Material Realities of Suffering V: Inhumane Treatment

In this series, I discuss the material proof of slavery in the Roman Empire. See part I on housing , part II on art, part III on marks and restrains and part IV on the zoninus collar. This essay concludes the series.

CW: topics discussed in this series include slavery and mentions of violence (physical, sexual and psychological).

Based on the before discussed archaeological evidence, slaves were treated as property, and no personal limits seem to have been taken into consideration. Their inferior social status was echoed in their housing and artwork, their body used ruthlessly to provide more labour force and utilised in a variety of work, and their physical realities limited by the use of different shackles and collars.

However, archaeological evidence by itself can merely create a small window into the historical realities on Roman slaves; literary sources need to be used to gather as conclusive a picture as possible, and even then, a considerable amount of the lives of these marginalised people will remain unknown to us. However, archaeological evidence can specify information gathered from literary quotes and expand on information that writers of the time were not interested in. Thus, the location of findings, the physical realities gathered from different shackle types, and the devastating permanence (in some cases) backed by funerary findings can expand and even multiply our knowledge of Roman slavery.

When discussing Roman slavery, it is important to note that not all slaves had same conditions, or indeed, same slave classification. Cattle slaves, for example, wore collars or cuffs, whereas slaves occupied in i.e. teaching and nursing were less likely do so. However, the overarching issue is the dominance of the master, and the consequent forced submission of the slave. As noted by Scheidel, “One might object that all forms of labor for others involve asymmetries and coercion. Even so, chattel slavery, farm tenancy, wage labor, and serfdom differ in many ways, including owners’ capacity for violence against workers and direct control over their labor” (2012, 107). Though not discussed at length in this essay, the possibility, and indeed, permission to treat slaves violently further demonstrated the imbalance of power in the society. As noted by Bryant, “the violence imposed on slaves reinforced how Rome represented imperial power and dislodged slaves from their genealogical ties” (2016, 47). Certainly, the abuse experienced by slaves is explicitly present in the archaeological evidence. Trible has even marked that “, the Zoninus and other Roman slave collars make visible the lives of some of the most invisible people in the historical record” (2016, 449). Indeed, the archaeological evidence, in some cases, can communicate what the slaves could not: the daily experienced abuse, suffering and inequality of reducing human beings to property.

Bibliography

Bradley, K. (1994), Slavery and Society at Rome, Cambridge.

Bryant, E. K. (2016), Paul and the Rise of the Slave: Death and Resurrection of the Oppressed in the Epistle to the Romans, Leiden/ Boston.

George, M. (2011), ‘Slavery and Roman material culture’, in K. Bradley and P. Cartledge (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery: The Ancient Mediterranean World, Cambridge, 385-413.

Scheidel, W. (2012), ‘Slavery’, in W. Scheidel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, Cambridge, 89-113.

‘The Projecta Cascet’, British Museum, https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=36296001&objectId=59394&partId=1. Accessed 7 April 2020.

Thompson, F. H. (2003), The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery, London.

Trimble, J. (2016), ‘The Zoninus Collar and the archaeology of Roman slavery’, American Journal of Archaeology 120.3: 447-72.

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