Usually, the general handed over the captives to an official who sold them at auction to traders who followed the armies. The commanding general determined the fate of war captives, whom the Romans considered part of the plunder. Of these, war, the enslavement of Rome’s defeated enemies, was one of the most important. The Romans had various sources of slaves-war, birth, piracy, and the long distance trade from outside the empire. At Rome, attitudes toward slaves and slaveholders’ practices denied the ethnicity of slaves even as they acknowledged it, and this simultaneous affirmation and denial contributed to the slave’s social death. In many ways, the attitudes and stereotypes of freeborn (usually elite) Romans, reflect what the sociologist Orlando Patterson calls “social death”-the slave’s the loss of ethnicity, family, and membership in a tribe or a state. The Romans did have negative ethnic stereotypes and they did denigrate slave bodies and supposed characteristics. Modern associations with race will not help us to understand the Roman view of slaves’ ethnicities, natal cultures, and origins. Domestic servants, in fact, were most often slaves, and depictions of servants, dressed in simple tunics or in livery, most probably represent slaves. In this case, however, factors other than race may well indicate a slave: his simple tunic and the vessel he carries for some task. Free Africans appeared in the Roman empire as traders, travelers, and workmen. Yet, we cannot be sure that he, or any Roman depiction of an African, is a slave. Currently in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France this man is identified as a slave probably because he looks African. Roman paintings and statuary, like a small statuette from the third century CE, which accompanies this article, depict men and women with African features. This is not to say that the Romans never saw a black African or that some slaves in the Roman empire were black. While the Romans had clear notions about non-Romans, other cultures, and even different body types and facial features, they lacked the notions of race that developed in Europe and the Americas from the fifteenth century to the present: that is, a notion that associates a particular set of characteristics (usually deeply discrediting for all but whites) with a skin color and particular physiogamy. In effect, slave is associated with black. Although we acknowledge that slavery existed in places and cultures other than the southern United States, in particular Greco-Roman antiquity, popular historical imagination usually associates slavery with race-in particular with the millions of black Africans shipped to the Americas from the seventeenth century on. Which noun a translator chooses will connote particular meanings for readers of ancient Roman texts in the twenty-first century, especially in the context of slavery. The term, “origin,” in Latin is natio: the Oxford Latin Dictionary tells its readers that natio can mean origin, people, nation, or race. Alan Watson)Īs the Roman law on the sale of slaves makes clear, the ancient Romans paid attention to the origin of the slaves whom they bought, sold, and used in their houses, farms, and businesses. (Edict of the Aediles, Digest 21.1.31.21, trans. Those who sell slaves must state the natio of each at the sale for the natio of a slave frequently encourages or deters a prospective buyer hence it is advantageous to know his natio, since it is reasonable to suppose that some slaves are good because they originate from a tribe that has a good reputation, and others bad because they come from a tribe that is rather disreputable. Historian Sandra Joshel, however, makes note of important distinctions the Romans made among their bondspeople. Instead they argued that those enslaved by the Romans had a rough equality regardless of their region of origin. Most historians of the Roman world have decoupled the concepts of bondage and race that are central to the arguments justifying the enslavement of millions of people in the United States and other modern western nations.
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