When In Rome Epub
Oswald Lemus
Nor were all these captives put to work in menial labor, for the Romans were happy to employ victims of enslavement with skills in their respective fields of expertise. These included craftsmen, but also those trained in service professions such as medicine, architecture, or music. According to Pliny the Elder, the satyrist Publilius Syrus, the astronomer Manilius, and the grammarian Staberius Eros, each of whom had an important impact on Roman intellectual history in the first century BCE, all arrived in Rome on the same ship.5 If younger captives stood out for their aptitude, these might be trained in a profession rather than being sent directly to the fields. Two captive boys from the eastern kingdom of Parthia have left inscriptions confirming that one was trained as a treasurer, the other as a pedagogue to the imperial family.6
Grabstein aus Nickenich bei Mayen (etwa 50 n. Chr.): Das Relief zeigt einen Sklavenhndler, der zwei Sklaven an einer Kette fhrt, um sie zu verkaufen. Es ist im LVR-Landesmuseum in Bonn zu sehen. In regard to the use of pictorial material: use of such material in this press release is remuneration-free, provided the source is named. The material may be used only in connection with the contents of this press release. For pictures of higher resolution or inquiries for any further use, please contact the Press office publishing this directly. -online.de/en/image?id=274118&size=screen
The practice of enslavement thus changed over time, adapting to shifting territorial, legal, political, and religious landscapes. But the Roman slave supply was always fortified with multiple streams which ensured that, even as the circumstances and attitudes that governed slaveholding shifted, supply always met demand. This fact is confirmed by the stability of documented slave sale prices throughout the imperial centuries, usually amounting to the equivalent of about five years of wages for a day laborer.15
With this as background, we can turn to experiences of enslavement as it was practiced by slaveholders, but also experienced by the enslaved. As we do so, we must once again emphasize that Roman society functioned in a way that simultaneously shared elements of antiquity and modernity. Like some ancient societies, Roman society was at times ready to overlook the productive labor potential of the enslaved in order to capitalize on the numinous or entertainment value of their destruction. Into the middle Republican period, the Romans occasionally used captives for human sacrifice (usually by live burial) and they regularly forced enslaved persons to fight to the death in the arena in spectacles that originated as a kind of funerary rite but took on the primary role of entertainment by the mid-first century BCE. This pure wastage of human life and labor never fully ceased even in the later empire, for a selection of enemy captives was still regularly culled for spectacular execution in public arenas.
Particularly prized among household and imperial staffs were eunuchs, males castrated in childhood to serve as household attendants. Castration itself was distasteful to the Romans such that more than one emperor sought to forbid it by law, but the Roman appetite for eunuch servants meant that the practice continued inside the empire, and where supplies fell short, eunuchs were imported from foreign markets.31 Eunuchs were especially prized as chamber servants since they could not pose a threat to the reproductive capacities of the household.
If the discussion thus far has focused on the use of slave bodies to perform labor services, we must still explore the question of the experience of enslavement by those who endured it as a regime of physical, social, and psychological repression. This problem was omnipresent, for even if some of the enslaved persons discussed above were at times able to escape their fetters and sometimes to benefit from the training or status imparted to them while enslaved, there was never a slave in the Roman Empire who did not experience slavery as a relationship of violent domination, natal alienation, and general dishonor. The final example in the previous section offers excellent proof of this concept. While some enslaved female sex workers gained fame as professionals and were even rewarded with freedom and wealth, they were never able to escape the anguish of a life of serial assault and the stigma of enforced bodily exploitation imposed on them by the master class.
Indeed, sexual assault was a regular experience for Roman slaves, both male and female, whether or not they were exploited in the sex trade. Owners of enslaved persons could and did have sex with them as they wished with no legal consequences. Romans of the means were thus less likely to use public prostitutes than simply to purchase sex slaves for their own exclusive exploitation. This had the consequence that male masters fairly commonly freed and married their slaves, a phenomenon well attested in funerary epigraphy and one that further points to the integrative role enslavement sometimes played.34 Sex between female masters and male slaves was generally stigmatized, though it too is attested, and some classes of elite male slaves, especially slaves owned by the emperor, are known to have been sought as marriage partners by free women. Sexual abuse was also common with same sex partners, particularly male masters who sexually abused their male slaves. This was especially common with male youths, who were often expected to grow their hair long and depilate body hair, sometimes well after the onset of puberty, in order to be ogled and sexually assaulted by their master and his friends (Fig. 5.2). The slave body, male and female, was thus a target for masters, who feared no consequences for what would today be considered felony behavior.
Bronze image of a nude ephebe from Xanten. The boy, who would have carried an actual tray, is shown long-haired and garlanded with his nude body right at the end of prepubescence. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Antikensammlung, Sk. 4. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY
Tombstone of Capua depicting the sale of an enslaved person, stripped and standing on a catasta with auctioneer (winged, to the right) and buyer, late first century CE. G. Fittschen Neg. D-DAI-Rom 1983VW1305)
The only legitimate means out of slavery was, however, manumission. We have already indicated that this was common in Roman society, especially when compared to other slave cultures, like those of the Atlantic world. Attempting to assign numbers and percentages is difficult given the nature of our evidence, but careful analysis of the sources (especially inscriptions) points to remarkably high rates of manumission. Perhaps more than 30 percent of urban slaves above the age of 25 could have expected to be given freedom, and many have argued the numbers were even higher.51
Exits from slavery were thus in part controlled by slaves, when these fled or otherwise resisted through revolt or suicide. More commonly, however, they were governed by the master class, which doled out manumission liberally but also in calculating fashion to serve as an incentive and a mechanism of control which could drive enslaved persons toward cooperation and eventually assimilation into their hegemonic system.
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The active Campi Flegrei caldera in southern Italy has a remarkably long history of coexistence between volcanism and human settlements, and it is famous for its peculiar slow ground movement called bradyseism, i.e. episodes of inflation and deflation of the caldera floor due to magmatic and/or hydrothermal processes. This natural phenomenon has interacted with the civilization that inhabited this strategic and fertile area, especially in Roman times, when the sinking of the coast hindered the flourishment of Puteoli and Baiae coastal towns. The drowning of a large part of Republic-early Imperial Roman coastal buildings, west of the modern Pozzuoli town, is classically used to illustrate the bradyseism activity. In this paper, we investigate the spatial variability and the role of this phenomenon, demonstrating that the caldera deflation alone cannot account for the submersion of Roman facilities in the western sector where the harbour structures of Portus Iulius and luxury villas of the Baianus Lacus presently lie beneath sea level. On the contrary, the sinking of this area is mainly the result of the activity of volcano-tectonic faults. We restored the topography to 100 BCE using archaeological and high-resolution topographic data. Results show that the several metres of vertical displacement recorded in the Baia area in the last 2100 yr were mainly produced by the activity of normal faults and secondarily by caldera deflation, the former including the long-lived Baia Fault and the younger normal faults associated with the Monte Nuovo eruption at 1538 CE.
The observations on the spatial distribution of ground deformation in the past and in recent years are fundamental for adequately constraining deformation source models; therefore, we used many archaeological, topographical and geological constraints available in the existing scientific literature.
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