Roman slavery was prominent by the end of the second century BCE, when the Romans controlled the states and all citizens of Italy south of the Po River. However, as Sandra R. Joshel states in Slavery in the Roman World, it is difficult to label this ancient society in Rome as a "slave society" as opposed to a society that have slaves. She notes that "Generally, historians define a slave society in quantatative terms: How many slaves? What proportion of the population were slaves?" (7) If a "slave society" is defined by a proportion of slaves greater than 20 percent of the population, only five slave societies have existed in human history, which include ancient Rome, Greece, and United States during the Civil War.
However, from my readings, I believe that ancient Rome was indeed a slave society, but not based on numbers. The reason it was a slave society is because it was culturally accepted in society, and there were explicit laws permitting slavery in ancient rome. Joshel explains that "if we rely solely on law and literature for our understanding of Roman society, we rely on a story that excludes for the most part the positions of slaves and lower-class Romans. Law maps the boundaries within which action took place and the roles determined by rights and privleges from the perspective of jurists that owned property, including slaves." (14) To me, this suggests that many of the wealthy owners often overlooked the harsh treatment of slaves, and very few literary works accurately capture the grueling conditions that the slaves work through. As Keith Bradley puts it in his 1994 book Slavery and Society at Rome, "Traditionalists will object that to try to penetrate the psychological world of the Roman slave is beyond the historian's sphere, especially if the attempt leans heavily on support from other times and places...But objections are inadmissible when founded on defective knowledge or false, and even arrogant, beliefs that the unique character of the classical world somehow renders it incapable of profitable comparison with other historical societies." (180) These slaves were used so that those who owned them could prosper, and the free people saw nothing wrong with this.
To capture the perspective of what the lives of these ancient slaves were like, I read a novel entitled The Satyricon, which was written by Petronius, an active senator and consul in the mid-first century CE.
One key part that stood out to me was the excerpt about a dinner party by Trimalchio, a wealthy free Roman. He would frequently hold such dinner parties, and the slaves were ordered to labor to his every command. Petronius wrote "Trimalchio had now stopped his game, and asked for all the same dishes, and in a loud voice invited any of us, who wished, to take a second glass of mead. Suddenly the music gave the sign, and the light dishes were swept away by a troop of singing servants. An entrée-dish happened to fall in the rush, and a boy picked it up from the ground. Trimalchio saw him, and directed that he should be punished by a box on the ear, and made to throw down the dish again. [34] This shows that having slaves is a symbol of wealth in Roman society, since these slaves would labor to a wealthy free person's ever need. Trimalchio spoke down to the slaves, instructing “Now tell me, my dear friend: you will erect a monument as I have directed? I beg you earnestly to put up round the feet of my statue my little dog, and some wreaths, and bottles of perfume, and all the fights of Petraites[p. 139] so that your kindness may bring me a life after death; and I want the monument to have a frontage of one hundred feet and to be two hundred feet in depth." By being ordered to do these tasks, it shows that the motivation for owning slaves is to have a sense of superiority, and not to help produce income, the way it was during the United States Civil War when slaves would cultivate and harvest crops and perform field labor so that their masters could sell these goods.
Plautus wrote a variety of plays during the late third and early second centuries BCE which aimed at capturing the essence of the physical and psychological toll the slaves had to go through. A moving scene was that when Saturio, a free Roman living in poverty, had to resort to selling his own daughter into slavery in order to support the family. Saturio declared "May this same matter turn out well for me, and for yourself, and for my stomach, and for everlasting victuals for it as well for all time to come...to you I have communicated all my designs. For that reason have I dressed you out after this fashiton; young woman, to-day you are to be sold." (3.1.1-5)
Today, although its place in culture has changed as well as the way it is administered, slavery is still a symbol of power for the wealthy that take ownership of the underprivleged, and the underprivleged in America today are generally illegal immigrants. Knowing that they have no rights in the United States due to lack of citizenship, wealthy restaurant owners or farmers take in illegal immigrants and their families, and pay them well below minimum wage to bus tables and clean dishes, or in the case of farmers, give them virtually inhospitable conditions while they work in the field, and provide them with little food and water. In the following video, it is revealed that Adkin's Blueberry Packing Company in South Haven, MI had employed young illegal immigrants and their family. Among these immigrants were eight and seven year olds.
As stated in the video, the family offered their children into labor because they had low income, similar to the conflict inthe play written by Plautus, when Saturio had to subject his daughter to slavery. Although slavery is illegal in society today, it has taken on new forms. This slavery is used for wealthy people, like this farm owner, to produce more income while undercutting the costs of labor by employing illegal child immigrants. But as it has been made clear, slavery still exists today.
No comments:
Post a Comment