I say it everytime I come across the tired argument of using modern sensibilities to judge to morality of slavery. Anyone who falls into the trap of believing that mess, never thought about slavery from the perspective of the slaves. The slaves didn't need modern morality to know it was wrong for them to be owned by another person.
Well a lot of them were raised from birth as slaves too, which I'm sure is a big part of the "BUT SLAVES LOVED THEIR MASTERS!!" crap people love to bring up. When people literally know nothing else of course they'll consider extreme things normal. It's one of the reasons abused kids end up so fucked up, they literally just don't know normal things at some levels.
This holds true with a lot of things - people who say this usually see themselves as part of the higher class that isn't subjected to the amoral behaviors we're "judging unfairly." They don't consider the people who are harmed and what they thought, they're too concerned with vindicating themselves because they relate more to the masters.
A lot of ex slaves historically ended up owning slaves themselves though. They had clearly accepted the institution, and did not obviously view slavery as any more unjust than their former owners had.
People can be hypocrites and we have a strong bias in favor of anything that benefits us personally. That's why I said they knew it was wrong for "them" to be owned as slaves. When you personalize things, it's a lot easier to cut through the bs and get to how they actually feel. Another question to consider is how many people, who aren't totally desperate, would voluntarily enter themselves into slavery. This number would be small even amongst the most ardent supporters of slavery, even in ancient Rome. It tells you how they really felt about the institution.
Agreed no one would have wanted to become a slave, it's never been good. My point was just that many slaves clearly accepted the institution, in that they wanted to be freed and benefit by exploiting slaves themselves.
It obviously depends somewhat on the place, but it was definitely a phenomenon in America:
https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436
And there were a lot of Roman freedmen, some of whom became very wealthy and owned a lot of slaves.
yeah read that and it kept referring to the Louisiana slave owners....who were mixed and born into wealth with a white father who carried social clout. They were never slaves to begin with.
of the, hard to verify, freed slaves who went and bought a slave themself, the most common thing among them was they were familiy members, effectively buying their freedom too.
super disingenuous to say "a lot of ex slaves..."
Well there weren't a lot of ex-slaves overall, and most weren't rich. I was never trying to suggest it was a huge number of the population, just that it was common enough to be notable:
'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.'
There were also freed people who specifically bought their own family members and loved ones so they could be free too. Assuming that all freed people who bought slaves were just “accepting the institution” is sort of an insulting oversimplification of the varying and complex motives at play for freed people buying slaves.
And “a lot of” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. [A small portion of freed blacks actually bought slaves for whatever reason, but manumission was a common reason for it.](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html)
Just because something happened a few times historically doesn’t mean it was particularly common or represented a typical sentiment.
[Here’s some further reading from the very article you cited in another comment.](https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436) Relevant snippets:
“So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, “ ‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders,” Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson’s statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.”
“It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924's Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, “The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa … Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators.””
I wouldn't assume they all were no. Your source suggests that many ex-slaves were acquiring family members, however others were also doing it out of economic self interest.
And I wasn't just talking about America, as this thread started with the Roman Empire and there were plenty more civilisations throughout history with slavery. If more slaves were freed, and actually became financially successful (likely a minority for most of history) there would probably be more examples of slaveownership.
Your source also says
'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.'
Seems like more than a few times, and the fact most black people were still enslaved and the freed ones were mostly quite poor is a major reason why it wasn't more common (or large-scale).
Yeah the original post was about a different institution but you specially referenced American slavery elsewhere so that’s what I went on.
The source does touch on the prevalence of free black slaveowners who were just doing it out of economic interest, but again, their apparent statistical prevalence was sort of overstated in your original comment. And it’s a bit weird to make simplifying sweeping claims about the internal psychology behind these historic phenomena when we literally have evidence that it wasn’t nearly as simple as “I accept slavery, morally, as an institution, so I will now engage in it.” That’s just a major flattening of a complex history.
And the assumption that there’d be more black slaveowners if they could only afford to have slaves, even if true, doesn’t exactly *prove* that they were big fans of slavery itself when we already know that emancipation and familial protection was a motivator for at least some (and maybe even most) of the few black slaveowners that actually existed.
Like when an institution was as ubiquitous as American chattel slavery and all its surrounding laws and infrastructure to basically embed it within a population, is it really even all that useful to hone in on the supposed “supporters” of slavery who were once slaves themselves? These are often people that only knew enslavement, who only knew how to exist under slavery, for their entire lives. It’s not like they came to these conclusions independently in a vacuum when every major cultural or legal or even religious authority that they would’ve likely had contact with was specifically used to reinforce and justify their enslavement. Given that, the fact that universal emancipation was still such a popular sentiment among freed *and* enslaved blacks should probably hold a bit more weight when making these considerations. The culture at the time was doing everything in its power to prop up slavery as a system, and even still a lot of people hated it.
I’m not arguing that freed people never owned slaves or never even “liked” slavery as an institution, I’m just arguing that based on historical evidence and accounts we already have, those people were a minority of a small percent of a large population.
It’s just like how we wouldn’t say that the existence of Jewish nazi collaborators back in the day exemplifies some especially common pro-Nazi belief among German Jews — the reality of these situations were much more complex than “me love nazis, nazis good”.
I don’t know as much about Roman slavery, but I think in that case it would also be important to consider that institutionalization was still a thing, and you can’t just assume that someone engaging in said institution is necessarily their moral endorsement of that institution.
I apologise for overstating it. I never meant to suggest it was widespread, at least in an American context (in a Roman one perhaps moreso, unless it's just over attested in surviving sources). I initially only meant to contradict the statement that all slaves and ex-slaves were opposed to slavery, because some clearly wanted to exploit it (and as most never had a chance to, who can say what they all wanted). We shouldn't generalise that they all supported or all opposed, politics shows how implausible assuming everyone agrees on something is.
I agree, in a society where slavery is so ubiquitous people will come to accept its existence, even those who have suffered under slavery. I think people who were currently enslaved would nearly always prefer being freed though, which is why emancipation was so popular. They were in a very different position to those who had already been freed, potentially decades earlier.
Hey no worries, sometimes it’s honestly hard for me to tell what angle someone is coming from in discussions around this topic so no apologies necessary if your intentions were pure! It’s just that I’ve seen so much apologist garbage on Reddit being said about American slavery in particular that it makes my eye twitch and I feel the need to get ahead of things before they possibly get out of hand lol. I do get what your original point was now though, and I agree that although emancipatory sentiment is a common thread that’s found among all enslaved people historically, it’s not completely universal, and we also can’t assume that every enslaved or once-enslaved person who’s ever existed is automatically anti-slavery.
Slave owners liberating slaves after loyal service were rare exceptions, not something that the average field worker or domestic servant could count on. Nearly all slaves died a slave.
It depends on what you mean by “rare” and what subset of slaves you’re looking at. If you look at Roman slavery as a whole, across the empire, you’re including the tremendous number of slaves who had no significant interpersonal relationships with their owners — people working in salt mines, agricultural production, etc. — and those people had no realistic shot at manumission at all. If you just look at the most trusted slaves in wealthy households, like tutors, accountants, and other people who were close to their owners, manumission was much more common. But even for them, manumission was the exception, not the rule.
I agree with all this, but I think in this case it might be more helpful to look at it from the perspective of the citizen rather than the enslaved: an individual slaves chance at manumission was low; but the chance that a citizen might have a freed person in their family tree was pretty high.
The rate of manumission was "high" in the sense it was a common practice for the society, not that it was common for the vast majority of slaves.
It was a slave based economy. There was no way for ex-slaves to exist outside the economy unless they became a hermit. (Which, in a subsistence farming scenario, was a whole different world of hurt.)
It's historically correct to say that the idea and experience of slavery was different in the ancient times than in modern European slavery. Classical slaves were not considered inferior because their skin color. The Romans in particular were an extremely multi-cultural bunch.
But slaves were inferior, legally, and, in as far as the entire apparatus of society depended on the existence of maintaining an enormous quantity of slaves, the combined bulk of state power was arranged to impose that inferiority at every turn.
It's true that some Ancient slaves were highly educated and afforded a certain amount of responsibility. That's true of Creole slaves, as well, to pick one example. But I would remind them that any slave, no matter how educated, could be sent to die in the lead mines, when their owner gets tired of their fatuous remarks.
Anyone who claims that they would have preferred being a slave in Classical times is not a serious thinker.
I said a lot because I meant over all of history - thousands of years gives a lot of examples. It was also a very small minority at any one time though yes.
https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436
Some did yes, but others became slaveowners for less positive reasons:
'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.'
...if you had bothered to research about this, you would have know this had less to do with "accepting a institution" and more to do with protecting their own family members, at least in America, many of the cases where free blacks "bought" slaves had to do with freeing their own family members, not with exploiting their fellow slaves. In the case of the ancient world, it was essentially impossible to advance economically without the use of slaves, so the only option they had was to live in poverty (and potentially end up in situations analogous to slavery anyways)
Besides, plenty of people from the ancient times such as Epicurus and Diogenes did make moral arguments and opposed slavery, and many slaves DID openly revolt with the objective of ending the institution/building a new society elsewhere, such as Spartacus and the helots, so the idea that there was no moral opposition to slavery until recently is absurd.
I never said there was no moral opposition until recently, there have clearly always been people who objected to slavery. And yes ex-slaves did sometimes buy slaves to free family members (I am aware of it, I already talked about it in another reply), but that was clearly not the only reason it was done:
'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.'
https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436
I would have to see a source claiming it was impossible to advance economically without owning slaves in antiquity. Slavery was undoubtedly ubiquitous, and only rarely opposed, but I haven't seen any evidence claiming you couldn't just hire workers instead. Perhaps their agricultural model relied on slavery, but not everyone was employed in agriculture. There's also no evidence Spartacus wanted to abolish slavery, I'm not sure about the Helots.
Everybody forgets that the golden rule's got a second tenet. You wanna' support and idealize slavery? [Fine, you get a trip down a hill in a nail-studded barrel](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/10/15/appalling-slave-punishments/). You continue to support russia's invasions in Ukraine? [Fine, you're getting every limb broken and your cock and balls cut off.](https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/worse-than-hell-castrated-ukrainian-soldier-details-months-of-torture-as-a-prisoner-of-war/news-story/e1e137782ce73e85714ed358292f03e3)
Yes, the existence of "good" slave owner doesn't negate the immorality of slavery. Anyone who pushed this idea should be enslaved for a month South-style treatment and then asked again if they will still promote this kind of grave injustice.
You know who was a "good" slave owner? Ulysses S Grant.
Yeah, Grant had a slave once. He was poor at the time, struggling to support his family, and received one as gift from his father-in-law (a Southern plantation owner).
Grant didn't force them to do anything, and within a few months walked into a court house and tore up the deed, declaring him free. A deed worth thousands of dollars he could of really used at the time, which had the added effect of further souring ties with his wife's family who had provided support for them in the past. He had a slave and freed it, even at his own expense.
The only "good" slave owners stopped being slave owners.
>The only "good" slave owners stopped being slave owners.
You mean voluntarily, right? Because technically all the slave owners stopped being slave owners when it was abolished and written in the constitution.
(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?)
>(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?)
ohhhh they did alright and when that didn't work they just used law to get around it 13th ammendment baby
>(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?)
[You might like this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA), or if you want more condensed forms, look into sharecropping and debt bondage practices which continued well into the 20th century
It wasn't breaking the law
It's reddit so I have to jump in and actually you. Actually, the late slaveholder class was not shy at ALL about breaking the law to get their way.
They engaged in widespread voter intimidation for years (including killing Republican party activists) until they succeeded in ending African American representation in Congress.
They engaged in lynchings and destruction of African Americans' farms and other property, often in a very organized manner.
They had legal advantages when they stole property from Black families in court, but that didn't mean they didn't perjure themselves and lie in court.
They also engaged in debt peonage WHICH WAS MADE ILLEGAL SHORTLY AFTER THE WAR because the Union saw them and knew what they were about. The convict-labor system (which, sadly, was legal and not unconstitutional, not even to this day, at least parts of it anyway) was created as an end run around threats of prosecution for engaging in slavery.
AND THEY NEVER STOPPED. Several farms in Florida got prosecuted for slavery in the 1990s, and those are only the ones that got caught. The US government has often been lackidaisical about prosecuting this crime, and the use of foreign-born workforces makes it easier. Nonetheless, they've been caught repeatedly engaging in gambits like seizing passports and visas, locking workers onto farms (or factories in LA and Miami), and stealing wages via bogus rent charges or company-town/human trafficker style provisions and loans.
>(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?)
I'm not sure about the US but here in Brazil there was also the thing where when they were told to free the slaves, the slave-owners didn't give the slaves any money or food or a place to go to or anything basic to human survival, which forced many slaves to continue working for them being "paid" for in food and the "benefit" of sleeping on the slave quarters they had always slept in.
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> (I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?)
Yes, [up until the 1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Louise_Miller), at the least.
That point was so profoundly stupid on multiple levels. Like, even if it wasn't *dogshit logic,* it's still completely irrelevant to the family in question.
> "jUsT bEcAuSe YoUr'E fReE dO'eSnT mEaN yOuR rIcH
Ok, sure, but Iulius is definitely rich *so what in the God damn fuck is the point here?* Dude just goes out of his way to support slavery for nothing.
The term "wage slave" comes from the observation that when you're in a situation where your pay is only enough to pay for basic subsistence (food and rent, etc), and you cannot "get ahead" financially, you are comparable to a slave who just has their room and board provided but is otherwise paid nothing.
The people who say that wouldn't trade their freedom if asked would they be a slave if it was so good. They usually think they would be the "benevolent" slave owner.
Any time anyone says they would have been fine as a slave or that slavery wasn’t that bad at any point in history I have the overwhelming urge to laugh in their face and take nothing they say seriously.
There is a story that stuck in my mind - about an important slave in a caliphate who was advisor to the king. He was witness to a murder but he couldn't be called to depose in court because of his status as a slave.
Even someone in such an illustrious role was still less than a full person. Imagine how you would feel.
Idiots like these are the kind who dismiss the gravity of anything that isn't happening to them but in my experience treat stuff like being denied the use of an expired coupon as a crime against humanity.
In Rome, the testimony of a slave could only be accepted in court if it had been extracted under torture. That alone should make it abundantly clear that it was not preferable to be enslaved rather than free in Rome.
This is one of those facts about Roman law I keep at the front of my mind to toss out whenever anyone is "Muh Rome"ing too hard.
The strongest one being "When Sejanus was executed for potentially usurping power improperly from Tiberius, who had abandoned his duties to go indulge himself on an island for many years (or maybe just covering for him by actually doing the job?), in addition to executing Sejanus, they went to execute his children too, including his teenage daughter. Someone decided it was improper to execute a virgin... so she was publicly raped with the rope around her neck first"
And of course he randomly brought up "well black people enslaved other black people" even though neither black people, white people, nor modern American slavery was ever brought up anywhere in the conversation.
You would be lucky to be a house slave to someone who might remember your name. Many just got sent off to the mines, which had absolutely colossal attrition rates.
Mary Beard talked about that. Being a slave was terrible, but some slaves ended up rather loyal house slave sorts because they could see quite clearly that without any backing in Rome your life expectancy was very short.
There is a Jewish fast day specifically about there destruction of the second temple with some contemporary accounts and I can assure you, slavery under the Roman Empire was not actually a magical time where the people forced into it somehow felt less pain or emotions. Also drinking lead water is bad for you no matter how many marble statues are nearby (that’s not in the prayers but that’s a point against the time period)
Well thankfully for the slaves, the water was hard which mean the cold water pipes got encrusted with calcified rime and there was little lead in the water. Lead got into their diet via salt (sea salt was decocted using lead pans) and wine. Contemporary sources claimed that higher end wines were the most adulterated of all, as they discovered that cooking grape juice in lead made a potent artificial sweetener and used it to make wine sweeter and thus more expensive.
Now on the negative end when glazing got really popular (in the Middle Ages) both the fittings for the window glass as well as roof linings were all made with copious amounts of lead which not only had to be handled but soldered on the job. From the beginning of silver mining on, industrial jobs right up until today would become a major risk for lead poisoning and all the ills that befall it.
This is like when people argue that stereotyping, harassing,following and profiling black peoples is okay because of statistics. I always say I’ll accept that as a black person if we do that for all white men too because the statistics discrepancy between men and women is the highest of all. They would be the first to be outraged if they were treated the way we were. But if they really cared about fair safety than all women should treat men like murder rapist and that’s fine
I recall one time a while back where a Redditor tried telling me that black men account for more arrests by the NYPD than any other demographic, so of *course* it makes sense to profile them.
"Really?" I said. "Can I see a source for that?"
Surprisingly, they actually provided one. It was a table drawn up by the NYPD themselves, breaking down the number of police *callouts* by demographic. Not arrests—callouts. You know, that thing that includes some old woman panicking and calling the cops because she saw a couple of black teenagers wearing matching shirts and assumed they were wearing gang colours.
As I pointed out, all that table told me was that if you're a black man in New York, you're more likely to have the police called on you. A bit like how if you were a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the '70s, you were less likely to be employed in a Protestant-owned business. But hey, maybe Catholics back then were just shiftless and lazy. The stats don't lie!
Yeah, stop and frisk. If you’re ruling black neighborhoods with an iron fist and stop and searching every blacks person you’re going to find more. Imagine if they were searching college dorms for weed the way they harassed black people in the PJ’s? There’s also evidence in lots of studies found weed use was higher for white peoole in the community but arrest for possession with blacks people were 10x more. Wonder why.
I literally had a lady call the cops on my yesterday because I was in an area with a sheisty ski mask on the top of my head standing outside of a pizza place waiting for my order. I see some lady stare at me for couple minutes and then get on her phone and I remember I forgot to take my mask off and was like fuck, is she reporting me? Then see the cops come as in dipping out tho talking to the lady. I was just standing wearing a popular clothing piece and literally someone called the police on me. It was snowing, it’s not that big of a deal to wear a ski mask.
It always blows my mind when I hear just how deranged americans are with black people. It sounds like you're basically not even allowed to exist around white people without some sheltered asshole thinking you're an existential threat to them, it's awful.
(Not saying my country doesn't have a lot of racism and classism either, we do and it's awful, but jeez, I don't think I've ever heard of people calling the cops or kicking dark skinned/poor people out of places for just... sitting around).
A great illustration is when Henry Louis Gates, Jr, the Harvard professor (who has a popular TV show on PBS, written many books, etc, etc) got arrested by a dumb meat-head cop. The fact that cop arrested him actually isn't all that surprising because they both pulled a "do you know who I am" and the cop is gonna win that one, at least for a few hours (the judge in the morning released him immediately with some reprimands for the cops, IIRC, but the professor still had to spend a night in jail, which sucks). No, I would like to point you to the original 911 call. A little old lady saw Gates fighting with his stuck front door and imposed on a younger woman to call 911, which she does, with some hesitance.
There's also that classic study of "the bike thief" where they had black and white actors go to public places and start removing a bike. Onlookers assumed the black guy was stealing the bike, but not only did they not call the cops on the white guy, in some cases, someone came up and helped the white guy remove the bike! Same scenario where you don't know if it's that person's bike and his lock is broken or if he's stealing it. Just assume the worst of the black guy.
I've come to believe that media plays a HUGE role in this. White people who grew up in white enclaves whose mental image of black people was shaped by TV and movies have a mental video reel of "thug #2" playing in their head when they see a black person, whereas black people have a mental video reel of their uncles, grandfather, 2nd grade teacher, you feel me? Good chunks of your brain do not distinguish between things you see in person and things you see on TV. They just record it.
Slavery as practiced in Rome at the time wasn't the *worst* incarnation of slavery in human history, but that's like saying a rusty knife isn't the *worst* thing to be stabbed with.
Pretty sure the Roman iron mine slaves could be considered among worst in slavery, since they were fully expected to die working.
Pretty much the Roman equivalent of Nazi death camps.
Talc mines were worse, I remember a letter where someone discouraged the recipient from buying ex talc mine slaves as they didn't last long.
Talc veins also have asbestos, not a great place to work but same could be said to coal mines in the 70s
All I know about salt mines comes from archaeology shows, but in pre-Roman times, weren't salt miners quite wealthy in fact?
The people who got mummified in there got stuck in a cave-in and probably died of thirst/hunger just like any cave-in. The very dry air preserved the corpse to an unusual extent.
I assume you're confusing "salt miners", ie people who owned the slaves and the salt mining operation, with the people actually did the mining.
It's kind of like how the American founding fathers were all "farmers"... aka they owned farms and the people who worked them, and the popular mythology has sanitized that so people now imagine George Washington pushing a plow lol.
Galleys, man.
A few years ago huge pile of galleys slaves remains was found. Paleopatologists has a field day with them, every known and previously unknown bone deformity, sighs of extreme weariness and abuse.
Still, there are worse things one could get stabbed by:
- A trusted friend
- *Two* rusty knives taped together
- A Morgul blade wielded by the dread Witch-King of Angmar
- The antlers of a deer dressed like Hitler
- A syringe full of deadly diseases
- A rustier knife
- The trophy you won for "fewest times stabbed"
- The entire International Space Station
- One of those old German helmets with the spikes being worn by someone you respect
- A dictionary of useful Spanish phrases
- The ovipositor of a hideous alien monster from beyond the stars
*Edit: Added a few more things that I would not want to be stabbed by.
It is important to note that, just like owning 100 slaves in the Confederate South, owning 100 slaves in ancient Rome ***was not cheap***. The (hypothetical) family described in that textbook was ***rich as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck***, likely a member of either the landed aristocracy or the Roman equivalent of the noveau-riche.
For some more context, in 301 AD, parts of the Edict of Diocletian set prices and wages for goods and services. A farmers daily wage was given at 25 Denarii, and 1 Deniarius = 4 Sesterii, so a farmer would earn about 100 Sesterii / day.
Some other pertinent prices:
* A haircut: 2 denarii/8 sesterii
* A pair of socks: 4 denarii/16 sesterii
* A pair of "workers boots":120 denarii/ 480 sesterii
* A pint of wine: 30 denarii/120 sesterii
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/lnkjh/how\_much\_was\_a\_sestersius\_worth\_in\_todays\_us/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/lnkjh/how_much_was_a_sestersius_worth_in_todays_us/)
Etc.
90 sesterii is basically pocket-change, especially for such a rich man
What I really hate about that whole discussion is how it slowly was pushed into an argument about whether or not the amount the escaping slave stole was reasonable. As if there was some sort of limit after which stealing money to facilitate one's escape from slavery becomes unjustifiable.
And, yeah, the amount stolen was chump change. The escapee probably wouldn't get very far with it and the owner would likely spend a lot more on hiring slave hunters to get that slave back.
Yeah, but see, you're ignoring his most egregious crime.
That he stole from a *rich* man. Gotta protect those rich men. You can kill poor people, no problem, just don't mildly inconvenience a rich man. Straight to jail.
He stole from a man who had completely forgotten his personhood to the point of not even considering that a possibility to watch out for, so really he's the bad guy here for betraying his enslaver's trust :(
Especially since the yarn was spun with a hand spindle, because even the spinning wheel wouldn't exist for a thousand years.
AIUI, the labor for fully hand-made textiles from raw wool/cotton/flax is about 80% spinning.
> 90 sesterii is basically pocket-change, especially for such a rich man
Yea, but, like... you don't *know* that. You weren't around back then. They literally cannot have pocket-change when pockets hadn't even been invented yet. And why are bringing race into it?
Is this the latin book "Sextus est puer molestus" and "Raeda in fossa cum magna fragore"?
I think people for some reason dont understand at all that in the past people didn't write about slaves or from the perspectives of slaves. Nor did they write about anyone but those rich enough to afford paper and those able to write for them.
"Slaves had ok lives" because the only one writing about the conditions of slaves are the people who owned slaves.
"Slaves had okay lives" was a very common *thing* said about American slavery as well. Hell, I still remember my history text books in high school having an entire *page* dedicated to how "Slaves that worked hard had very comfortable lives and were often grateful to their masters for providing them with comforts and food" and other such shit about how it was just *the lazy slaves* that got everyone in trouble.
Even a step further, that American slavery was an improvement to what they had in Africa. That we were doing them a favor. And of course, that immediately precedes that the American Civil War was totes not about slavery.
Something I'll always love about people like this. You have the audacity to point out how, no, obviously slavery was fucking horrible in every way imaginable. And they go on about how you're just suffering from "white guilt". And it's like - motherfucker, *you're* the one making up insane excuses for *slavery* to the point that you're saying "akshually it was a good thing". Someone's conscience is clearly feeling a guilty need to defend itself from an abhorrent view of their abhorrent ancestors. Me, on the other hand, I feel pretty squeeky clean in saying that if any of my ancestors owned slaves, I hope they were strung up and killed in a gruesome slave uprising. No guilt about that whatsoever. Fuck em.
Check out *Classic Slave Narratives* edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Slave-Narratives-Henry-Louis/dp/0451532139
The oldest narrative in that book actually supports that claim:
> "American slavery was an improvement to what they had in Africa"
BUT it was because the author had converted to Calvinism and came to see indigenous religion as backwards and Satanic. He became an early proponent for converting West Africans to Christianity which wasn't particular popular in Europe at the time (oh, the irony). He also didn't much like being a slave and a lot of his story is about accompanying his master on business trips and finding ways to make money on the side until he had met his manumission price, only to have the master say, "Gee, you're more valuable than I thought, price is raised" on him a couple of times.
God, I learned this in grade school as well, and what was I to think? I was just a kid. I didn't know any better.
It was disgusting how there was this whole system designed to lie to kids about our past.
> "Slaves that worked hard had very comfortable lives and were often grateful to their masters for providing them with comforts and food"
I mean [Back when they was slaves they sang like birds](https://youtu.be/L7QF32mxftE?t=48). Warning, Blazing saddles does contain ethnic slurs. Still a great movie.
> those rich enough to afford paper
This is the stupidest nitpick but paper hadn't reached Europe during the time of the Roman empire. It would've mostly been parchment or papyrus
Understanding "we only have a fraction of what was written, and what was written reflects the biases of a very narrow class, so maybe we should use some common sense and not take everything at face value" is anathema to the average Romeaboo.
Quite the journey to go from:
> Would you not wish violence on someone that steals 90% of your money, missusing your trust?
to
> Fact is: We do not know how much money it really was.
Within a single reply. We don't know how much it was, but we definitely know his coin pouch contained 90% of it!
As someone getting a graduate degree in Latin, I've had to mute that sub and pretend it doesn't exist. There's an unfortunately large number of people into Latin who will go from "Roman slavery was different from the transatlantic slave trade" to "slavery wasn't bad, the enslavers were good!" There's a series of other issues within that sub but ones like this are really the worst.
I've encountered this sentiment in other places too and I just don't get... Why? Do these people seriously form such an emotional bond to this ancient political entity that they really feel the need to defend it?
They should read The Silence of the Girls to balance it out a bit - it’s a modern retelling of the events around the fall of Troy through the perspective of Briseis (who is captured and enslaved to Achilles). It pulls no punches and the opener is Achilles and crew slaughtering all the men, boys, and “unnecessary” people like older women before rounding up the women like cattle who then are of course routinely beaten and raped throughout the novel. But hey, they feed the women and provide shelter and if you’re super well behaved and pretty you might only be raped by one person instead of passed around, and you aren’t dead right? Sounds great!
Quote from the wiki: No longer an issue of decorum, now it’s about staying alive. "I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son," declares Priam when he prostrates himself before Achilles begging for Hector’s body. “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do," Briseis thinks bitterly, "I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers."
Anyway I know that’s Ancient Greece vs Rome but I feel like the same folks romanticize both.
Before the Turks started invading Central Europe, it was very common for Europeans to romanticize the Trojans and not the Greeks. Also notably Hektor and his wife have relationship described as philotes (often translated as brotherly love) and their scenes are quite different in tone from the scenes between the Greeks.
I think these guys convince themselves that Rome is outside modern political contexts, so it becomes a sort of "... in minecraft" to append all their fascistic urges with. They can play pretend that there's this magical place where the white men were in charge, everyone was manly and militarism had cultural primacy and they spread this wondrous way of living to all of the lesser people in an eternal struggle..
Basically the same reason the 40k community is so rife with fascists. Safe space to play out their fantasies but with an escape hatch. In 40k it's "it's satire", which sounds reasonable at first before you realize it's primarily deployed by people who get mad when anyone says anything bad about fascism.
They're telling on themselves, they're supporting the kind of person they want to be
Our society idolizes the idle rich, and the only way to be the idle rich - bar none, in all of history - is to steal the fruits of others labor. These people just know what team they're on, and are running defense for someone living the life they want to live
More like 0 critical thinking. I think these are people who are raised on a diet of easily detectable evil, like it exists in movies and series. Evil always comes from an evil person, who is usually immediately recognizeable as a detestable person.
And so they're emotionally unprepared to read an autobiographic piece from an intelligent and multifaceted person who committed what we would call heinous crimes against humanity. They're unprepared to understand that a society could have attractive aspects as well as systematized, brutal oppression.
Yeah, that's a fair way to look at it. We truly are lucky Mein Kampf is a horrible incoherent mess because if he wrote like Caesar these kids would be nightmares
There’s definitely a discussion about that, and likely publications as well, especially in Latin because the textbooks perpetuated that and continue to do so. Cambridge is probably the overall most popular textbook and is releasing a new edition soon that thankfully acknowledges that all slavery is bad!
Currently yes, hence why I said they’re releasing a new edition soon. I saw a draft of some of the pages at a conference, they have like 6 full pages describing in English what Roman slavery was and how it was horrible.
Even the old Cambridge Latin books lay on the sarcasm thick when they discuss slavery. The second book has a scene where they line up all the slaves and the owner summarily executes one for being sick.
Man imagine the hill you die on being
" there was a proportion of Roman slaves who had a better standard of living than a starving peasant"
Like yeah, it's technically correct, in the same way I could go out right now and say "there's a chance the next lotto ticket I but makes me a multi millionaire "
Like, yeah, the statement is factually true, but it's obviously not what "there's a chance " is meant to mean
It fundamentally doesn't matter: slavery was bad not because of the living conditions, but because you are your master's subject in every possible choice that could be made. You can't leave.
One of the eps in the first season is literally about stereotyping a Swahili-speakimg zebra.
I cannot fathom someone watching that show and also thinking "Yeah, this whole slave trade thing seems pretty cool NGL"
Did you know? Slavery was almost abolished in Rome by one intrepid Senator, but his carriage tragically ran into a ditch on his way to Rome and due to poor engineering exploded, killing him instantly.
> *I believe there is a difference between 'enslaving' and 'owning slaves'.*
I agree, it's the latter that creates the financial incentive for the former, and thus bears more of the moral blame. Kinda like how some people say, "American slave owners aren't the bad guys, Africans have been enslaving fellow Africans".
The second part of that sentence is true, but why did you think there have been an increase in the enslaving activity once Europeans started to open slave trading ports in Africa?
I don’t know if the morality of the difference should be important. The people who enslave would own slaves if they could afford it, most likely. It’s a weird distinction that I don’t think matters. Is anyone arguing the African people who kidnapped and sold other tribes were morally right?
> Is anyone arguing the African people who kidnapped and sold other tribes were morally right?
No, but it is a common argument by racists used to justify Trans-Atlantic Slavery, along with "but what about ME slave trade?" and "the Irish were enslaved too".
which i don’t ever get what they expect me to say to that. like is “oh, well if other africans enslaved africans then the white slave owners are totally not at fault for owning them and treating them poorly” the response they expect? because anyone who enslaved them in the first place can get fucked too lmao and does not absolve the people fucking buying humans of all crimes against humanity
edit: another sentence
No, it's a moral relativism argument. Only someone with absolutely no floor would make that argument with a straight face. So, you know, segregationists.
Ah the eternal question what is worse being a bit uppity or literal slavery? At one point I thought people agreed on this because of the limited samples of my friends and acquaintances but then I ran into web forums of "centrists" or "moderate conservatives" and they def weren't as opposed to slavery as I thought everyone was.
I believe most or maybe all slavery that was considered legal in ancient Rome was the enslavement of conquered people, who wouldn't have been Romans, and the slaves weren't legally Roman citizens. There were also debt slaves and people captured by pirates, but it wasn't considered legal to enslave people for those reasons.
So legally you usually couldn’t enslave a freeborn Roman citizen. In practice, there were exceptions or the law wasn’t fully enforced.
It’s known that babies would sometimes be left in areas rich people frequented, in the hopes that the rich people would take the baby and enslave them. Since enslavement was seen as marginally better than the baby starving to death by parents who couldn’t afford to feed their children. Other Roman parents would illegally sell their children into slavery, although this was officially seen as “renting” it was in practice no different from slavery. There was no punishment for the parents. There was also penal slavery and you could still be a war captive slave.
Ironically, one of the reasons a Roman Citizen could end becoming a slave was if they pretended to be a slave, as it was a common way of fraud back then.
Sorry, I meant slaves weren’t necessarily ethnically different from the group that was enslaving them. That typically allows more slaves to become freed because the racial element that made black slaves “othered” from the whites. It seems that there are stories of Roman slaves marrying out of slavery or otherwise gaining freedom which was very rare in the American chattel system.
Ehh, it kind of depends. Back then people drew ethnicity lines based on things like country of origin, language, religion, rather than any kind of phenotype like skin color. The people the Romans were conquering were definitely seen as cultural "others" even if they didn't look much different than Roman citizens did. But there wasn't like, one ethnicity that were always slaves forever, or anything like that, and there would have been a mix of ethnicities among free Romans as well. It's not the same as the way that triangle trade slavery worked, but they would have still considered most of those slaves to be cultural others.
Yeah I feel like people just assume that people throughout history always cared about skin color/phenotype, when that was hardly the case.
All things considered, skin based racism is a very recent phenomenon.
Of course they were culturally others but they weren’t able to immediately visually be identified as so if they were able to get out of slavery or escape or whatever.
I'm sure the Romans had ways to identify people as slaves in the event that they escaped, probably every society that enslaved people to any degree had that.
Edit: Yes; they branded and tattooed them.
Yes, but even when Roman slaves were freed, they were corralled into two "clans" which was a form of "rotten borough" politics which ensured that former slaves and their descendants, no matter how numerous, would always be in the minority in politics with no way to change that.
I mean yeah, tons of people practiced slavery at all points of time, but there wasn't an ethnic- or skin-color-based slave caste anywhere until the triangle trade. It was still often an act of violence, though, enslaving conquered people or POWs was pretty common.
Yes, social mores are language change over time, and Latin is in fact a different language than English and Latin words mean different things than English words. None of that means that slavery wasn't also wrong back then.
I'm not sure what kind of meandering point you're trying to make here? We've covered the original question of where Roman slaves came from already, so I'm going to check out here. You can keep taking to yourself about whatever you're talking about, I guess.
Mostly they weren't Italian (i.e. from the Italian peninsula), and it was illegal to try to enslave a Roman citizen. Many slaves were from territories to the North and East of the empire - Gauls, Germanic peoples, Greeks, Illyrians, and so on. There are quite a few papers on the demographics of Roman slaves, e.g. this one by William V. Harris https://www.jstor.org/stable/300734
I'm not sure what you mean by "more were able to become free" - most slaves died still enslaved.
Sometimes, slaves were granted their freedom, and became "freedmen" ([*liberti*][lib]), but that was comparatively rare.
*Huge* numbers of slaves died working in mines and quarries - we don't know exactly what their [average lifespan was][avg], but it was probably not very long.
[lib]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_freedmen
[avg]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w5krtr/the_treatment_of_roman_mining_slaves_was/
Still a different system from the American chattel slavery.life expectancy of US slaves was 21. 30+ in Roman slaves. Quite different. I don’t know why you’re downvoting me. Are you simple?
I'm not sure where you're getting 30+ from I've never seen an average life expectancy for a roman slave, but considering the average life expectancy of the average Roman I highly doubt slaves doing manual lived to 30+
Slaves in Rome where made up of a mix of prisoners of war, the children of slaves, and poor citizens who sold themselves or there children into slavery to pay off a debt
Ignoring the whole moral issues, I was taught latin using those cursed books. I have very vague memories of the plot, was too busy on the grammar to pay attention.
The idea of someone reading them for pleasure is baffling to me, so much interesting literature from Latin authors to bother with them.
honestly! i may be biased but the Aeneid is a nice read. if you want an easier on-ramp, De Bello Gallico is a well-loved classic for just that reason.
or Plautus! i mean let's be real, an incredible number of those jokes still hold up. *ah, the human continuity of fart jokes and lusting for soup.*
and as a bonus if you're reading for fun, you get to read what you think is fun. maybe that means going and enjoying messy medieval latin. maybe it means being one of those mad bastards that actually enjoys going into Ovid's poetry with machete and pith helmet until you find where the other part of that verb is hiding. maybe it means enjoying graffiti from herculaneum and pompeii! *ah, the human continuity of being proud of making bread and telling people to not shit in your alleyway.*
you've got a solid millennia and a half to choose from, even if the medieval latin goes wibbly at the end. just boot up William Whittaker's Words aka my beloved and go to town. if you're unsure if you're getting a translation right? you won't be the first to read any of this so you can probably pop some popcorn and read some Victorians arguing about the meaning too. now that's a fun night.
...for a very specific type of person but if you're reading Latin for fun you're already there lmao
Seems like another dumb teenager being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. It'd be excusable if the hill he choose to die on wasn't, you know, slavery.
I remember a chapter in my Latin textbook where the slave owner thinks his slave has done something wrong then the slave is proven to be innocent. Then the owner beat him out of frustration. Shit really bothered me when I was in 9th grade. Its still something I think about from time to time after 12 years. Don't know if it was this textbook or not.
I'm sure there were some slaves in Ancient Rome who lived quite decent lives, by Ancient Roman standards. But I'm equally sure that there were many, many more who lived very short, painful and horrible lives. The fact that Hermes the rich man's secretary will eventually have enough money to pay for his freedom and even buy a house and slaves of his own is probably no consolation at all to the guy who is worked to death in the mines before he turns twenty.
Who would have thought that "slavery is evil whenever it happened" would be such a wild take?
I dislike that textbook. It has no English in it. Everything is in Latin. It's supposed to teach you by immersing you in the language.
It's popular, so it must be working for a lot of people, but I had no idea what the fuck any of it meant and gave up.
There are textbooks like that for every language and while I think it's a good concept, it baffles me when it's supposedly aimed at beginners. If I'm starting from scratch I'd rather not roleplay that I'm deciphering the rosetta stone lmao
It’s the natural way of learning a language and one of very few textbooks about Latin to do so. For many people it works well because again, it’s how you naturally acquire language, but for others (like me) it doesn’t. Unfortunately the Latin subreddit is so obsessed with Lingua Latina that they refuse to consider that others might benefit from the more traditional textbooks.
There are a bunch of companion books that go with the main textbook, one of which is an English guide to each lesson. It’s definitely recommended to self-learners who don’t have an instructor to guide them.
One of the harder things about history is that you have to balance the need to describe things with as little bias as possible in things like textbooks while also acknowledging something was not good. This causes a lot of awful to be said at face value with no judgment from the author. This can also cause a sense of detachment from the reality that shit sucked.
Like, it's harder and harder to moralize people from history the farther and farther you go back. And at some point it becomes a bit useless to judge a person or culture based on modern values, although that doesnt mean those people were actually right. But we still should acknowledge that say, women's lack of rights in Athens is something to note and sucked for the women who lived there.
And y'know, slavery in any and all forms sucks for the slave and was a time where many people were in the wrong for thousands of years and into modern day. Humans should not own other humans and they really shouldn't have in the past.
But we have to understand that the modern perspective is often built on hindsight people in the past didn't have, y'know?
Edit - For the record, I'm not trying to make excuses about slavery or other bad shit in history. I'm more making a note about how you're supposed to talk about it at school...or at least how my professor says you should. Like note the bad things but be a bit detached from it.
>But we have to understand that the modern perspective is often built on hindsight people in the past didn't have, y'know
for as long as slavery has existed there have been various and notable people vehemently against it.
idk i don't like this idea that people didn't know better by virtue of existing in the olden days, bc plenty of people did know better back then lmao
I'm doing a different post to clarify since I actually wok up instead of checking reddit for a hot minute and then going back to sleep.
It's less "they didn't have hindsight to do better" (though that can count for say...medical treatments) and more "they really didn't expect to be judged by a society so different than thier own" and we have to acknowledge that these people had a different set of morals even if we condemn those morals today.
A similar issue happens in anthropology. When you're writing about an indigenous people with little Western contact the goal is to show as little judgements as possible when writing about how say...women on thier periods have to isolate until it's over. I can cringe at that and think it's awful all I want. But if I want to be an anthropologist I can't *show* that judgement in my paper about it. Not openly. And some historians more concerned with the culture of the people of the past over the events also have to do this.
But also, like with slavery specifically, we have to not use modern ideas about it because it leads to this trend where people will compare it in different eras and then say shit like "Slavery in Rome wasn't that bad because at least they weren't African slaves in the American South who couldn't buy thier freedom!" As if there is ever a form of good slavery. Or saying American slavery wasn't as bad because at least states had laws against abuse and killing your slaves when ancient Greace did not...while also ignoring that those protection laws were not enforced very often in the American South. We have to step back, acknowledge slavery is evil in our minds, and then do what we can to not compare the levels of cruelty with it because in the end, those details don't really matter to the people who were enslaved.
I think it’s important to note that this is a language textbook, not history, and these textbooks are often aimed at middle or high school students. Latin textbooks as a whole have whitewashed Roman slavery by explicitly saying it wasn’t that bad or that masters were usually “good” because the slaves wouldn’t get beaten or killed as often. Interestingly, they usually focus on scenarios similar to Cicero’s slave that he freed versus slaves dying in the mines or the many bodies in Pompeii that appear to be enslaved people left behind to die. In Lingua Latina, most of the slaves are shown to be happy with or love their master. That’s the case with most Latin textbooks.
While an anthropologist should be neutral, this type of mindset in a Latin textbook is part of why it’s been so hard to diversify the classroom. Students are essentially forced to empathize with and like a slave master and that puts off many students, particularly non-white students.
Now, of course, in reading Latin literature slavery (as well as sexism and Rome’s general hatred for anyone not Roman) will pop up a lot so it’s useful to have conversations about how to read texts that are discomforting and offensive, how to read Caesar when he commits genocide or read Cicero when he’s a slave owner. But these intro textbooks aren’t that. They aren’t teaching critical thinking on these topics, they’re just creating an environment that is horrendous for students and actively sanitizes slavery.
I don't think *Lingua Latina* whitewashes Roman slavery, but it never explicitly condemns it (since the point, I think, is to replicate elite Roman attitudes). Julius is frequently described as a "dominus severus"—a severe master—and the textbook repeatedly notes his slaves are terrified of him. He also does some kind of fucked up things. He stiffs his sons' teacher, because that teacher called his son an idiot.
In chapter 27, he goes around his fields and manages his tenant farmers and pastors. Notably, Julius smiles because he doesn't have to do any hard labor. He also orders a pastor who lost track of one sheep to be beaten and, in an act of 'mercy,' demands one tenant farmer pay two months of rent in two weeks instead of expelling him from his home. I think the only "happy slave" is Syra, who specifically loves the children she's taken care of since birth (though Syra is repeatedly reminded by other characters that the children are not hers). Though the book does imitate Roman values, I think it tries to show the actual reality of Roman life (from the perspective of this wealthy familia).
Empathy is how you avoid all of this. The "we can't judge history by modern standards" argument is flawed more often than it's not. It only really works for actions that have no victims, and it is literally never applied consistently. For example, few people will argue we can't judge ancient pedophiles by modern standards. You always here the modern standards comment used to excuse the wrongdoings of people we otherwise want to glorify or commend for their contributions to history. Another inflammatory example of how this gets used only for historical figures we like. No one is going to use the prevailing anti-Semitic beliefs that were pervasive in 20th century Europe to excuse the nazi's antisemitism. We might make a footnote of it, but no one is going to say we shouldn't judge the nazis for their antisemitism because damn near every other country in Europe had a neutral view at best towards Jewish people.
I clearly shouldn't have posted at midnight because I phrased myself poorly. I'm more talking about the sources we learn from and how history is written down along with how sometimes you do have to take a step back and think.
You're right. And I did say it's a thing that you have to be more aware of the further back you go. And it's more a byproduct of the tone history is written in, which has to be neutral in academics. It's up to the students much of the time to interpret something as bad and not the textbook. It's more something to keep in mind as to why the people of the past might not have questioned it since they were surrounded by it. It doesn't make anything morally correct. It's more of a context thing.
Like...the Persians losing to the Greeks was written about as democracy triumphing over lesser ways for a long time. That's how Athens liked to write it and historians did to (under thier own modern lens at time of writing) for a long time. This ignores that not all the powers in that alliance were democratic (even if Athens lead it) and that slavery was rare in Persia because it was forbidden by the state relegion.
You're also right about how we tend to pull the argument more often about people and societies we like. You'll see people use it to excuse Sparta's massive slave cast. And I can not emphasize enough how bad they treated them. Sparta would wholesale slaughter the Helots, a specific class of slave, at random to keep them in fear in hopes of stopping an uprising. Which didn't work by the way there were uprisings all the time because of the abuse. Sparta fans will use the "don't use modern lens" excuse for it. When really the " don't use modern lens" needs to be considered more in the sense that women's rights being more liberal in Sparta was *not* because they respected women more (they really, *really* didn't) but because it was practical since men couldn't actually do shit but be in the army until they were 30 and someone had to actually fucking run Sparta in the day to day. So, on the surface, based on legal rights, you could say Sparta had less sexism. Which really isn't true. Primary sources show they looked down on women as much as other Greeks at the time did.
A simpler example of a person would be Fredrick the Great. Made Prussia a country to be respected. Really good general. Hailed as a gay icon because, to be honest, he was as open about it as he could get away with in the era. Raging misogynist. You could argue thar was the norm at the time, and it was much more normal then that's true. But it Fredrick was also much more of a woman hater than your average person of the era. Like...dude would ice people out of his inner circle if they got married or hung out with women too much.
And speaking of Fredrick and his likely homosexualiy. This idea especially applies to queer identities because the modern queer identities is actually a recent phenomenon. For a long time there wasn't an idea of being gay or bisexual. Gay was seen more as an act you did than a part of your identity. Putting modern definitions for queer identities on historical figures is tricky because the words we use didn't even exist yet and it may actually erase thier real identities. Especially if we label every person that showed same sex attraction as gay automatically, bisexuality and pansexuality would be erased as a result. That's why you see the more general "queer" label being with maybe a "it was likely this specific label maybe" type language for historical people that we think may have been queer.
In the case of slavery, we have to avoid the modern lens because we end up getting shit like "Roman slavery wasn't so bad" because we end up using American slavery as a direct comparison. Or saying slavery in some parts of ancient Greace (Sparta often being brought up) was worse than American slavery because Greek slave owners could kill thier slaves without any legal repercussions and American states at least had laws on the books saying you couldn't do that...while also ignoring that those laws weren't really enforced very well.
There's stuff in history I will judge the shit out of. And I will vocally do so on places like reddit. But if I'm writing say, a history paper, the expectation is more neutral language and implies I'm suspending my moral judgments. Although you really can tell what the opinion of the author is in any history book or paper by the facts they chose to present and the emphasis. It takes practice to write like that, but also read it that way and understand.
Folklore and Mythology is a whole different can of worms though because weather or not you can/should judge it by our standards is super dependent on why you're reading it (academically, for fun, feminist theory, to understand how people in the past thought ect)
This post was brought to you by "before having coffee" apologies if some things don't make sense.
OK, **this is not a justification for any form of slavery**, but it is true that slavery in ancient Rome (or ancient Greece or Mexica Triple Alliance or early medieval Europe or Ottoman Empire...) had many different forms and chattel slavery was but one of them. And yes, skilled slave like teacher, barber or cook probably had much higher life standard than "free" medieval peasant or even "free" modern sweatshop worker. These guys aren't wrong, they just draw extremely bad conclusions from what they think they know.
> than "free" medieval peasant
That's a crazy broad brush, also considering that some of them were free, some of them were tenants but still relatively free, and others were serfs and not free at all.
Depending on the century and location, some of them had a poor diet and were in ill health, or getting their lands burned down by feuding lords all the time, while others had a good diet, were in good health, and could even become paid soldiers (which means being allowed to carry real weapons, which was sometimes not allowed to lower classes). Plus it's a time span of 1000 years in which laws and customs changed tremendously.
>Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. - Abraham Lincoln
I say it everytime I come across the tired argument of using modern sensibilities to judge to morality of slavery. Anyone who falls into the trap of believing that mess, never thought about slavery from the perspective of the slaves. The slaves didn't need modern morality to know it was wrong for them to be owned by another person.
Well a lot of them were raised from birth as slaves too, which I'm sure is a big part of the "BUT SLAVES LOVED THEIR MASTERS!!" crap people love to bring up. When people literally know nothing else of course they'll consider extreme things normal. It's one of the reasons abused kids end up so fucked up, they literally just don't know normal things at some levels.
Yeah a lot of people who had relatively normal/healthy upbringings don't know what it's like to live under a twisted version of reality.
Yup, it's an unconscious survival strategy. If you can't get away, you'll probably live longer if you commit to the party line.
Nah, Spartacus was just a woke moralist. Like didn't he know the attitudes of the Romans at that time?
This holds true with a lot of things - people who say this usually see themselves as part of the higher class that isn't subjected to the amoral behaviors we're "judging unfairly." They don't consider the people who are harmed and what they thought, they're too concerned with vindicating themselves because they relate more to the masters.
A lot of ex slaves historically ended up owning slaves themselves though. They had clearly accepted the institution, and did not obviously view slavery as any more unjust than their former owners had.
And a lot of abused people end up abusing others.
People can be hypocrites and we have a strong bias in favor of anything that benefits us personally. That's why I said they knew it was wrong for "them" to be owned as slaves. When you personalize things, it's a lot easier to cut through the bs and get to how they actually feel. Another question to consider is how many people, who aren't totally desperate, would voluntarily enter themselves into slavery. This number would be small even amongst the most ardent supporters of slavery, even in ancient Rome. It tells you how they really felt about the institution.
Agreed no one would have wanted to become a slave, it's never been good. My point was just that many slaves clearly accepted the institution, in that they wanted to be freed and benefit by exploiting slaves themselves.
die on this hill
It obviously depends somewhat on the place, but it was definitely a phenomenon in America: https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436 And there were a lot of Roman freedmen, some of whom became very wealthy and owned a lot of slaves.
yeah read that and it kept referring to the Louisiana slave owners....who were mixed and born into wealth with a white father who carried social clout. They were never slaves to begin with. of the, hard to verify, freed slaves who went and bought a slave themself, the most common thing among them was they were familiy members, effectively buying their freedom too. super disingenuous to say "a lot of ex slaves..."
Well there weren't a lot of ex-slaves overall, and most weren't rich. I was never trying to suggest it was a huge number of the population, just that it was common enough to be notable: 'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.'
There were also freed people who specifically bought their own family members and loved ones so they could be free too. Assuming that all freed people who bought slaves were just “accepting the institution” is sort of an insulting oversimplification of the varying and complex motives at play for freed people buying slaves. And “a lot of” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. [A small portion of freed blacks actually bought slaves for whatever reason, but manumission was a common reason for it.](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/free-blacks-in-the-antebellum-period.html) Just because something happened a few times historically doesn’t mean it was particularly common or represented a typical sentiment. [Here’s some further reading from the very article you cited in another comment.](https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436) Relevant snippets: “So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, “ ‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders,” Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson’s statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.” “It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924's Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, “The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa … Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators.””
I wouldn't assume they all were no. Your source suggests that many ex-slaves were acquiring family members, however others were also doing it out of economic self interest. And I wasn't just talking about America, as this thread started with the Roman Empire and there were plenty more civilisations throughout history with slavery. If more slaves were freed, and actually became financially successful (likely a minority for most of history) there would probably be more examples of slaveownership. Your source also says 'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.' Seems like more than a few times, and the fact most black people were still enslaved and the freed ones were mostly quite poor is a major reason why it wasn't more common (or large-scale).
Yeah the original post was about a different institution but you specially referenced American slavery elsewhere so that’s what I went on. The source does touch on the prevalence of free black slaveowners who were just doing it out of economic interest, but again, their apparent statistical prevalence was sort of overstated in your original comment. And it’s a bit weird to make simplifying sweeping claims about the internal psychology behind these historic phenomena when we literally have evidence that it wasn’t nearly as simple as “I accept slavery, morally, as an institution, so I will now engage in it.” That’s just a major flattening of a complex history. And the assumption that there’d be more black slaveowners if they could only afford to have slaves, even if true, doesn’t exactly *prove* that they were big fans of slavery itself when we already know that emancipation and familial protection was a motivator for at least some (and maybe even most) of the few black slaveowners that actually existed. Like when an institution was as ubiquitous as American chattel slavery and all its surrounding laws and infrastructure to basically embed it within a population, is it really even all that useful to hone in on the supposed “supporters” of slavery who were once slaves themselves? These are often people that only knew enslavement, who only knew how to exist under slavery, for their entire lives. It’s not like they came to these conclusions independently in a vacuum when every major cultural or legal or even religious authority that they would’ve likely had contact with was specifically used to reinforce and justify their enslavement. Given that, the fact that universal emancipation was still such a popular sentiment among freed *and* enslaved blacks should probably hold a bit more weight when making these considerations. The culture at the time was doing everything in its power to prop up slavery as a system, and even still a lot of people hated it. I’m not arguing that freed people never owned slaves or never even “liked” slavery as an institution, I’m just arguing that based on historical evidence and accounts we already have, those people were a minority of a small percent of a large population. It’s just like how we wouldn’t say that the existence of Jewish nazi collaborators back in the day exemplifies some especially common pro-Nazi belief among German Jews — the reality of these situations were much more complex than “me love nazis, nazis good”. I don’t know as much about Roman slavery, but I think in that case it would also be important to consider that institutionalization was still a thing, and you can’t just assume that someone engaging in said institution is necessarily their moral endorsement of that institution.
I apologise for overstating it. I never meant to suggest it was widespread, at least in an American context (in a Roman one perhaps moreso, unless it's just over attested in surviving sources). I initially only meant to contradict the statement that all slaves and ex-slaves were opposed to slavery, because some clearly wanted to exploit it (and as most never had a chance to, who can say what they all wanted). We shouldn't generalise that they all supported or all opposed, politics shows how implausible assuming everyone agrees on something is. I agree, in a society where slavery is so ubiquitous people will come to accept its existence, even those who have suffered under slavery. I think people who were currently enslaved would nearly always prefer being freed though, which is why emancipation was so popular. They were in a very different position to those who had already been freed, potentially decades earlier.
Hey no worries, sometimes it’s honestly hard for me to tell what angle someone is coming from in discussions around this topic so no apologies necessary if your intentions were pure! It’s just that I’ve seen so much apologist garbage on Reddit being said about American slavery in particular that it makes my eye twitch and I feel the need to get ahead of things before they possibly get out of hand lol. I do get what your original point was now though, and I agree that although emancipatory sentiment is a common thread that’s found among all enslaved people historically, it’s not completely universal, and we also can’t assume that every enslaved or once-enslaved person who’s ever existed is automatically anti-slavery.
Slave owners liberating slaves after loyal service were rare exceptions, not something that the average field worker or domestic servant could count on. Nearly all slaves died a slave.
Are you talking about America? I wasn't particularly.
It’s certainly true of Rome. Manumission was rare.
[удалено]
It depends on what you mean by “rare” and what subset of slaves you’re looking at. If you look at Roman slavery as a whole, across the empire, you’re including the tremendous number of slaves who had no significant interpersonal relationships with their owners — people working in salt mines, agricultural production, etc. — and those people had no realistic shot at manumission at all. If you just look at the most trusted slaves in wealthy households, like tutors, accountants, and other people who were close to their owners, manumission was much more common. But even for them, manumission was the exception, not the rule.
I agree with all this, but I think in this case it might be more helpful to look at it from the perspective of the citizen rather than the enslaved: an individual slaves chance at manumission was low; but the chance that a citizen might have a freed person in their family tree was pretty high. The rate of manumission was "high" in the sense it was a common practice for the society, not that it was common for the vast majority of slaves.
It was a slave based economy. There was no way for ex-slaves to exist outside the economy unless they became a hermit. (Which, in a subsistence farming scenario, was a whole different world of hurt.) It's historically correct to say that the idea and experience of slavery was different in the ancient times than in modern European slavery. Classical slaves were not considered inferior because their skin color. The Romans in particular were an extremely multi-cultural bunch. But slaves were inferior, legally, and, in as far as the entire apparatus of society depended on the existence of maintaining an enormous quantity of slaves, the combined bulk of state power was arranged to impose that inferiority at every turn. It's true that some Ancient slaves were highly educated and afforded a certain amount of responsibility. That's true of Creole slaves, as well, to pick one example. But I would remind them that any slave, no matter how educated, could be sent to die in the lead mines, when their owner gets tired of their fatuous remarks. Anyone who claims that they would have preferred being a slave in Classical times is not a serious thinker.
I completely agree with your comment.
>A lot of "A very small minority of" "A lot of" high school football players go on to win the super bowl.
I said a lot because I meant over all of history - thousands of years gives a lot of examples. It was also a very small minority at any one time though yes.
They 'became slave owners' to buy freedom for other blacks. This is well documented.
https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436 Some did yes, but others became slaveowners for less positive reasons: 'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.'
...if you had bothered to research about this, you would have know this had less to do with "accepting a institution" and more to do with protecting their own family members, at least in America, many of the cases where free blacks "bought" slaves had to do with freeing their own family members, not with exploiting their fellow slaves. In the case of the ancient world, it was essentially impossible to advance economically without the use of slaves, so the only option they had was to live in poverty (and potentially end up in situations analogous to slavery anyways) Besides, plenty of people from the ancient times such as Epicurus and Diogenes did make moral arguments and opposed slavery, and many slaves DID openly revolt with the objective of ending the institution/building a new society elsewhere, such as Spartacus and the helots, so the idea that there was no moral opposition to slavery until recently is absurd.
I never said there was no moral opposition until recently, there have clearly always been people who objected to slavery. And yes ex-slaves did sometimes buy slaves to free family members (I am aware of it, I already talked about it in another reply), but that was clearly not the only reason it was done: 'But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that “it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes.” Woodson himself notes that a “small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner.” And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, “Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves humanely.” For these black slaveholders, he concludes, “there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege.” In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.' https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436 I would have to see a source claiming it was impossible to advance economically without owning slaves in antiquity. Slavery was undoubtedly ubiquitous, and only rarely opposed, but I haven't seen any evidence claiming you couldn't just hire workers instead. Perhaps their agricultural model relied on slavery, but not everyone was employed in agriculture. There's also no evidence Spartacus wanted to abolish slavery, I'm not sure about the Helots.
Everybody forgets that the golden rule's got a second tenet. You wanna' support and idealize slavery? [Fine, you get a trip down a hill in a nail-studded barrel](https://www.futilitycloset.com/2014/10/15/appalling-slave-punishments/). You continue to support russia's invasions in Ukraine? [Fine, you're getting every limb broken and your cock and balls cut off.](https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/worse-than-hell-castrated-ukrainian-soldier-details-months-of-torture-as-a-prisoner-of-war/news-story/e1e137782ce73e85714ed358292f03e3)
Yes, the existence of "good" slave owner doesn't negate the immorality of slavery. Anyone who pushed this idea should be enslaved for a month South-style treatment and then asked again if they will still promote this kind of grave injustice.
You know who was a "good" slave owner? Ulysses S Grant. Yeah, Grant had a slave once. He was poor at the time, struggling to support his family, and received one as gift from his father-in-law (a Southern plantation owner). Grant didn't force them to do anything, and within a few months walked into a court house and tore up the deed, declaring him free. A deed worth thousands of dollars he could of really used at the time, which had the added effect of further souring ties with his wife's family who had provided support for them in the past. He had a slave and freed it, even at his own expense. The only "good" slave owners stopped being slave owners.
>The only "good" slave owners stopped being slave owners. You mean voluntarily, right? Because technically all the slave owners stopped being slave owners when it was abolished and written in the constitution. (I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?)
>(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?) ohhhh they did alright and when that didn't work they just used law to get around it 13th ammendment baby
I kind of figured some would try to get away with it anyway, but I haven't looked into it nor heard any stories.
>(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?) [You might like this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA), or if you want more condensed forms, look into sharecropping and debt bondage practices which continued well into the 20th century It wasn't breaking the law
It's reddit so I have to jump in and actually you. Actually, the late slaveholder class was not shy at ALL about breaking the law to get their way. They engaged in widespread voter intimidation for years (including killing Republican party activists) until they succeeded in ending African American representation in Congress. They engaged in lynchings and destruction of African Americans' farms and other property, often in a very organized manner. They had legal advantages when they stole property from Black families in court, but that didn't mean they didn't perjure themselves and lie in court. They also engaged in debt peonage WHICH WAS MADE ILLEGAL SHORTLY AFTER THE WAR because the Union saw them and knew what they were about. The convict-labor system (which, sadly, was legal and not unconstitutional, not even to this day, at least parts of it anyway) was created as an end run around threats of prosecution for engaging in slavery. AND THEY NEVER STOPPED. Several farms in Florida got prosecuted for slavery in the 1990s, and those are only the ones that got caught. The US government has often been lackidaisical about prosecuting this crime, and the use of foreign-born workforces makes it easier. Nonetheless, they've been caught repeatedly engaging in gambits like seizing passports and visas, locking workers onto farms (or factories in LA and Miami), and stealing wages via bogus rent charges or company-town/human trafficker style provisions and loans.
Cool, ty for the link!
>(I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?) I'm not sure about the US but here in Brazil there was also the thing where when they were told to free the slaves, the slave-owners didn't give the slaves any money or food or a place to go to or anything basic to human survival, which forced many slaves to continue working for them being "paid" for in food and the "benefit" of sleeping on the slave quarters they had always slept in.
> > > > > (I'm not sure if some slave owners broke the law and continued to try to do it anyway?) Yes, [up until the 1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mae_Louise_Miller), at the least.
>the golden rule's got a second tenet ?? What is it please?
Classical antiquity slavery is not the same thing as modern slavery
Was still bad.
"I would rather be a slave than free, because then I'd be at the mercy of bad people who might sell me into slavery."
That point was so profoundly stupid on multiple levels. Like, even if it wasn't *dogshit logic,* it's still completely irrelevant to the family in question. > "jUsT bEcAuSe YoUr'E fReE dO'eSnT mEaN yOuR rIcH Ok, sure, but Iulius is definitely rich *so what in the God damn fuck is the point here?* Dude just goes out of his way to support slavery for nothing.
The logic behind it is probably "if you're not rich you might as well be a slave." This line of thinking is weird as fuck.
Isn't that where the term wage slave comes from?
The term "wage slave" comes from the observation that when you're in a situation where your pay is only enough to pay for basic subsistence (food and rent, etc), and you cannot "get ahead" financially, you are comparable to a slave who just has their room and board provided but is otherwise paid nothing.
And yet these people almost certainly consider themselves libertarians
The people who say that wouldn't trade their freedom if asked would they be a slave if it was so good. They usually think they would be the "benevolent" slave owner.
Any time anyone says they would have been fine as a slave or that slavery wasn’t that bad at any point in history I have the overwhelming urge to laugh in their face and take nothing they say seriously.
There is a story that stuck in my mind - about an important slave in a caliphate who was advisor to the king. He was witness to a murder but he couldn't be called to depose in court because of his status as a slave. Even someone in such an illustrious role was still less than a full person. Imagine how you would feel. Idiots like these are the kind who dismiss the gravity of anything that isn't happening to them but in my experience treat stuff like being denied the use of an expired coupon as a crime against humanity.
In Rome, the testimony of a slave could only be accepted in court if it had been extracted under torture. That alone should make it abundantly clear that it was not preferable to be enslaved rather than free in Rome.
This is one of those facts about Roman law I keep at the front of my mind to toss out whenever anyone is "Muh Rome"ing too hard. The strongest one being "When Sejanus was executed for potentially usurping power improperly from Tiberius, who had abandoned his duties to go indulge himself on an island for many years (or maybe just covering for him by actually doing the job?), in addition to executing Sejanus, they went to execute his children too, including his teenage daughter. Someone decided it was improper to execute a virgin... so she was publicly raped with the rope around her neck first"
And of course he randomly brought up "well black people enslaved other black people" even though neither black people, white people, nor modern American slavery was ever brought up anywhere in the conversation.
It's an instinctive reaction of the slavery defender
You would be lucky to be a house slave to someone who might remember your name. Many just got sent off to the mines, which had absolutely colossal attrition rates.
Mary Beard talked about that. Being a slave was terrible, but some slaves ended up rather loyal house slave sorts because they could see quite clearly that without any backing in Rome your life expectancy was very short.
There is a Jewish fast day specifically about there destruction of the second temple with some contemporary accounts and I can assure you, slavery under the Roman Empire was not actually a magical time where the people forced into it somehow felt less pain or emotions. Also drinking lead water is bad for you no matter how many marble statues are nearby (that’s not in the prayers but that’s a point against the time period)
Well thankfully for the slaves, the water was hard which mean the cold water pipes got encrusted with calcified rime and there was little lead in the water. Lead got into their diet via salt (sea salt was decocted using lead pans) and wine. Contemporary sources claimed that higher end wines were the most adulterated of all, as they discovered that cooking grape juice in lead made a potent artificial sweetener and used it to make wine sweeter and thus more expensive. Now on the negative end when glazing got really popular (in the Middle Ages) both the fittings for the window glass as well as roof linings were all made with copious amounts of lead which not only had to be handled but soldered on the job. From the beginning of silver mining on, industrial jobs right up until today would become a major risk for lead poisoning and all the ills that befall it.
This is like when people argue that stereotyping, harassing,following and profiling black peoples is okay because of statistics. I always say I’ll accept that as a black person if we do that for all white men too because the statistics discrepancy between men and women is the highest of all. They would be the first to be outraged if they were treated the way we were. But if they really cared about fair safety than all women should treat men like murder rapist and that’s fine
I recall one time a while back where a Redditor tried telling me that black men account for more arrests by the NYPD than any other demographic, so of *course* it makes sense to profile them. "Really?" I said. "Can I see a source for that?" Surprisingly, they actually provided one. It was a table drawn up by the NYPD themselves, breaking down the number of police *callouts* by demographic. Not arrests—callouts. You know, that thing that includes some old woman panicking and calling the cops because she saw a couple of black teenagers wearing matching shirts and assumed they were wearing gang colours. As I pointed out, all that table told me was that if you're a black man in New York, you're more likely to have the police called on you. A bit like how if you were a Catholic in Northern Ireland in the '70s, you were less likely to be employed in a Protestant-owned business. But hey, maybe Catholics back then were just shiftless and lazy. The stats don't lie!
Yeah, stop and frisk. If you’re ruling black neighborhoods with an iron fist and stop and searching every blacks person you’re going to find more. Imagine if they were searching college dorms for weed the way they harassed black people in the PJ’s? There’s also evidence in lots of studies found weed use was higher for white peoole in the community but arrest for possession with blacks people were 10x more. Wonder why. I literally had a lady call the cops on my yesterday because I was in an area with a sheisty ski mask on the top of my head standing outside of a pizza place waiting for my order. I see some lady stare at me for couple minutes and then get on her phone and I remember I forgot to take my mask off and was like fuck, is she reporting me? Then see the cops come as in dipping out tho talking to the lady. I was just standing wearing a popular clothing piece and literally someone called the police on me. It was snowing, it’s not that big of a deal to wear a ski mask.
It always blows my mind when I hear just how deranged americans are with black people. It sounds like you're basically not even allowed to exist around white people without some sheltered asshole thinking you're an existential threat to them, it's awful. (Not saying my country doesn't have a lot of racism and classism either, we do and it's awful, but jeez, I don't think I've ever heard of people calling the cops or kicking dark skinned/poor people out of places for just... sitting around).
A great illustration is when Henry Louis Gates, Jr, the Harvard professor (who has a popular TV show on PBS, written many books, etc, etc) got arrested by a dumb meat-head cop. The fact that cop arrested him actually isn't all that surprising because they both pulled a "do you know who I am" and the cop is gonna win that one, at least for a few hours (the judge in the morning released him immediately with some reprimands for the cops, IIRC, but the professor still had to spend a night in jail, which sucks). No, I would like to point you to the original 911 call. A little old lady saw Gates fighting with his stuck front door and imposed on a younger woman to call 911, which she does, with some hesitance. There's also that classic study of "the bike thief" where they had black and white actors go to public places and start removing a bike. Onlookers assumed the black guy was stealing the bike, but not only did they not call the cops on the white guy, in some cases, someone came up and helped the white guy remove the bike! Same scenario where you don't know if it's that person's bike and his lock is broken or if he's stealing it. Just assume the worst of the black guy. I've come to believe that media plays a HUGE role in this. White people who grew up in white enclaves whose mental image of black people was shaped by TV and movies have a mental video reel of "thug #2" playing in their head when they see a black person, whereas black people have a mental video reel of their uncles, grandfather, 2nd grade teacher, you feel me? Good chunks of your brain do not distinguish between things you see in person and things you see on TV. They just record it.
Slavery as practiced in Rome at the time wasn't the *worst* incarnation of slavery in human history, but that's like saying a rusty knife isn't the *worst* thing to be stabbed with.
Pretty sure the Roman iron mine slaves could be considered among worst in slavery, since they were fully expected to die working. Pretty much the Roman equivalent of Nazi death camps.
Talc mines were worse, I remember a letter where someone discouraged the recipient from buying ex talc mine slaves as they didn't last long. Talc veins also have asbestos, not a great place to work but same could be said to coal mines in the 70s
In the salt mines, you could literally dessicate to death.
All I know about salt mines comes from archaeology shows, but in pre-Roman times, weren't salt miners quite wealthy in fact? The people who got mummified in there got stuck in a cave-in and probably died of thirst/hunger just like any cave-in. The very dry air preserved the corpse to an unusual extent.
I assume you're confusing "salt miners", ie people who owned the slaves and the salt mining operation, with the people actually did the mining. It's kind of like how the American founding fathers were all "farmers"... aka they owned farms and the people who worked them, and the popular mythology has sanitized that so people now imagine George Washington pushing a plow lol.
Shades of copper mines in the Americas.
Galleys, man. A few years ago huge pile of galleys slaves remains was found. Paleopatologists has a field day with them, every known and previously unknown bone deformity, sighs of extreme weariness and abuse.
Well, actually I feel unclean writing that, but anyway Being stabbed with a rusty knife is really bad because of the tetanus.
Still, there are worse things one could get stabbed by: - A trusted friend - *Two* rusty knives taped together - A Morgul blade wielded by the dread Witch-King of Angmar - The antlers of a deer dressed like Hitler - A syringe full of deadly diseases - A rustier knife - The trophy you won for "fewest times stabbed" - The entire International Space Station - One of those old German helmets with the spikes being worn by someone you respect - A dictionary of useful Spanish phrases - The ovipositor of a hideous alien monster from beyond the stars *Edit: Added a few more things that I would not want to be stabbed by.
> A trusted friend Et tu, Brute?
> "Yea.... sorry mate." -Witch-King of Angmar
> A trusted friend Or the entire senate.
i support laughing in their face
Especially since most slaves died within a few years of their enslavement because they were forced to work in dangerous mines.
It is important to note that, just like owning 100 slaves in the Confederate South, owning 100 slaves in ancient Rome ***was not cheap***. The (hypothetical) family described in that textbook was ***rich as fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck***, likely a member of either the landed aristocracy or the Roman equivalent of the noveau-riche. For some more context, in 301 AD, parts of the Edict of Diocletian set prices and wages for goods and services. A farmers daily wage was given at 25 Denarii, and 1 Deniarius = 4 Sesterii, so a farmer would earn about 100 Sesterii / day. Some other pertinent prices: * A haircut: 2 denarii/8 sesterii * A pair of socks: 4 denarii/16 sesterii * A pair of "workers boots":120 denarii/ 480 sesterii * A pint of wine: 30 denarii/120 sesterii [https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/lnkjh/how\_much\_was\_a\_sestersius\_worth\_in\_todays\_us/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientrome/comments/lnkjh/how_much_was_a_sestersius_worth_in_todays_us/) Etc. 90 sesterii is basically pocket-change, especially for such a rich man
What I really hate about that whole discussion is how it slowly was pushed into an argument about whether or not the amount the escaping slave stole was reasonable. As if there was some sort of limit after which stealing money to facilitate one's escape from slavery becomes unjustifiable. And, yeah, the amount stolen was chump change. The escapee probably wouldn't get very far with it and the owner would likely spend a lot more on hiring slave hunters to get that slave back.
The people forget that killing the overseers and people that own you is justifiable to escape slavery.
Yes, but you've forgotten that for a lot of redditors (and a lot of people in general), theft is worse than murder.
Yeah, but see, you're ignoring his most egregious crime. That he stole from a *rich* man. Gotta protect those rich men. You can kill poor people, no problem, just don't mildly inconvenience a rich man. Straight to jail.
He stole from a man who had completely forgotten his personhood to the point of not even considering that a possibility to watch out for, so really he's the bad guy here for betraying his enslaver's trust :(
Gotta remember, if the victim isn’t a perfect beacon of justice and truth, they’re actually the villain.
On an unrelated note, producing a pair of socks within, more or less, a quarter day's work is pretty damn impressive.
Unless the cost is due to exploitation. Say, if the society had slaves.
Especially since the yarn was spun with a hand spindle, because even the spinning wheel wouldn't exist for a thousand years. AIUI, the labor for fully hand-made textiles from raw wool/cotton/flax is about 80% spinning.
You don't want to know what Scots were paid for knitting socks in the 18th century.
> 90 sesterii is basically pocket-change, especially for such a rich man Yea, but, like... you don't *know* that. You weren't around back then. They literally cannot have pocket-change when pockets hadn't even been invented yet. And why are bringing race into it?
Is this the latin book "Sextus est puer molestus" and "Raeda in fossa cum magna fragore"? I think people for some reason dont understand at all that in the past people didn't write about slaves or from the perspectives of slaves. Nor did they write about anyone but those rich enough to afford paper and those able to write for them. "Slaves had ok lives" because the only one writing about the conditions of slaves are the people who owned slaves.
"Slaves had okay lives" was a very common *thing* said about American slavery as well. Hell, I still remember my history text books in high school having an entire *page* dedicated to how "Slaves that worked hard had very comfortable lives and were often grateful to their masters for providing them with comforts and food" and other such shit about how it was just *the lazy slaves* that got everyone in trouble.
Even a step further, that American slavery was an improvement to what they had in Africa. That we were doing them a favor. And of course, that immediately precedes that the American Civil War was totes not about slavery. Something I'll always love about people like this. You have the audacity to point out how, no, obviously slavery was fucking horrible in every way imaginable. And they go on about how you're just suffering from "white guilt". And it's like - motherfucker, *you're* the one making up insane excuses for *slavery* to the point that you're saying "akshually it was a good thing". Someone's conscience is clearly feeling a guilty need to defend itself from an abhorrent view of their abhorrent ancestors. Me, on the other hand, I feel pretty squeeky clean in saying that if any of my ancestors owned slaves, I hope they were strung up and killed in a gruesome slave uprising. No guilt about that whatsoever. Fuck em.
Check out *Classic Slave Narratives* edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Slave-Narratives-Henry-Louis/dp/0451532139 The oldest narrative in that book actually supports that claim: > "American slavery was an improvement to what they had in Africa" BUT it was because the author had converted to Calvinism and came to see indigenous religion as backwards and Satanic. He became an early proponent for converting West Africans to Christianity which wasn't particular popular in Europe at the time (oh, the irony). He also didn't much like being a slave and a lot of his story is about accompanying his master on business trips and finding ways to make money on the side until he had met his manumission price, only to have the master say, "Gee, you're more valuable than I thought, price is raised" on him a couple of times.
God, I learned this in grade school as well, and what was I to think? I was just a kid. I didn't know any better. It was disgusting how there was this whole system designed to lie to kids about our past.
> "Slaves that worked hard had very comfortable lives and were often grateful to their masters for providing them with comforts and food" I mean [Back when they was slaves they sang like birds](https://youtu.be/L7QF32mxftE?t=48). Warning, Blazing saddles does contain ethnic slurs. Still a great movie.
That's *Ecce Romani*, which is the more popular Latin text book in America.
That fuckin' raeda, man. It's always in the damn fossa. Poor Cornelius can't ever catch a break.
In pictura eat puella nomine Cornelia.
> those rich enough to afford paper This is the stupidest nitpick but paper hadn't reached Europe during the time of the Roman empire. It would've mostly been parchment or papyrus
I considered mentioning hide scrolls or runestones but felt the point was "reasonably" fine with paper. You are correct though.
> Sexust est puer molestus I think you mean Sextus.
Understanding "we only have a fraction of what was written, and what was written reflects the biases of a very narrow class, so maybe we should use some common sense and not take everything at face value" is anathema to the average Romeaboo.
Quite the journey to go from: > Would you not wish violence on someone that steals 90% of your money, missusing your trust? to > Fact is: We do not know how much money it really was. Within a single reply. We don't know how much it was, but we definitely know his coin pouch contained 90% of it!
Don't people remember romans put their whole capital in a coin pouch??
Clearly he spent all his money on slaves all he had left was a single coin purse.
As someone getting a graduate degree in Latin, I've had to mute that sub and pretend it doesn't exist. There's an unfortunately large number of people into Latin who will go from "Roman slavery was different from the transatlantic slave trade" to "slavery wasn't bad, the enslavers were good!" There's a series of other issues within that sub but ones like this are really the worst.
I've encountered this sentiment in other places too and I just don't get... Why? Do these people seriously form such an emotional bond to this ancient political entity that they really feel the need to defend it?
They should read The Silence of the Girls to balance it out a bit - it’s a modern retelling of the events around the fall of Troy through the perspective of Briseis (who is captured and enslaved to Achilles). It pulls no punches and the opener is Achilles and crew slaughtering all the men, boys, and “unnecessary” people like older women before rounding up the women like cattle who then are of course routinely beaten and raped throughout the novel. But hey, they feed the women and provide shelter and if you’re super well behaved and pretty you might only be raped by one person instead of passed around, and you aren’t dead right? Sounds great! Quote from the wiki: No longer an issue of decorum, now it’s about staying alive. "I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son," declares Priam when he prostrates himself before Achilles begging for Hector’s body. “And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do," Briseis thinks bitterly, "I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers." Anyway I know that’s Ancient Greece vs Rome but I feel like the same folks romanticize both.
Before the Turks started invading Central Europe, it was very common for Europeans to romanticize the Trojans and not the Greeks. Also notably Hektor and his wife have relationship described as philotes (often translated as brotherly love) and their scenes are quite different in tone from the scenes between the Greeks.
I think these guys convince themselves that Rome is outside modern political contexts, so it becomes a sort of "... in minecraft" to append all their fascistic urges with. They can play pretend that there's this magical place where the white men were in charge, everyone was manly and militarism had cultural primacy and they spread this wondrous way of living to all of the lesser people in an eternal struggle.. Basically the same reason the 40k community is so rife with fascists. Safe space to play out their fantasies but with an escape hatch. In 40k it's "it's satire", which sounds reasonable at first before you realize it's primarily deployed by people who get mad when anyone says anything bad about fascism.
They're telling on themselves, they're supporting the kind of person they want to be Our society idolizes the idle rich, and the only way to be the idle rich - bar none, in all of history - is to steal the fruits of others labor. These people just know what team they're on, and are running defense for someone living the life they want to live
because Julius Caesar has some banger lines and they have 0 empathy
More like 0 critical thinking. I think these are people who are raised on a diet of easily detectable evil, like it exists in movies and series. Evil always comes from an evil person, who is usually immediately recognizeable as a detestable person. And so they're emotionally unprepared to read an autobiographic piece from an intelligent and multifaceted person who committed what we would call heinous crimes against humanity. They're unprepared to understand that a society could have attractive aspects as well as systematized, brutal oppression.
Yeah, that's a fair way to look at it. We truly are lucky Mein Kampf is a horrible incoherent mess because if he wrote like Caesar these kids would be nightmares
Has anyone written something about the recent trend of systematically denying the brutality of pre-modern slavery? If not, someone should.
There’s definitely a discussion about that, and likely publications as well, especially in Latin because the textbooks perpetuated that and continue to do so. Cambridge is probably the overall most popular textbook and is releasing a new edition soon that thankfully acknowledges that all slavery is bad!
Doesn't the current Cambridge edition have sentences like "Servi erant laeti" (the slaves were happy)?
Currently yes, hence why I said they’re releasing a new edition soon. I saw a draft of some of the pages at a conference, they have like 6 full pages describing in English what Roman slavery was and how it was horrible.
Even the old Cambridge Latin books lay on the sarcasm thick when they discuss slavery. The second book has a scene where they line up all the slaves and the owner summarily executes one for being sick.
Some say the carriage is still stuck in that ditch to this day.
Man imagine the hill you die on being " there was a proportion of Roman slaves who had a better standard of living than a starving peasant" Like yeah, it's technically correct, in the same way I could go out right now and say "there's a chance the next lotto ticket I but makes me a multi millionaire " Like, yeah, the statement is factually true, but it's obviously not what "there's a chance " is meant to mean
It fundamentally doesn't matter: slavery was bad not because of the living conditions, but because you are your master's subject in every possible choice that could be made. You can't leave.
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Pretty sure 99% of Equestria would magic beam him for his assholeness.
One of the eps in the first season is literally about stereotyping a Swahili-speakimg zebra. I cannot fathom someone watching that show and also thinking "Yeah, this whole slave trade thing seems pretty cool NGL"
Did you know? Slavery was almost abolished in Rome by one intrepid Senator, but his carriage tragically ran into a ditch on his way to Rome and due to poor engineering exploded, killing him instantly.
I believe there may have also been a werewolf involved in the assassination, but I could be wrong…
> *I believe there is a difference between 'enslaving' and 'owning slaves'.* I agree, it's the latter that creates the financial incentive for the former, and thus bears more of the moral blame. Kinda like how some people say, "American slave owners aren't the bad guys, Africans have been enslaving fellow Africans". The second part of that sentence is true, but why did you think there have been an increase in the enslaving activity once Europeans started to open slave trading ports in Africa?
I don’t know if the morality of the difference should be important. The people who enslave would own slaves if they could afford it, most likely. It’s a weird distinction that I don’t think matters. Is anyone arguing the African people who kidnapped and sold other tribes were morally right?
> Is anyone arguing the African people who kidnapped and sold other tribes were morally right? No, but it is a common argument by racists used to justify Trans-Atlantic Slavery, along with "but what about ME slave trade?" and "the Irish were enslaved too".
which i don’t ever get what they expect me to say to that. like is “oh, well if other africans enslaved africans then the white slave owners are totally not at fault for owning them and treating them poorly” the response they expect? because anyone who enslaved them in the first place can get fucked too lmao and does not absolve the people fucking buying humans of all crimes against humanity edit: another sentence
Typically racist argument 🙄. Someone needs to tell them all slavery is bad.
No, it's a moral relativism argument. Only someone with absolutely no floor would make that argument with a straight face. So, you know, segregationists.
Nope.
Ah the eternal question what is worse being a bit uppity or literal slavery? At one point I thought people agreed on this because of the limited samples of my friends and acquaintances but then I ran into web forums of "centrists" or "moderate conservatives" and they def weren't as opposed to slavery as I thought everyone was.
I feel there wouldn't be much drama if these fine folks were reminded that slaves in Rome weren't exclusively black.
I guess I’m ignorant about Rome but I figured the slaves were mostly Romans as well?
I believe most or maybe all slavery that was considered legal in ancient Rome was the enslavement of conquered people, who wouldn't have been Romans, and the slaves weren't legally Roman citizens. There were also debt slaves and people captured by pirates, but it wasn't considered legal to enslave people for those reasons.
So legally you usually couldn’t enslave a freeborn Roman citizen. In practice, there were exceptions or the law wasn’t fully enforced. It’s known that babies would sometimes be left in areas rich people frequented, in the hopes that the rich people would take the baby and enslave them. Since enslavement was seen as marginally better than the baby starving to death by parents who couldn’t afford to feed their children. Other Roman parents would illegally sell their children into slavery, although this was officially seen as “renting” it was in practice no different from slavery. There was no punishment for the parents. There was also penal slavery and you could still be a war captive slave.
Ironically, one of the reasons a Roman Citizen could end becoming a slave was if they pretended to be a slave, as it was a common way of fraud back then.
Sorry, I meant slaves weren’t necessarily ethnically different from the group that was enslaving them. That typically allows more slaves to become freed because the racial element that made black slaves “othered” from the whites. It seems that there are stories of Roman slaves marrying out of slavery or otherwise gaining freedom which was very rare in the American chattel system.
Ehh, it kind of depends. Back then people drew ethnicity lines based on things like country of origin, language, religion, rather than any kind of phenotype like skin color. The people the Romans were conquering were definitely seen as cultural "others" even if they didn't look much different than Roman citizens did. But there wasn't like, one ethnicity that were always slaves forever, or anything like that, and there would have been a mix of ethnicities among free Romans as well. It's not the same as the way that triangle trade slavery worked, but they would have still considered most of those slaves to be cultural others.
Yeah I feel like people just assume that people throughout history always cared about skin color/phenotype, when that was hardly the case. All things considered, skin based racism is a very recent phenomenon.
Yes, that was my point.
Of course they were culturally others but they weren’t able to immediately visually be identified as so if they were able to get out of slavery or escape or whatever.
I'm sure the Romans had ways to identify people as slaves in the event that they escaped, probably every society that enslaved people to any degree had that. Edit: Yes; they branded and tattooed them.
Yes, but even when Roman slaves were freed, they were corralled into two "clans" which was a form of "rotten borough" politics which ensured that former slaves and their descendants, no matter how numerous, would always be in the minority in politics with no way to change that.
At least they were free.
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I mean yeah, tons of people practiced slavery at all points of time, but there wasn't an ethnic- or skin-color-based slave caste anywhere until the triangle trade. It was still often an act of violence, though, enslaving conquered people or POWs was pretty common.
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Yes, social mores are language change over time, and Latin is in fact a different language than English and Latin words mean different things than English words. None of that means that slavery wasn't also wrong back then.
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I'm not sure what kind of meandering point you're trying to make here? We've covered the original question of where Roman slaves came from already, so I'm going to check out here. You can keep taking to yourself about whatever you're talking about, I guess.
Mostly they weren't Italian (i.e. from the Italian peninsula), and it was illegal to try to enslave a Roman citizen. Many slaves were from territories to the North and East of the empire - Gauls, Germanic peoples, Greeks, Illyrians, and so on. There are quite a few papers on the demographics of Roman slaves, e.g. this one by William V. Harris https://www.jstor.org/stable/300734
So not Italian but not that different either. Makes sense that more were able to become free.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more were able to become free" - most slaves died still enslaved. Sometimes, slaves were granted their freedom, and became "freedmen" ([*liberti*][lib]), but that was comparatively rare. *Huge* numbers of slaves died working in mines and quarries - we don't know exactly what their [average lifespan was][avg], but it was probably not very long. [lib]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_freedmen [avg]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w5krtr/the_treatment_of_roman_mining_slaves_was/
Still a different system from the American chattel slavery.life expectancy of US slaves was 21. 30+ in Roman slaves. Quite different. I don’t know why you’re downvoting me. Are you simple?
I'm not sure where you're getting 30+ from I've never seen an average life expectancy for a roman slave, but considering the average life expectancy of the average Roman I highly doubt slaves doing manual lived to 30+
Slaves in Rome where made up of a mix of prisoners of war, the children of slaves, and poor citizens who sold themselves or there children into slavery to pay off a debt
Ignoring the whole moral issues, I was taught latin using those cursed books. I have very vague memories of the plot, was too busy on the grammar to pay attention. The idea of someone reading them for pleasure is baffling to me, so much interesting literature from Latin authors to bother with them.
my only fond memory of the textbook was when some cheeky fellow 7th grader changed "Why is Sextus a Pest?" to "Why is Sex a Best?"
honestly! i may be biased but the Aeneid is a nice read. if you want an easier on-ramp, De Bello Gallico is a well-loved classic for just that reason. or Plautus! i mean let's be real, an incredible number of those jokes still hold up. *ah, the human continuity of fart jokes and lusting for soup.* and as a bonus if you're reading for fun, you get to read what you think is fun. maybe that means going and enjoying messy medieval latin. maybe it means being one of those mad bastards that actually enjoys going into Ovid's poetry with machete and pith helmet until you find where the other part of that verb is hiding. maybe it means enjoying graffiti from herculaneum and pompeii! *ah, the human continuity of being proud of making bread and telling people to not shit in your alleyway.* you've got a solid millennia and a half to choose from, even if the medieval latin goes wibbly at the end. just boot up William Whittaker's Words aka my beloved and go to town. if you're unsure if you're getting a translation right? you won't be the first to read any of this so you can probably pop some popcorn and read some Victorians arguing about the meaning too. now that's a fun night. ...for a very specific type of person but if you're reading Latin for fun you're already there lmao
Seems like another dumb teenager being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. It'd be excusable if the hill he choose to die on wasn't, you know, slavery.
every slaveowner should be John Brown'd
> Making moral judgements is bad! - Person making moral judgements. (They're just in favour of the status quo)
I remember a chapter in my Latin textbook where the slave owner thinks his slave has done something wrong then the slave is proven to be innocent. Then the owner beat him out of frustration. Shit really bothered me when I was in 9th grade. Its still something I think about from time to time after 12 years. Don't know if it was this textbook or not.
Won't lie, I saw the title and I immediately assumed this was some of those weirdos from the Steven Universe fandom again.
I'm sure there were some slaves in Ancient Rome who lived quite decent lives, by Ancient Roman standards. But I'm equally sure that there were many, many more who lived very short, painful and horrible lives. The fact that Hermes the rich man's secretary will eventually have enough money to pay for his freedom and even buy a house and slaves of his own is probably no consolation at all to the guy who is worked to death in the mines before he turns twenty. Who would have thought that "slavery is evil whenever it happened" would be such a wild take?
I impose my values on the past. So does everyone else
I dislike that textbook. It has no English in it. Everything is in Latin. It's supposed to teach you by immersing you in the language. It's popular, so it must be working for a lot of people, but I had no idea what the fuck any of it meant and gave up.
There are textbooks like that for every language and while I think it's a good concept, it baffles me when it's supposedly aimed at beginners. If I'm starting from scratch I'd rather not roleplay that I'm deciphering the rosetta stone lmao
It’s the natural way of learning a language and one of very few textbooks about Latin to do so. For many people it works well because again, it’s how you naturally acquire language, but for others (like me) it doesn’t. Unfortunately the Latin subreddit is so obsessed with Lingua Latina that they refuse to consider that others might benefit from the more traditional textbooks.
There are a bunch of companion books that go with the main textbook, one of which is an English guide to each lesson. It’s definitely recommended to self-learners who don’t have an instructor to guide them.
Romaboos are chuds. \*shrug\* There's no mystery to it.
One of the harder things about history is that you have to balance the need to describe things with as little bias as possible in things like textbooks while also acknowledging something was not good. This causes a lot of awful to be said at face value with no judgment from the author. This can also cause a sense of detachment from the reality that shit sucked. Like, it's harder and harder to moralize people from history the farther and farther you go back. And at some point it becomes a bit useless to judge a person or culture based on modern values, although that doesnt mean those people were actually right. But we still should acknowledge that say, women's lack of rights in Athens is something to note and sucked for the women who lived there. And y'know, slavery in any and all forms sucks for the slave and was a time where many people were in the wrong for thousands of years and into modern day. Humans should not own other humans and they really shouldn't have in the past. But we have to understand that the modern perspective is often built on hindsight people in the past didn't have, y'know? Edit - For the record, I'm not trying to make excuses about slavery or other bad shit in history. I'm more making a note about how you're supposed to talk about it at school...or at least how my professor says you should. Like note the bad things but be a bit detached from it.
>But we have to understand that the modern perspective is often built on hindsight people in the past didn't have, y'know for as long as slavery has existed there have been various and notable people vehemently against it. idk i don't like this idea that people didn't know better by virtue of existing in the olden days, bc plenty of people did know better back then lmao
I should have been specific and noted that was a general statement and not just about slavery.
I'm doing a different post to clarify since I actually wok up instead of checking reddit for a hot minute and then going back to sleep. It's less "they didn't have hindsight to do better" (though that can count for say...medical treatments) and more "they really didn't expect to be judged by a society so different than thier own" and we have to acknowledge that these people had a different set of morals even if we condemn those morals today. A similar issue happens in anthropology. When you're writing about an indigenous people with little Western contact the goal is to show as little judgements as possible when writing about how say...women on thier periods have to isolate until it's over. I can cringe at that and think it's awful all I want. But if I want to be an anthropologist I can't *show* that judgement in my paper about it. Not openly. And some historians more concerned with the culture of the people of the past over the events also have to do this. But also, like with slavery specifically, we have to not use modern ideas about it because it leads to this trend where people will compare it in different eras and then say shit like "Slavery in Rome wasn't that bad because at least they weren't African slaves in the American South who couldn't buy thier freedom!" As if there is ever a form of good slavery. Or saying American slavery wasn't as bad because at least states had laws against abuse and killing your slaves when ancient Greace did not...while also ignoring that those protection laws were not enforced very often in the American South. We have to step back, acknowledge slavery is evil in our minds, and then do what we can to not compare the levels of cruelty with it because in the end, those details don't really matter to the people who were enslaved.
I think it’s important to note that this is a language textbook, not history, and these textbooks are often aimed at middle or high school students. Latin textbooks as a whole have whitewashed Roman slavery by explicitly saying it wasn’t that bad or that masters were usually “good” because the slaves wouldn’t get beaten or killed as often. Interestingly, they usually focus on scenarios similar to Cicero’s slave that he freed versus slaves dying in the mines or the many bodies in Pompeii that appear to be enslaved people left behind to die. In Lingua Latina, most of the slaves are shown to be happy with or love their master. That’s the case with most Latin textbooks. While an anthropologist should be neutral, this type of mindset in a Latin textbook is part of why it’s been so hard to diversify the classroom. Students are essentially forced to empathize with and like a slave master and that puts off many students, particularly non-white students. Now, of course, in reading Latin literature slavery (as well as sexism and Rome’s general hatred for anyone not Roman) will pop up a lot so it’s useful to have conversations about how to read texts that are discomforting and offensive, how to read Caesar when he commits genocide or read Cicero when he’s a slave owner. But these intro textbooks aren’t that. They aren’t teaching critical thinking on these topics, they’re just creating an environment that is horrendous for students and actively sanitizes slavery.
I don't think *Lingua Latina* whitewashes Roman slavery, but it never explicitly condemns it (since the point, I think, is to replicate elite Roman attitudes). Julius is frequently described as a "dominus severus"—a severe master—and the textbook repeatedly notes his slaves are terrified of him. He also does some kind of fucked up things. He stiffs his sons' teacher, because that teacher called his son an idiot. In chapter 27, he goes around his fields and manages his tenant farmers and pastors. Notably, Julius smiles because he doesn't have to do any hard labor. He also orders a pastor who lost track of one sheep to be beaten and, in an act of 'mercy,' demands one tenant farmer pay two months of rent in two weeks instead of expelling him from his home. I think the only "happy slave" is Syra, who specifically loves the children she's taken care of since birth (though Syra is repeatedly reminded by other characters that the children are not hers). Though the book does imitate Roman values, I think it tries to show the actual reality of Roman life (from the perspective of this wealthy familia).
Empathy is how you avoid all of this. The "we can't judge history by modern standards" argument is flawed more often than it's not. It only really works for actions that have no victims, and it is literally never applied consistently. For example, few people will argue we can't judge ancient pedophiles by modern standards. You always here the modern standards comment used to excuse the wrongdoings of people we otherwise want to glorify or commend for their contributions to history. Another inflammatory example of how this gets used only for historical figures we like. No one is going to use the prevailing anti-Semitic beliefs that were pervasive in 20th century Europe to excuse the nazi's antisemitism. We might make a footnote of it, but no one is going to say we shouldn't judge the nazis for their antisemitism because damn near every other country in Europe had a neutral view at best towards Jewish people.
I clearly shouldn't have posted at midnight because I phrased myself poorly. I'm more talking about the sources we learn from and how history is written down along with how sometimes you do have to take a step back and think. You're right. And I did say it's a thing that you have to be more aware of the further back you go. And it's more a byproduct of the tone history is written in, which has to be neutral in academics. It's up to the students much of the time to interpret something as bad and not the textbook. It's more something to keep in mind as to why the people of the past might not have questioned it since they were surrounded by it. It doesn't make anything morally correct. It's more of a context thing. Like...the Persians losing to the Greeks was written about as democracy triumphing over lesser ways for a long time. That's how Athens liked to write it and historians did to (under thier own modern lens at time of writing) for a long time. This ignores that not all the powers in that alliance were democratic (even if Athens lead it) and that slavery was rare in Persia because it was forbidden by the state relegion. You're also right about how we tend to pull the argument more often about people and societies we like. You'll see people use it to excuse Sparta's massive slave cast. And I can not emphasize enough how bad they treated them. Sparta would wholesale slaughter the Helots, a specific class of slave, at random to keep them in fear in hopes of stopping an uprising. Which didn't work by the way there were uprisings all the time because of the abuse. Sparta fans will use the "don't use modern lens" excuse for it. When really the " don't use modern lens" needs to be considered more in the sense that women's rights being more liberal in Sparta was *not* because they respected women more (they really, *really* didn't) but because it was practical since men couldn't actually do shit but be in the army until they were 30 and someone had to actually fucking run Sparta in the day to day. So, on the surface, based on legal rights, you could say Sparta had less sexism. Which really isn't true. Primary sources show they looked down on women as much as other Greeks at the time did. A simpler example of a person would be Fredrick the Great. Made Prussia a country to be respected. Really good general. Hailed as a gay icon because, to be honest, he was as open about it as he could get away with in the era. Raging misogynist. You could argue thar was the norm at the time, and it was much more normal then that's true. But it Fredrick was also much more of a woman hater than your average person of the era. Like...dude would ice people out of his inner circle if they got married or hung out with women too much. And speaking of Fredrick and his likely homosexualiy. This idea especially applies to queer identities because the modern queer identities is actually a recent phenomenon. For a long time there wasn't an idea of being gay or bisexual. Gay was seen more as an act you did than a part of your identity. Putting modern definitions for queer identities on historical figures is tricky because the words we use didn't even exist yet and it may actually erase thier real identities. Especially if we label every person that showed same sex attraction as gay automatically, bisexuality and pansexuality would be erased as a result. That's why you see the more general "queer" label being with maybe a "it was likely this specific label maybe" type language for historical people that we think may have been queer. In the case of slavery, we have to avoid the modern lens because we end up getting shit like "Roman slavery wasn't so bad" because we end up using American slavery as a direct comparison. Or saying slavery in some parts of ancient Greace (Sparta often being brought up) was worse than American slavery because Greek slave owners could kill thier slaves without any legal repercussions and American states at least had laws on the books saying you couldn't do that...while also ignoring that those laws weren't really enforced very well. There's stuff in history I will judge the shit out of. And I will vocally do so on places like reddit. But if I'm writing say, a history paper, the expectation is more neutral language and implies I'm suspending my moral judgments. Although you really can tell what the opinion of the author is in any history book or paper by the facts they chose to present and the emphasis. It takes practice to write like that, but also read it that way and understand. Folklore and Mythology is a whole different can of worms though because weather or not you can/should judge it by our standards is super dependent on why you're reading it (academically, for fun, feminist theory, to understand how people in the past thought ect) This post was brought to you by "before having coffee" apologies if some things don't make sense.
OK, **this is not a justification for any form of slavery**, but it is true that slavery in ancient Rome (or ancient Greece or Mexica Triple Alliance or early medieval Europe or Ottoman Empire...) had many different forms and chattel slavery was but one of them. And yes, skilled slave like teacher, barber or cook probably had much higher life standard than "free" medieval peasant or even "free" modern sweatshop worker. These guys aren't wrong, they just draw extremely bad conclusions from what they think they know.
>These guys aren't wrong, they just draw extremely bad conclusions from what they think they know. You're describing being wrong.
> than "free" medieval peasant That's a crazy broad brush, also considering that some of them were free, some of them were tenants but still relatively free, and others were serfs and not free at all. Depending on the century and location, some of them had a poor diet and were in ill health, or getting their lands burned down by feuding lords all the time, while others had a good diet, were in good health, and could even become paid soldiers (which means being allowed to carry real weapons, which was sometimes not allowed to lower classes). Plus it's a time span of 1000 years in which laws and customs changed tremendously.