Talk:Slavery in ancient Rome

Mine slavery only for convicts?

This article strongly suggests that mine slavery was only for convicts. Yet in this BBC TV show classicist Mary Beard talks about children, as young as four, being used in the mines (and dying there). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzIWYI_zrBY Surely they were not convicts, and if they are sending kids down there who were not convicts, surely they did not exempt adults? LastDodo (talk) 16:29, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Slavery in Italy

"Slavery in Italy" redirects here, and the Wikipedia article on the timeline of abolition of slavery leaves Italy blank. This article by Medium claims there were slaves in Italy in the medieval period: https://medium.com/the-history-buff/slavery-in-medieval-italy-cb189ae45933. Anyone have enough information to start an article about Italy and not just ancient Rome? --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 11:22, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Uncited "Emancipation" paragraph resembles close paraphrasing

In reading the section on "Emancipation," the first paragraph caught my eye as being uncomfortably close to a paragraph from the textbook Cambridge Latin Course: Unit 1 (Fifth Ed.). The paragraph in question, which currently lacks citation in this article, is:

"Freeing a slave was called manumissio, which literally means "sending out from the hand". The freeing of the slave was a public ceremony, performed before some sort of public official, usually a judge. The owner touched the slave on the head with a staff and he was free to go. Simpler methods were sometimes used, usually with the owner proclaiming a slave's freedom in front of friends and family, or just a simple invitation to recline with the family at dinner."

Mirlita (talk) 21:15, 27 April 2021 (UTC)

Anti-slavery views

@Sweet6970: There are several problems with the text about "Anti-slavery views" I deleted. The first problem regards the author: The text was inserted into Abolitionism by user Editshmedt (talk · contribs) who was later (on Feb 21) blocked indefinitely for sockpuppetry. On 4 March the text was copied to this article by IP 142.120.69.72. The same address is mentioned at User_talk:Doug_Weller#Block_evasion_(possible!), with Doug Weller (the same admin who blocked Editshmedt) responding: I'm convinced. Blocked the latest one, all the edits by the addresses above can be reverted as sock edits.

The other problems refer to the content: The section "Insurrection ..." is sourced to The Inner Cohesion of Jeremiah 34:8–22, which deals with an event that happened during the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians around 590 BC - not exactly "ancient Rome". The whole text treats biblical authors and Christian theologians in detail, giving them an undue covering (given the fact that Christians didn't become influential in the Roman empire before the 4th century AD). --Rsk6400 (talk) 16:28, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

@Rsk6400: Thank you for the explanation. Sweet6970 (talk) 10:47, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 January 2022 and 12 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Pompeii 315 (article contribs).

Pompeii 315 I will also be working on this page in the coming weeks. The section on Freedmen in particular needs a major overhaul. If this is a topic you are covering in detail, please get in touch. NChapman98 (talk) 16:09, 31 March 2022 (UTC)

@NChapman98 The Freedmen section is a topic I am covering because as you may have noticed it needs a lot of work. As of now I am both trying to add more sources and rewording a lot of it so it has a little more flow and makes more sense. Pompeii 315 (talk) 23:13, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

@Pompeii 315 I had noticed that. Ultimately, I chose to write an entirely new article for Roman Freedmen, but the section in the main article still needs attention. Should you be looking for sources, my bibliography from the new article may prove useful. Best of luck! NChapman98 (talk) 13:54, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Power

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 January 2022 and 12 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): NChapman98 (article contribs).

Illustrating the article

I'm reluctant to intrude since the article has been developed as an educational project and I haven't been editing WP much the last few years. But the two modern images that are in the article are problematic as illustrations of the topic historically. I'm all for illustrating the classical tradition in articles about Greece and Rome, if the actual content of the article supports and contextualizes these representations. But currently there is no section, as there well could be, on the intellectual and artistic purposes to which notions of slavery in ancient Rome were put, especially in the US.

If you skim through the article on Jean-Léon Gérôme, you'll see that the painter has a number of paintings showing his preoccupation with the shapely, luminously white-skinned lone woman standing naked in public and gazed upon by fully clothed, more darkly shaded men. What he seems interested in is locating scenarios that lend a veneer of narrative plausibility and variety to a scene he wants to paint over and over. Compositionally, the image of the supposed Roman slave market chosen here is scarcely to be distinguished from several other of his paintings, and that lack of specificity is part of what makes it not useful here. If there were a section on later depictions, I would have no objection to the image if it were related to the content.

The other painting by Charles W. Bartlett has more utility. The architecture says Rome. Although women and children are foregrounded, perhaps for pathos, the painter includes stripped men as well. The central image is the kindly (!) Roman soldier handing fruit to the child about to be sold into slavery. He stands in contrast to the spear-bearing soldier pushing that poor fellow along at the top of the stairs. There are many ways to interpret this; perhaps the painter is saying that even when we live in times when our livelihood depends on atrocity as daily commerce, there's redemption in a moment of kindness. The contemporary viewer's response is likely to be more complicated.

Those are my views on why neither of these images belongs near the top of the article. I'm intending to delete Gérôme's and move Bartlett's to that position. There are extensive options for illustrating the article with Roman art and inscriptions. And an even more interesting point is that while visual art in antiquity was commissioned by the ruling class or bought by the well-to-do, many if not most artists and artisans were slaves or freedmen creating images of themselves, as in possibly the mosaic at the top. Cynwolfe (talk) 01:12, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for doing that and for the clear and compelling explanation – welcome back! If it's any reassurance or encouragement, the 2022 educational projects resulted in two edits here, this to the text and references of the section on freedmen and this linking to a new article Ancient Roman freedmen.

NebY (talk) 12:25, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. I'm quite out of practice editing at WP. There's one other point I hope to address, the recent addition of a sentence stating that it was against the law to erect a funerary stone for slaves, when in fact we have an image of an actual inscription commemorating Eros the cook—explicitly a servus, not even a libertinus or libertus. I don't think the source is quite as emphatic as the assertion placed in the article, but burial practice with commemoration is a terrific question to raise. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:15, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

It surprised me too (but only after you pointed it out) and I qualified it per the quote from the source "no siempre respetada, es cierto".[1] I'm wondering when it was in force, if it applied in Rome as well as that part of Hispania, whether it applied to columbaria inscriptions, which I'd thought a major source and object of study – but I'm basically ignorant. Still I know who has done a lot of careful work here on Roman funerary practices – pinging Haploidavey! NebY (talk) 17:44, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, though I can't offer much, as I've limited access to relevant works I used in the Roman funerary practices article (see that article's sources). Off the top of my head, however, I've come across no support at all for a legal or customary prohibition of monuments to slaves, many of whom seem to have had better funerary treatments and memorials than the poorest of their urban citizen counterparts, with access to Columbaria and other mausolea.

It seems possible to me that whoever inserted the "no monuments" claim has based it on a misreading of contracts between undertakers and town councils at Puteoli and Lanuvium. They were obliged to remove and dispose of any corpses of slaves, the poorest citizens, or the indigent who had been dumped on the streets, within two hours of discovery and disposed as garbage (a public nuisance), without ceremony or memorial. If at all possible, the responsible owners or relatives were fined.

Cicero confirms that funerals for most non-elite citizen corpses were carried out over 24 hours. Many of these would have been funded by burial associations, who were able to take slaves as members, with permission of their owners, and give their members burial with an image (in other words, a memorial) even as slaves.

In many cases, families and deceased patrons of deceased slaves and freedmen who were considered loyal could be added to existing memorial inscriptions; good examples survive in Aquilea.

Graham, Emma-Jayne, The burial of the urban poor in Italy in the late Roman Republic and early Empire. BAR Int. Series 1565. Oxford, Archaeopress, 2006

Bendlin, Andreas, "Associations, funerals, sociality, and Roman law: The collegium of Diana and Antinous in Lanuvium (CIL 14.2112) reconsidered", 2011

(Huge numbers of rural slaves would have been buried by fellow slaves with only a perishable monument, such as a name scratched into an amphora that covered their corpse or ashes. Eros the cook is by no means exceptional; lots more where that came from). Haploidavey (talk) 12:27, 24 June 2023 (UTC)