14 - The Roman slave supply

Summary

PROBLEMS AND METHODS

Any reconstruction of the Roman slave supply depends on two variables: the total number of slaves, and the relative contribution of particular sources of slaves to overall supply. Owing to the nature of the record, these issues are at best only dimly perceptible. A simple comparison with the history of US slavery highlights the severity of this predicament: decadal census counts not only record the number and distribution of slaves but also permit us to calculate rates of natural reproduction and even to assess the patterns of the domestic slave trade. This body of data gives us a good idea of the scale and development of the underlying slave system. In the study of the world history of slavery, by contrast, an evidentiary basis of this kind is the exception, while uncertainty and guesswork are the norm. Roman slavery firmly belongs in the latter category: hardly any genuine statistics are available, and historians face two similarly unpalatable options. Thus, we may decide to eschew speculative quantification altogether and focus on what our sources readily provide – that is, qualitative impressions of the prevalence of slave-ownership and the provenance of slaves. This humanistic approach allows us to draw a rich canvas of slaveholdings large and small, and of a variety of sources of supply from capture in war all the way to voluntary self-enslavement. What it cannot do is to give us even a remotely reliable notion of the representative value of scattered references.