15 - Slave labour and Roman society

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Domestic slavery was imagined as existing at Rome from the beginning – it could hardly have been otherwise with a cultural institution so deeply embedded in daily life during the historical period – and its established presence by the middle of the fifth century bc can be presumed from references to manumission and the liability of slave-owners in the Twelve Tables. However, slave labour did not become a significant phenomenon in Roman culture before the fourth century bc, when its rise in importance coincided with a decline in the institution of debt-bondage (nexum), as foreign conquests brought captive manpower to Roman territory and sent citizen colonists abroad, while displaced peasants migrated to the city in search of new means of support. From then on, if not before, agricultural slavery in Italy and, eventually, throughout most of the western empire predominated over all other categories of slave labour in importance for as long as landholding remained the cornerstone of the socio-economic system and the ideal of self-sufficiency was aspired to by the elite. Anecdotal reports in our literary sources of domestic servants in the houses of the kings, like the legendarily servile origins of the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius, reflect the conventions of foundation myth-making more surely than they do any historical reality, about which the most that can be said is that the houses of the wealthy of the regal period might seem to require staffing.