A few ancient states were true slave societies. In classical Athens, slavery was central to the social structure, economy, and culture, just as it would be in the later slave societies of the Caribbean, Brazil, and the southern United States. Along with household slaves who carried out a variety of tasks, slaves worked in large artisanal workshops, as soldiers and sailors in the Athenian army and navy, as the low-status prostitutes known as pornai, in the countryside raising crops, and as laborers in mines and quarries. Determining numbers is difficult, but perhaps as much as a third or even a half of the population of Athens was enslaved. Most citizen households owned at least one slave—to have none was to be seen as poverty-stricken—and it is estimated that the average was three or four. The philosopher Plato (427–347 BCE) owned five, and the ideal state he envisioned in The Republic includes slaves who do most of the manual labor, leaving citizens time for thinking and governing. As distinctions among free male citizens were played down in the ideology of Athenian democracy, the distinction between free and slave came to be of special concern. In the Politics, the Athenian philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) developed the idea of “natural slavery,” arguing that those who can apprehend reason but not practice it were “slaves by nature.” Such a man had “only so much moral virtue as will prevent him from failing in his duty” to his master. Aristotle does not explain how those slaves who were able to purchase their freedom or whose masters emancipated them, or conversely those resident foreigners who were enslaved as a punishment or for debt, came to gain or lose their rational capacity or moral virtue in the process.
Athens may provide the best example from the ancient world of the conceptualization of slavery proposed by the Jamaican-born historical sociologist Orlando Patterson, who has argued that slavery everywhere was “social death.” Slaves were not simply owned by others, but lost the identity and relations that a person usually possesses by virtue of birth, a process Patterson terms “natal alienation.” Slaves were not acknowledged to be members of a family, lineage, clan, or community, but were dishonored persons with only one acknowledged tie, that of subordination to their masters, enforced by violence. Patterson’s thesis has been criticized as overly totalizing and dichotomous, because many societies had a range of servile and dependent relationships. It has also been seen as insufficiently attentive to the vibrant cultures that often developed among enslaved persons, but has been influential in its focus on the role of violence and social isolation in slave systems.
In Rome, slavery became an increasingly important social and economic system, and the survival of a wide range of sources allows us to examine many aspects of this development in more detail than we can elsewhere in the ancient world. Although there had always been slaves in the city of Rome and its environs, the expansionary wars of the second century BCE led to a dramatic growth of slavery in several interrelated processes. The prolonged fighting drew men into the army and away from their farms; their wives managed the farms in their absence, but they did not have enough workers to keep them under full cultivation and so could not pay all their taxes or rents. When the soldiers returned, they were often forced to sell their farms at low prices to the wealthy, who included military contractors and others who had become rich through the wars. These wealthy landowners also rented land won by conquest, and created huge agricultural estates termed latifundia, where crops could be raised at a lower cost than on small farms. The owners of the latifundia occasionally hired free people as day laborers, but they preferred to use slaves, who had no legal identity and could not be drafted into the army. Those slaves were provided by the conquests; slave dealers accompanied Roman armies, and brought back slaves of every conquered population, particularly boys and young men, favored as workers on latifundia. Gradually agriculture in Italy was transformed from subsistence farming to an important source of income for the Roman ruling class. Large labor gangs of slaves worked under the supervision of overseers, who might themselves be slaves. Estimates are difficult, but by the end of the first century BCE perhaps one-third of the population of Italy were slaves.
Slaves on latifundia raised all types of crops, but the most important of these was wheat, the staple of the Roman diet. Romans may have eaten some wheat in the form of sheets of fried dough akin to pasta (the idea that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China in the thirteenth century is a legend), but they—and other Mediterranean peoples—ate their wheat primarily in the form of bread, flat if necessary and leavened if possible. Breads of various types became foods with great nutritional, cultural, and ultimately religious importance.
Slaves were also engaged in other occupations besides farming in Roman Italy. They ranged from highly educated household tutors and widely sought out sculptors to gladiators forced to fight and convicts condemned to work in the mines, and their living conditions were similarly varied. Slaves could not marry and had no legally recognized family ties—here Patterson’s thesis fits well—and the children of a female slave belonged to her owner. Some household slaves did enter into marriage-like relationships, but these could be broken up at the will of the owner, and sources indicate that very young enslaved children were regularly sold by themselves from one house to another.
2.6 In this first-century CE Roman wall fresco, slaves slaughter a small animal, perhaps a fawn, in preparation for a meal, while a nearby tray holds imported species and a bulb of garlic. In most wealthy households all the kitchen staff, including the head cook, would have been slaves.
Slaves sometimes attempted to flee, and those who failed in their attempts were returned to their masters and often branded on their foreheads. There were occasional small slave revolts, and one major one, in 73 BCE, which began when a group of gladiators escaped from one of the gladiatorial schools near Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy. Led by Spartacus and several others, the armies of escaped slaves eventually numbered in the tens of thousands. They defeated several Roman army units sent to quash them, and finally a large army of regular soldiers put down the revolt. Spartacus was apparently killed on the battlefield, and the slaves who were captured were crucified, with thousands of crosses lining the main road to Rome. The rebellion had a significant impact on Roman politics, as the commanders who had defeated the slaves took their own armies to Rome and began to shape the Roman Republic to fit their ambitions, eventually leading to its downfall at the hands of Julius Caesar and the establishment of the Roman Empire by his grandnephew (and adopted son) Augustus.
The effects of the Spartacus revolt on Roman slavery are less clear. The use of slaves on latifundia began to decline in the first and second centuries CE, but this appears to have resulted primarily from the fact that, as the military expansion of the Empire slowed and the influx of new slaves lessened, hiring poor free families as sharecroppers became cheaper than purchasing and maintaining slaves. More people freed their slaves in these centuries than had earlier—so many that in 4 CE Emperor Augustus in the Lex Aelia Sentia regulated the practice—with motivations that ranged from philosophical to economic. Manumitted slaves, or those who had purchased or otherwise gained their own freedom, belonged to a legal class in Rome called libertini (singular libertus/liberta). Their position varied depending on the circumstances of their becoming free and changed over time, but in general the men among them had a limited political voice, and their children were full citizens.
Roman laws about slavery—as about many things—became increasingly complex over the centuries, and were always connected to other social practices and aims. For example, in the Lex Aelia Sentia, a libertus who would normally only have received limited citizenship rights was made a full citizen as long as he married a freewoman or a liberta and she had a son. The woman herself could claim these rights for herself and her son if the libertus had died, and if she had given birth to a certain number of children she could petition to be released from male legal guardianship. Augustus promoted these measures not because he was a champion of slaves or women, but because he was worried about
the Roman birthrate and what he perceived as a decline in traditional Roman values centered on the family, and because he was positioning himself as the real source of authority in Rome during this period of transition from republic to empire. In his efforts at social control, he also passed a series of other laws regarding marriage and morality, among them a restriction on the inheritance of property by free men and women who were unmarried or had no children, and a transformation of adultery from a private family matter into a public crime.
Rome was unusual in the ancient world in its dependence on slave labor, but not in its concern with the sexual actions of slaves and ex-slaves, which appear in law codes, edicts, and commentaries from other areas as well. Although in Athens adult male slaves were specifically prohibited from engaging in relations with free male adolescents because this would upset the proper power hierarchy of male–male sexual relations, in most places the primary concern of lawmakers was sexual relations that could produce children. In the law codes of the Germanic tribes that conquered Roman lands from the third to the fifth century CE, for example, enslaved men who engaged in sex with free women were generally liable to death (as were the women), and freed women (that is, former slaves) who had sex with or married slaves could be enslaved again. Different rules and laws were issued in other areas, although everywhere policing the boundaries between various social groups depended on traditions and norms as much as on statutes.
Text-based religions and cultural interactions
In the middle of the first millennium BCE, those traditions and norms were themselves being systematized and often written down for the first time. The period from about 600 BCE to about 350 BCE encompasses the life-spans of Confucius and Laozi (viewed as the founder of Daoism) in China, the Greek thinkers Thales, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the Hebrew prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the second Isaiah, and the Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of the Jain faith) in South Asia. In the mid twentieth century the scholars Karl Jaspers and Shmuel Eisenstadt posited that this period—which they later extended from 800 to 200 BCE—was also a crucial turning point in human history, to which they gave the name “Axial Age,” from the German word achse, which means both axis and pivot. They saw this as a time when (in Jaspers’ words) “the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid” because for the first time self-reflective thinkers became skeptical about received truths, argued that the individual has worth, stressed moral conduct and compassion, and drew lessons from history. The concept of an Axial Age has been very influential among sociologists interested in typologies of human experience and among scholars of religion, who sometimes extend it forward in time to encompass the development of Christianity. Some historians point out, however, that six hundred years (or more) is a long time for a turning point, and that what made the Axial Age thinkers most distinctive is that their ideas came to be written down. Earlier thinkers, or those in societies that did not leave written records, or women, or illiterate rural dwellers, may have had similar ideas, they note, but no record of them survives. Whether or not you find the notion of an Axial Age persuasive, the fact that the ideas of these thinkers were recorded, and, more importantly, copied and recopied, studied, commented on, and expanded until they became foundational cultural traditions does make them extremely significant.
Among these written traditions are those created by the Hebrews, a group of people who briefly established two small states in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River known as Canaan. Politically unimportant when compared with the Egyptians or the Babylonians, the Hebrews created a new form of religious belief, a monotheism based on the worship of an all-powerful god they called YHWH, Anglicized as Yahweh. Beginning in the late 600s BCE, they began to write down their traditions, laws, history, and ethics, which were edited and brought together in the five books known as the Torah. More history and traditions, and other types of works—advice literature, prayers, hymns, and prophecies—were added, to form the Hebrew Bible, which Christians later adopted and termed the “Old Testament” to parallel specific Christian writings termed the “New Testament.” These writings became the core of the Hebrews’ religion, Judaism, a word taken from Judah, the southern of the two Hebrew kingdoms and the one that was the primary force in developing religious traditions.
Fundamental to an understanding of the Jewish religion is the concept of the Covenant, an agreement that people believed to exist between themselves and Yahweh. According to the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh appeared to the tribal leader Abraham, promising him that he would be blessed, as would his descendants, if they followed Yahweh. (Because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all regard this event as foundational, they are referred to as the “Abrahamic religions.”) The Bible recounts that Yahweh next appeared to a charismatic leader named Moses during a time he was leading the Hebrews out of enslavement in Egypt, and Yahweh made a covenant with the Hebrews: if they worshipped Yahweh as their only god, he would consider them his chosen people and protect them from their enemies. Early leaders such as Abraham and Moses and later individuals such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah who acted as intermediaries between Yahweh and the Hebrew people were known as “prophets.” Much of the Hebrew Bible consists of writings in their voices, understood as messages from Yahweh to which the Hebrews were to listen.
Worship was embodied in a series of rules of behavior, the Ten Commandments, which Yahweh gave to Moses. These required certain kinds of religious observances and forbade the Hebrews to steal, kill, lie, or commit adultery, thus creating a system of ethical absolutes. From the Ten Commandments a complex system of rules of conduct was created and later written down as Hebrew law. Like the followers of other religions, Jews engaged in rituals through which they showed their devotion. They also were to please Yahweh by living up to high moral standards, and by worshipping him above all other gods. Increasingly this was understood to be a commandment to worship Yahweh alone. The later prophets such as Isaiah created a system of ethical monotheism, in which goodness was understood to come from a single transcendent god, and in which religious obligations included fair and just behavior toward other people as well as rituals. Religious leaders were important in Judaism, but personally following the instructions of Yahweh as recorded in sacred texts was the central task for observant Jews in the ancient world. Political and military developments led Jews to scatter widely, first throughout the Mediterranean and then beyond. They maintained their cohesion as a group through intermarriage, and only rarely actively sought converts.
Other religious traditions were spread by their adherents, becoming what are often called “universal religions” or “portable religions”—religious traditions not identified with particular locations or ethnic groups as were most in the ancient world, but that appealed across cultural boundaries. Migrations, invasions, trade, and intentional missionary work carried religious ideas and practices from place to place in the first millennium BCE, and they became transformed in the process.
Buddhism was the first religious tradition to spread widely, to Southeast Asia alongside Hinduism and in many other directions as well. Buddhism was based on the ideas of a north Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama (fl. c. 500 BCE), called the Buddha (“enlightened one”). As related in later Buddhist texts, Prince Gautama had a pampered and sheltered early life, but gradually learned about the reality of pain, suffering, and death. He left his wife and family to go off as a wandering ascetic, but while meditating had a revelation in which he achieved enlightenment, that is, insight into the cosmic truths that underlay the universe. He began to teach his central insights, laid out as the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path: life is suffering arising from desire and attachments, but people can overcome their desires and weaknesses by deciding to liberate themselves from them, living morally, being compassionate, and searching for enlightenment through contemplation. Those who gain enlightenment are freed from the cycle of birth and death, and enter into a state called nirvana, a blissful nothingness akin to the Hi
ndu concept moksha. In theory, the Buddhist path to enlightenment was (and is) an individual journey open to all regardless of caste or gender, although other early texts present women as dangerous threats to men’s achieving enlightenment. The Buddha taught that a life of monasticism—renouncing the world in favor of a life of prayer and meditation in a community—could make one spiritually superior, but that lay believers gained spiritual merit by supporting the monastic community (sangha). He allowed women to become nuns—and many did—but placed them in a subordinate status to monks.
Although Buddhist teachings emphasized that withdrawal from the world was the best way to lessen desire, political leaders adopted Buddhism. Among the earliest was Ashoka (ruled c. 270–232 BCE), who ruled the Mauryan Empire founded by his grandfather that controlled a large part of the Indian subcontinent. Ashoka became a Buddhist at some point in his life—by tradition after being revolted by the slaughter and suffering involved in one of his military campaigns—built monasteries and mounds called stupas to house Buddhist relics, sent missionaries beyond the borders of his territory, and erected large pillars proclaiming his devotion to dharma and instructing his officials and subjects on how to act according to its principles of justice and ethics, which included toleration of other traditions.
The Mauryan Empire collapsed shortly after Ashoka’s rule, and northern India came to be ruled by groups that originated elsewhere and brought with them other traditions. Among these were the Kushans, a Central Asian nomadic people who established an empire that by the second century CE stretched from western China to the Ganges Valley and west to modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, with cities at the oases along the trading routes that crossed Asia known as the Silk Roads. Judging by archaeological evidence and sources from outside—no textual works have survived from Kushan itself—the Kushans followed a range of religious practices and blended aspects of many cultures. Their empire included small states that had been ruled by Greek-speaking kings since the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, including Gandhara, where several rulers had become Buddhists, and Hellenistic Greek ideas, religious traditions, and artistic styles blended with Indian ones.
A Concise History of the World (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 14