet, the Roman economy was far more dynamic than a subsistence economy, as evidenced by a now-familiar litany of proxies: cities, shipwrecks, ceramics, coins, pollutants, and so on. Commerce and urbanism expanded dramatically under Roman rule. The basket of goods consumed by some fairly ordinary Romans suggests high levels of commercialization.
The Roman empire brought with it relative peace, a stable currency, transportation infrastructure, property rights – in short, the institutional conditions for trade and even growth. But how much trade and growth existed, and how are we to describe their transformative potential in the Roman world? This is where consensus ends as the frontiers of knowledge are briskly expanding. The Roman economy was apparently the most successful first-millennium economy. It attained levels of complexity which were only equaled in a handful of pre-industrial “efflorescences.” The Roman economy was exceptional. Economic growth in the Roman empire was ultimately restricted by low levels of technology, limited specialization, and diminishing returns on the land, but what matters more for us is complexity, the rise of thick networks of exchange. Urbanism, bulk commercial exchange, and the creation of a large middling element of society were the inter-related features of this exceptionalism. Complexity and integration were limited by the much larger backdrop of technologically primitive, near-subsistence production, but they were decisive for the Roman slave system.
Slavery has been ubiquitous in human history, but in pre-industrial societies, it was usually dominated by elite ownership of female domestics. Roman slavery is exceptional on two counts: slave-ownership was widespread within the sizeable middling classes, and slave labor played an important role in commercialized, agricultural production on elite land. The nexus of towns and trade not only marked the Roman economy as exceptional, they are the key to understanding Roman slavery. As we move into the late Roman empire, questions of continuity and change overtake questions of structure and scale. The problems are interdependent, and the early imperial economy is often an implicit benchmark. Given that the Roman imperial economy was exceptional, and that trade and urbanism were markers of its complexity, how does the late Roman economy compare? Archaeology has been of paramount importance, for it offers an especially tangible index of stability and loss. In recent years, moreover, a wave of synthetic work has produced some consensus on the patterns of production and exchange in late antiquity. Archaeology has demonstrated the breadth and scale of the fourth-century recovery. The traces of exchange networks and settlement patterns, unsurprisingly, register the effects of the third-century crisis which, like a pulse felt across the empire, disrupted the economy. But the basic skeleton of the imperial economy perdured. The recovery was uneven, as parts of the empire, notably Italy, never recaptured their former glory. But the fourth century was the age of the provinces. Britain, southern Gaul, coastal Spain, and North Africa flourished.
In the east it is possible to speak without qualification of the beginnings of an extraordinary phase of expansion. Greece and Asia Minor prospered, and the provinces of the Levant would experience their economic peak in the centuries of late antiquity. The fourth-century economy was characterized by exchange, integration, and commercialized production. It was a world built around money: “The use of money welds together our entire existence, and it lies at the foundation of all our affairs, and if something is to be bought, or something is to be sold, we do it all with money.” The cities were a hallmark of the system. Around , “golden Rome, first among cities, home of the gods,” was still home to some half a million hungry inhabitants, with Constantinople catching up, and Carthage, Alexandria, and Antioch also thriving. Urbanization may have remained in the realm of percent. The lynchpin of the economy remained the politically guaranteed transfer of food from the southern to the northern rim of the Mediterranean, but only a part of this trade was subsidized by the state. By no means was the commercial system of the fourth century an administered economy. The Expositio totius mundi, a fourth-century tract written by a merchant, provides us with a trader’s eye view of the Roman world.
This “practical guide to the best buys of the fourth-century empire’s different shores” presents a Mediterranean economy integrated by well-informed merchants who paid careful attention to circuits of production and consumption. The author knew where to find good cheese, wine, oils, grain, textiles, and slaves. The Mediterranean market created by the Roman empire was still intact. While the third-century crisis did not undermine the essential framework of the Roman economy, events in the fifth century did, by contrast, re-orient the Roman economy towards its demise – in the west. This fact makes it problematic to speak of late antiquity as a unified period. The fragmentation of the state, and the disruption of markets, progressively eroded the conditions which had fostered the complexity of the Roman economy. There was never total depopulation or total collapse. There remained local markets, regional exchange. What was lost was complexity – bulk exchange, middling consumers, the integration of markets, currencies, and laws. Urbanism is a stark index. The population of Rome fell, from some half a million in ad to perhaps ,, perhaps even less, by ad . There was great regional variation in the timing and extent of decline, but the direction was general and remarkably prolonged, until a universal nadir in the seventh century. The Roman pattern of dispersed settlement remained the dominant system in the western countryside, but within that pattern the villas died out in a “slow agony” that only in the eighth century was reversed by a settlement system oriented around the nucleated villages which had been gestating amidst the ruins of the old landscape. Exchange and connectivity slowly dwindled, until there was one pitiful line of trade running east and west across the Mediterranean.
Only in the Carolingian period did a long and arduous turnaround begin, based on new systems of settlement, exploitation, and trade. In the east, and in Africa, the tempo of change was altogether different. The commercial economy thrived deep into late antiquity. “O how lovely the beach looks when it’s filled with merchandise and it bustles with businessmen! Bundles of different clothing are pulled from the ships, countless people delight at the sailors’ cheerful singing, and the rich man dances in the sand!” In Africa, the fourth and fifth centuries were a peak, the sixth and seventh centuries a phase of gradual recession. In the east expansion continued throughout the fifth century. We will follow the intensification of slave labor along the edges of this great eastern migration of wealth. There is considerable debate over when this expansion slowed or involuted. In the Aegean, Asia Minor, and Egypt, there is a good case for permanent reverse in the sixth century, in the wake of catastrophes like plague and earthquake. Certainly the end of annona shipments in ad 618 fractured a great trading spine. But in the Levant expansion continued at least into the seventh century, into the Islamic period. The Carolingians would find in the Caliphate a desirable and much wealthier trading partner whose goods they coveted, and yet they were able to maintain a balance of payments only by exporting that commodity of last resort among underdeveloped economies, their people, slaves. By the end of late antiquity, the changes which began in the fifth century had come full circle, and western Europe had become a supplier of the slave trade rather than a consumer. There are areas of debate and uncertainty, inevitably, but more striking are the outlines of consensus which make it possible to frame the history of slavery within broader structures of production and exchange.
The economy of the long fourth century, even if high imperial levels were never re-attained, belongs to the Roman efflorescence. It was an economy that allowed middling consumption on a mass scale and that fueled strong demand for farm labor in the commercialized sectors of the countryside. The fourth century was still home to a complex system of production and consumption, while the fundamental shocks to that economic nexus, in the fifth and seventh centuries, provide an explanation for the end of ancient slavery that is not only consistent with the evidence but also coherent in terms of its analytical architecture. By the sixth or seventh centuries, patterns of consumption and production for the market had declined, and with them the slave system. The demand curve for slaves collapsed, as both the consumption power of the middling classes and the elite’s ability to control market-oriented production were eroded in an early medieval world in which there was simply far less exchange. So a history of slavery in the long fourth century is not a history of slavery in late antiquity. It is, rather, a history of slavery during the last phase of a politically and economically united Mediterranean. Roman slavery did not become serfdom; it receded, out of existence, as the Roman economy was pulled back by the tides into the sea of subsistence that engulfed all pre-industrial economies.
recovering the late roman slave system: evidence and models This book is organized into three parts, exploring in turn the material, social, and institutional foundations of slavery. Methodologically, it is inspired by two paradoxical convictions. First, that a new study of late Roman slavery should be founded on a fresh and thorough investigation of the late antique sources. Second, that we must operate on the skeptical assumption that the surviving evidence is inadequate. On the one hand, this book is written in the belief that there is considerable evidence for late Roman slavery which has never entered the discussion and which, if presented, is sufficient to demand a revision of the dominant paradigms. Exhaustive research is the beginning of revision. On the other hand, the study of Roman slavery in the earlier periods has shown that the evidence has limits, that systematic gaps in the record fundamentally obstruct the search for a complete understanding of ancient slavery. Consequently our own assumptions – implicitly or explicitly – inevitably fill out the picture. This book thus hopes to improve our understanding of the late Roman slave system by working simultaneously on empirical and conceptual fronts. A primary goal of the book is to return ad fontes and to recover the world of late antique slavery.
Throughout these pages it will become obvious that one objective is simply to present the abundant record on late Roman slavery in order to enrich the material available for the ongoing conversation on late Roman society. Much of the evidence for slavery in late antiquity remains unfamiliar. Cato the Elder and Spartacus dependably appear in general histories of slavery, but there is no objective reason why these cases should be more well known to the history of slavery than any of the comparable late antique examples. This book is, in one sense, an unabashed experiment in organized impressionism, trying to balance decades or more of the subtle influence which comes from greater collective knowledge of the earlier sources by putting on a canvas the thousands of small brushstrokes which can be restored from the late antique record. The findings draw opportunistically upon the inscriptions and papyri of the period. Unfortunately, neither the papyri nor the inscriptions offer a stable data set which allows us to evaluate what is typical and what is exceptional, or to track change over time. Nevertheless, there are enough papyri from the fourth century to form an impression of household slaveownership and estate-based slavery. The fourth century cannot boast as many papyri as the early centuries of the Roman empire, but the record is superior to that of the fifth century, which is bleak.
The epigraphic evidence is relatively sparse compared to earlier centuries but still provides insights. Above all, a set of fragmentary census inscriptions from the fourth century provides our only objective, quantitative data on the use of slaves in agriculture and on the demographics of a rural slave population. Consequently, these documents will surface throughout the book. The legal record also presents a rich if highly particular source of information, and this book tries to make systematic use of the Theodosian Code. But the laws require special handling, and part iii is entirely devoted to an exploration of the legal sources. If papyri, inscriptions, and laws are used whenever possible, at the heart of this book lies the exhaustive use of the literary sources from late antiquity. The reliance on written sources is a strategy born of necessity. It is no simple task to write the history of slavery from the texts. Imagine trying to write the history of slavery in the early Roman empire without the great sixth volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, the agricultural manuals, or the Digest; add a thicket of stubborn, ill-founded pre-judgments derived from nineteenth-century historiography.
Those are the obstacles in writing the history of late Roman slavery. And yet, the literary evidence is extensive and vivid. The fourth century has left behind a truly extraordinary amount of material, and in exploring it we are aided by research tools which were inconceivable even in the recent past. Electronic databases of Greek and Latin texts make it possible to create instant lexical indices. John Chrysostom mentioned slaves over , times in his surviving corpus. A generation ago, it took several years and a monograph to outline what he said about slavery. Using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), it takes a few seconds to locate every reference to slavery in the works of this most vocal Christian warrior, and he is one of our primary informants. These tools re-configure what it is possible to do with the literary record.
The databases make it immediately apparent how pervasive slavery was in late Roman society. Culling for references to the principal words for “slave” (and there are many), the computers turned up , instances from the fourth to sixth centuries in Greek and Latin. The vast majority of these were of no great interest – biblical quotations, trite figures of speech, and so on. But amongst the chaff there is a bumper crop of original and interesting evidence, much of it “new.” Though some of these clues are mere flecks of insight, in conjunction they become rather significant. Often the insights are hiding in little-used texts: Asterius of Amasea will tell us about slavegirls on the auction block, Cyril of Alexandria will explain that prostitutes are forced into slavery by their masters, while Libanius and Theodoret of Cyrrhus tell us how slaves spend moments of nocturnal privacy. Even the pages of old favorites, Augustine or Chrysostom, still have insights to yield. A source base as rich and diverse as the late antique literary record still cannot necessarily provide a complete or objective account of the slave system.
Certain forces have systematically shaped the literary record and make it a particular sort of lens on the past. The late antique writings which make the electronic tools such an amazing resource come largely from the process of Christianization. This process, with its theological, ascetic, and pastoral dimensions, at times takes the historian close to the dense web of human relations that constituted social life. The Christians who left behind their thoughts often recapitulated the extreme upper-class bias in the ancient material. What is Jerome, with his clique of glamorous senatorial ascetics, if not another chapter in the overrepresentation of the rich and famous? But not all Christians were Jerome. In late antiquity, there was an unmistakable shift in the literary record towards mainstream Mediterranean households. The rich came to church, certainly, but Augustine or Chrysostom were in dialogue with a cross-section of society more diverse than Cicero or Pliny. The overrepresentation of the urban realm at the expense of the countryside, however, is an abiding and, at times, insuperable challenge. It is equally important to be conscious of how we use the literary sources.
Often the written evidence will be a reliable source precisely because the literature is used obliquely. The sermons of Augustine or Chrysostom, for example, were not written in order to describe the economy, but in passing they reveal casual assumptions about who owned slaves. This is not an excuse to let down our critical guard, and it will be advisable to consider key sources, like the Life of Melania the Younger, with a surfeit of scrutiny. But the problems with the literary evidence become more subtle in part ii, which explores the role of slavery in social relations. Here, we are so richly informed by the Christian authors precisely because we are nearer to the heart of their project. The Christian leadership of late antiquity had the idea of Christianizing society. It prompted a direct engagement with the habits of ancient society, and reformers will sometimes put words in the mouth of the average man. “You are telling me I can’t have sex with my slave-woman?” “Are you telling me not to beat my slave?”
These discursive moments give privileged insights into ancient society, precisely because of their critical stance. But we must be aware of the possible distortions or exaggerations which were encouraged by the stance of the bishops, and part ii tries to make careful, critical use of the literary evidence. A more dangerous distortion of the evidence lies in its chronological distribution. The generations between and are densely represented. Those very generations lived through a critical turning point. The church found itself vaulted from a triumphal survivor to become a newly dominant religion. At the same time, the collapse of imperial institutions in the west became irreversible, and the indices of material prosperity would follow a downward trajectory for the next two centuries. In the east the retrenchment of the state permitted a longer cycle of prosperity.
During the pivotal period, old and new existed side by side in ways they never would again. In his last years, Augustine could write a letter that would have traveled to Rome aboard ships carrying food to the old capital. In the letter, he would seek out the legal guidance of a trained lawyer so that, as bishop of Hippo, he could adjudicate cases of slave status according to the complex rules of Roman civil law. Augustine’s classical education, the imperial scale of his connections, even the infrastructure of travel which carried his letters, belonged to a world that he saw crumbling around him. The rich picture of social life as it existed around thus represents a challenge. Using the abundant material from those years, it is just possible to catch the importance of slavery in the structure of antique society. We can glimpse where slaves physically are, what they were doing, how they lived, how their masters felt about them and used their bodies and their labor. But it is a picture that is evanescent.
The sources thereafter begin to dwindle in quantity and in vividness. This decline is both exaggerated and real, a product of random factors in source preservation and a phenomenon linked to the slow, steady abatement of a way of life. It is just a fact that the late sixth century remains obscure in comparison to the late fourth century, and it is correspondingly more difficult to say with confidence what the slave system looks like. But in this gathering darkness of the fifth and sixth centuries, the modern historian of slavery has an indispensable ally in the archaeologist. If we are able to link slavery with patterns of production and consumption, urbanism and rural settlement, then archaeology can furnish new insights into the processes which contributed to the end of ancient slavery. Stones and sherds will never tell us directly about slaves, but they do tell us about the end of a way of life in which slavery was central. So far can the evidence take us.
We cannot, however, simply rewrite the last chapters of Westermann’s The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity and hope to find enough evidence to set aside his claims for decline. This book, therefore, is not positivist in design. It is not a guide to the sources, nor is it framed by the sources. The book is framed by problems, often the most difficult problems, in the belief that what is needed is an effort to describe the system, how it worked, and where its center of gravity lay. The sources are used to answer, not to generate, the questions we ask, and there is no guarantee that they are sufficient to that purpose. Some of the best analyses of the social and economic dimensions of Roman slavery have been guided by the methodological premise that because the evidence is insufficient, modeling must be used to control the assumptions we deploy to fill in the inadequate data. It is impossible not to “model” – in the sense of mentally filling out an inadequate record – from the moment that we ask questions of the system itself. We have already highlighted the cluster of ideas, the conquest thesis, which long steered the way historians thought about Roman slavery.
The conquest thesis seriously distorted the burden of proof in the study of Roman slavery, shaping the way that the limited and hopelessly imperfect evidence is read. In this subtle way, the ghost of the conquest thesis continues to haunt the study of Roman slavery. Sublimated into other narratives, it is never very far from the surface. The ambition of this book is to construct, from the ground up, a model of the slave system in the long fourth century. This exercise will make us continually aware of the limits of our evidence. The book begins by outlining the scale and distribution of the slave population. This reconstruction is the most heavily modeled part of the inquiry. Chapter sets the system in motion, considering first its sources of supply, its demographic profile, and its mechanisms of circulation. These, in turn, should be consistent with the occupational structure of the slave population. This proposed material framework of the slave system must then inform our investigation of the social fabric and institutional foundations of Roman slavery.
There is a practical check on this method: comparison. This book is not in any strong sense a comparative work, but it aspires to be informed by the great strides in the study of world slavery. This body of research should make us aware of the gaps and weaknesses of the traditional historiography of our own period. The neglect of slave-women, the constrictive view of plantation labor, the misguided idea that Christianity was incompatible with slavery, become all the more glaring in the panorama of world slavery. The diversity uncovered within the experience of modern slavery, even within times and places not far apart, should make us wary when we speak of “Roman slavery” (as we must inevitably do). Even as we scour every corner of the late antique record for the residues of the slave system, we should remain conscious of the limits of the evidence. One overarching deficiency cannot be stressed enough. We have not a single slave’s voice. We can and must listen to the master’s words as though they are only one side of a conversation whose other side is irretrievably lost. When we hear a master call his slaves “lazy,” we must imagine the invisible field of tension over work conditions underneath the stereotype. When we hear that a slave’s only consolation was “to invent rumors,” we must imagine the feeble leverage slaves gained from their intimate household knowledge in a face-to-face society with a strong sense of honor. We must look proactively for the small traces of the slaves’ agency within and against the system that sought systematically to dehumanize them.
This problem is by no means unique to late antiquity, for it plagues the study of ancient slavery in general. If anything, the late antique record is slightly less hopelessly inadequate. The triumph of Christianity prompted a perceptible change of inflection in the master’s voice. “How many obols have you paid for the image of God?” This quiver of doubt we will try to interpret in part ii. The book’s second epigraph evokes just such a brief and unexpected moment of candor. It is inspired by a desperate letter of Saint Augustine, written in his last years as he watched the empire fold in around him. Roman slave-traders, displaced from their old haunts, had swept through his province, carrying inside the empire the terror they were accustomed to visit on those beyond the frontiers. The bishop described the columns of slaves marched to the harbor, “like an endless river.”
There on the docks of Hippo they were boarded onto ships that would ferry them towards the social death of enslavement. That metaphor, of perpetual movement and elemental brutality, is one of our most arresting descriptions of Roman slavery. Stripped of ideology and convention, it is a glimpse of the Roman slave system as it appeared to an observer momentarily startled by its violence. How the violence and displacement were experienced by those whose bodies were stolen and sold it takes enormous will even to imagine. But the slave system has left its traces throughout the dense record of late antiquity. With enough patience and some cautious imagination, we can recover the remnants from this neglected corner of the past, often passed through in sweeping narratives of transition from antiquity to the middle ages, rarely searched with the care it deserves.
the end of ancient slavery: from modes of production to supply and demand The fourth-century Mediterranean was a vast space connected by an empire sitting on the sea.
This space was home to some million inhabitants, living under a single civil law, but in a society, or rather aggregation of societies, that enjoyed divergent levels of material advancement and natural resources. Over percent of these inhabitants lived in the countryside, their existence absorbed in the interminable rhythms of subsistence and reproduction. At the same time, this society was a volatile mixture of traditional and modern elements. Its teeming polyglot cities were nodes in an imperial network, home to a precociously large class of consumers, hustlers, slave-owners. Trade was a source of massive wealth. “Wheat becomes gold for you, wine congeals into gold for you, wool turns into gold in your hands!” Grain was eaten by mouths living hundreds of miles from the fields where it was grown. Wine, the dominant psychotropic commodity, was manically consumed, a staple of nutrition. High-quality lamps, table-wares, and rooftiles were made in bulk and circulated far from their point of manufacture and, most remarkably, penetrated well beyond the highest tier of society into peasant households. When the sea opened each spring, ships loaded with wheat, wine, oil, sauce, lumber, ceramics, textiles . . . and slaves criss-crossed the waters in a commerce whose volume and velocity had almost no precedent. The fourth-century empire needs to be conceived first as a space interconnected by webs of production and exchange. A danger lurks in thinking of the fourth-century empire in terms of its place in time. The temptation is too great to imagine fourth-century society, and the fourth-century slave system, on an arc between antiquity and the middle ages.
The idea of a transition from ancient slavery to medieval serfdom has endured for so long, cut a groove so deep, that it has created an almost inescapable course of intellectual path dependence. Yet it is essential, if we are to understand the slave system of the fourth century, that we scrape away these encrustations of thought. The story of transition is not rooted in the sources of the period. The slave population was not a stable group of humans capable of undergoing a step-by-step metamorphosis. The story of transition is a wholly inadequate way to approach the realities of a slave system in which some million souls were reduced to the status of a commodity. This book is an attempt to spend time among the slaves of late antiquity and to consider how they fit within the structures of empire in the fourth century rather than between the ancient world and the middle ages. Chapter outlines the scale and distribution of the slave population. This is a hazardous endeavor, to be sure, but it is, at a minimum, preferable to working uncritically with qualitative labels like “dominant” and “important.” We should imagine four categories of slave-holders: Illustrious, Elite, Bourgeois, and Agricultural. Illustrious households comprised the wealthiest 500–600 families in Roman society, the core of the senatorial order, who controlled staggering amounts of landed property and, on average, hundreds of slaves. Elite households included the next wealthiest –. percent of society, and they too were large-scale slave-owners.
These strata of Roman society owned half of all slaves, some . million souls. At the same time, Bourgeois slave-holders constituted some percent of the urban population, owning on average two slaves; likewise, the top tier of agricultural households held small numbers of slaves. These middling orders comprised percent of the Roman population, and they owned the other half of the slave population. The Roman slave system was thus both intensive and extensive. Slaves produced the commodities which underwrote Illustrious and Elite wealth, and they were embedded in the social dynamics of the broad middling strata. The top –. percent of Roman society owned the bottom percent, and the top percent of Roman society owned property in humans. In a pre-industrial society, on an imperial scale, these are remarkable figures. Chapter describes the supply side of the Roman slave system, Chapters and the demand side. A slave population on the order of million souls would have required hundreds of thousands of new bodies per annum to maintain replacement levels. Natural reproduction was the main source of new slaves, but child exposure, self-sale, kidnapping, and cross-border importation were major supplements. The supply system, in short, was diverse and decentralized. Chapter analyzes the demand for household slaves. Domestic slavery is not to be equated with consumption, if that implies lack of productivity.
Slave labor at the household level was economically significant. In large households, slavery allowed the family to operate as a firm, absorbing roles in education and commerce. In all slaveowning households, slave labor had an intimate relationship with textile production. The interface between the family, its labor supply, and the textile industry is one of the keys to understanding the Roman slave system. The economies of textile production encouraged the integration of slave labor within the household. Moreover, slave labor within agricultural households played a decisive part in the social stratification among village elites and wealthy peasants. Chapter offers a model of agricultural slavery organized around the interaction of four determinants: the slave supply, the total demand for labor, formal institutions, and the dynamics of estate management. Slave labor remained instrumental in agricultural production on elite land in the fourth century. Large land-owners held on the order of 30–40 percent of the land; they exploited it with a mix of tenants, slaves, and wage laborers.
The labor market of the fourth century was complex. Tenancy was quantitatively predominant, but slavery played a vital role in elite control over commercialized production. Demand for slave labor was a function not only of prevailing wages and transaction costs, but also of the demand for commodities, especially wheat, wine, oil, and textiles. The markets for these goods incentivized elite control over production on a massive scale. There was no form of estate organization that was uniquely expressive of slave labor. Slave labor was adaptive to a variety of crops and work regimes; slaves can be found on stock ranches in upper Egypt, on olive factories on Lesbos, on the wineries of Thera, on vast arable latifundia in Italy, and in the hills of North Africa herding their master’s flocks. Even though rural slaves accounted for something like percent of the total rural population, they were over percent of the total labor force on elite estates, a percentage that would have been higher in core regions of market-oriented production, lower in peripheral areas.
Slave labor was decisive in the profitable, cash-crop enterprises that rewarded control over production. Part ii moves towards the human experience of the Roman slave system. Chapter uses an incentive model to explore the aims and techniques of domination; the extraction of labor was the end of the master–slave relationship, and the nature of the labor performed by slaves was a primary influence on their exposure to violence and their prospects for reward. Chapter then turns to an even murkier side of Roman slavery, the world of the slave underneath the veil of violence and vulnerability. The slave’s options – to shirk or steal, to fight or flee, to form families and communities – are measured. While rural slaves enjoyed latitude to pursue family relationships, life for urban slaves was more varied, opened by the inherent anarchy of the city but lived along the razor’s edge of the free family’s life cycle. Chapter argues that Roman slavery bore a peculiar relationship to sexual exploitation.
Sexual exploitation has received only cursory attention, although it was a core feature of Roman slavery. Late marriage for men, the lack of any strong concept of male virginity, strict public and private surveillance of free women: the abuse of the slave’s body was built into Roman society. In other societies, race, religion or honor deterred, however ineffectually, the sexual use of slaves; in Roman society, it was tolerated, even encouraged. Chapter focuses on the circulation of social honor. Slaves made the wealth that underwrote the honor of the elite, and the middling classes built their honor on the ownership of slaves, even in small numbers. Part iii explores the institutional fabric of Roman slavery. A slave system of such magnitude and complexity would have been inconceivable without the active complicity of the state, especially in the absence of that sinister marker of status, race. Slavery was a relationship fraught with tension and a legal status whose boundaries required constant, active definition. Late Roman laws have often been read as reactionary measures against deepening status confusion. This book will stake out a position which is diametrically opposed to the idea of a progressive breakdown of the legal basis of slavery. The fourth century was an age of universal citizenship, when practically all inhabitants of the empire were subject to Roman civil law. Conflict was inherent in the system, and in the fourth century such conflict was more likely than ever to end up in Roman jurisdiction.
We can identify three arenas in which the edges of status required vigilant regulation: illicit enslavement, sex, and manumission. We need to imagine the constant human struggles behind these pressure points in the law of slavery. These were centrifugal forces within a complex slave system, constantly threatening to fray the edges of legal status. The active regulation of the Roman state provided the opposite, centripetal force, holding together the property rights of slave-owners over their human chattel. In the fourth century we see an imperial state that was energetically committed to the project of ruling a slave society. The material, social, and institutional foundations of slavery remained solid in the fourth century. The evidence will give us no reason to believe that, around ad , the Roman slave system was on a downward slope. The abundant evidence for late Roman slavery has often been noticed, of course, but it has proven harder to explain this vitality. The most enduring response to this impasse has been to argue that slaves, while still numerous, were already deployed in a feudal mode of production, managed as tenants rather than slaves. This neo-Marxist narrative is conscious of the evidence for slavery, but ultimately it represents a maneuver which Shaw has described with mordant precision: an attempt “to save appearances by endlessly re-tooling the utility of social and economic classes, modes of production, the special status of the Western city, and the origins of so-called feudalism . . . ”
The argument that late Roman slaves were effectively serfs or organized in a feudal mode of production does little justice to the sources of the period. Moreover, it lacks a robust explanation for change, relying on a just-so narrative in which ever-larger properties made direct management unworkable. There is, simply, not an account of late Roman slavery that is both responsible to the evidence and analytically compelling. What is really at stake in the perennial debate about the “end” of Roman slavery is the way we conceive of pre-industrial economies. Both Marx and Weber viewed Roman slavery as an exceptional interlude whose end was predestined. For Marx, Roman slavery was a variant of the community economy, fundamentally tied to war; for Weber, Roman slavery was an episode of war capitalism, a temporary exception to the oikos-based society which typified pre-modern, pre-rational market economies. The driving force of the slave system was political, exogenous to the economic system: conquest moved capital. When the neo-Marxist account of Roman slavery broke away from the orthodox models and began to admit that slavery could be inherently profitable and productive, there was a revealing moment of indecision over when and why the “crisis” of Roman slavery occurred. Having admitted that slave labor was efficient, the source of crisis was no longer apparent.
Some historians found in Rostovtzeff an explanation ready to hand: provincial producers arrived to wrest market share away from the slave-based estates of Italy. For others, Weber’s causal sequence, organized around diminishing supply, has seemed the best way to salvage the narrative of decline and transition. The ghost of class struggle quietly vanished, but the machinery looks the same. The root of the problem lies in the belief that Roman slavery was somehow a basic exception to the mechanics of pre-industrial society and that pre-industrial societies cannot really be shaped by movements of capital. The Roman economy was the most complex and successful economy of the first millennium, by some measures unmatched until the late middle ages. Even though the market was relatively limited in scope, it exerted a tremendous influence in the Roman empire. The dynamics of Roman slavery were not determined by primitive, pre-capitalist styles of exchange. Even if the Roman economy never achieved the breakthrough to continuous intensive growth, it can be analyzed in terms of capital and markets, in terms of demography, commerce, and institutions.
The refinements introduced over the last generation by historical demography, institutional economics, and comparative history allow the basic toolbox of neo-classical economics to be applied with more subtlety to the Roman empire. These insights open up a middle ground that does not require us to elide important differences between ancient and modern in the manner of Rostovtzeff, nor to accord them privileged status in the tradition of Bucher, Weber, and Finley. ¨ The rise of Roman slavery is increasingly appreciated in these terms, but the later phases of the slave system are still locked in older, deterministic interpretive frameworks. Instead of looking exclusively for “the” culprit in slavery’s decline, we should retreat and work with a general model of what causes slavery in the first place. Slavery was the outcome of the supply of slaves and the demand for their labor. The fundamentals of supply and demand provide a simple, core model, and that model lies behind the organization of the book. The Roman slave supply was diverse, decentralized, and stable. Demand was a complex and sensitive variable, determined by the ability of elites to capitalize on production and the capacity of middling households to consume and exploit slaves.
This model does not assume that labor relations are the substructure of change, but rather it places them within broader material, social, and institutional structures. It allows us to admit the diversity of Roman productive systems. It allows us to see intensive rural slavery and extensive household slavery as part of the same system, restoring to household slaves and female slaves a real berth in the story. This model allows us to see the long fourth century for what it was: the last phase of a deep cycle of intensification and integration that lasted from the late republic until the early fifth century ad. But this cycle of Mediterranean development was not an Antiquity that mutated into the Middle Ages, and ancient slavery did not become medieval feudalism. Even as we abandon the unwieldy terms of class struggle and modes of production, our approach will allow us to restore a credible account of human exploitation to the story of the Roman economy. The Roman economy was not an abstract wheat machine, mobilizing surpluses here and there with bloodless efficiency. The study of slavery asks us to peer inside the black box of production and to ask how the chain of commercialization and intensification worked. We will search for the fierce, little battles over time and effort, repeated on a human scale but across the Roman world, to dig trenches, to manure fields, to trim vines, to muster livestock. And it was not only the rich man who turned the slave’s labor into wealth and status; we must be sensitive to the millions of small-scale slave-owners whose possession of a slave’s body was a precious marker of respectability. To be a slave-owner was a manifest symbol of honor. “According to the common opinion, where there is no slave, there is no master.” But this was not a disembodied symbol.
The ownership of slaves, even on a petty scale, brought with it the need to capitalize on their labor. Within the humble household we must imagine the constant struggle to produce, and the use of violence, deprivation, and reward to discipline slaves to their daily of quotas of work. So even if we discard the language of class struggle, the actual material relations remain integral to the story, as we try to understand how the systems of exchange in the Roman world made it worthwhile to create wealth and honor through the domination of human chattel. This model permits a degree of narrative freedom in the way we describe change. The argument in this book is not that the fourth-century slave system was as extensive as before. But reduction does not have to be construed as decline nor to bear the burden of a great historical transition from one mode of production to another. The fourth-century slave system changed in quantity from the earlier centuries of Roman slavery, but it was still essentially Roman slavery. The slave system of the fourth century was a mature system. Slave labor was widespread not because slaves were cheap – in fact, they were dear – but because slave labor was deployed in roles where it was highly suitable. Slavery was used when the logic of capital investment rewarded tight control over labor; it was used when effort-intensive work could be physically extracted from unfree bodies; it was used when the dynamics of human capital, legal agency, and positive incentives encouraged long-term control; it was used when the values of honor and shame inhibited the development of a free market; it was used when the domestic sphere provided a venue for the supervision of unskilled labor.
The late Roman slave system was structurally stable, operating at a high equilibrium. Change would come from without, not from an internal crisis in the system, not from a long-term reduction in supply, not from the new-found dominance of provincial producers, but from the collapse of the material and institutional structures that drove the use of slave labor. The fall of the Roman empire was an important rupture in the history of slavery. The language of rupture is deliberate. Terms like “transition” and “transformation” suggest seamless change and constant direction, but the period of late antiquity was not monolithic, and the history of slavery was not defined by a single trajectory. The history of slavery in late antiquity needs to be divided into two phases, before and after the fifth century, and geographically into east and west. Slavery had a different destiny in each of these times and places. In the west the salient factor was the material breakdown of the Roman economy – and with it, urbanism, bulk exchange, and elite control over production. Between the fifth and seventh centuries, the Roman system gradually unraveled in the western empire. There were always slaves in western regions.
Indeed, our model would predict as much, since slavery is the outcome of both supply and demand. But the vital energy of the slave system was gradually sapped. Endemic warfare would flood the market with captives, even as that very instability washed out the foundations of the economy which had held together the demand for slaves. There was a caesura in the history of labor relations in the early medieval west. Medieval norms of power and dependency would owe virtually nothing to Roman slavery, as serfdom arose out of completely different material and institutional contexts. Roman slavery receded, and the legacy of Roman slavery to later ages of western Europe hardly extended beyond a half-forgotten vocabulary of status. In the east, change was gradual. The expansion of slavery seems to have been slowly reversed, not because demand collapsed, but because demographic growth, the availability of wage labor, and the fiscal system of the eastern empire created alternatives for estate labor. Slavery would continue to play a role in Byzantine households, however, throughout late antiquity and beyond.
The Caliphate, inheritor of the most vibrant parts of the late antique world, would become the vortex of the medieval slave trade. In this post-Roman Mediterranean, religious affiliation would overlay civic identity in new and fateful ways. By the eighth century, when intensification and commercialization began a long, slow ascent in western Europe, the Christian empire of the Carolingians would look on the Islamic world from the vantage of an underdeveloped economy onto a more advanced one. The slave shackles which had once appeared on the farms of late Roman Gaul could now be found only in the trading posts out of which the Carolingians shipped slaves towards the richer markets of the Levant. The European countryside was a landscape without slave labor, even as the kingdoms of the west became crucial suppliers of human chattel. By the ninth century, this very traffic in humans along the frontiers of the Carolingian world would attach a new name – sclavus, slave – to those men, women, and children who were truly seen as property, as commodities to be bought and sold, and not simply as dependent laborers.
The substitution of “slave” for “servus” was a belated recognition of a change that had begun with the fall of Rome. Late Roman slavery belonged to a world that was lost when the empire fell. Roman slavery exists on its own, as the only vast and enduring slave system of the ancient world, one of history’s only pre-modern slave societies. There would always be slavery in the Mediterranean, but the fall of the Roman empire meant the end of a slave society and its replacement, for the next thousand years of Mediterranean history, by a succession of societies with slaves. The role of slavery in agricultural production, and the long reach of middling slave-ownership, were not lasting. In the post-Roman centuries, female slaves came to command a higher price within a slave trade that would serve the domestic needs of a narrow elite.
Only with the rise of sugar, and the virulent expansion of the plantation complex out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic, would male slaves once again consistently draw higher prices on the market. Only in the New World would capital find such a vast unending frontier that the expansion of slavery would pass the limits it had known in the age of the Romans. But this book is about what happened in the first civilization that fostered thick commercial exchange, secure property rights, broad middling classes and extensive market-oriented production on a large scale over a long run. Roman slavery, sustained over half a millennium, and touching three continents, and taking millions of souls, was part of the unique mix of ancient and modern which the Romans created and, finally, lost.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق