4 - Late Roman Ideas of Ethnicity and Enslavement

Summary

In this way, the fourth-century philosopher Bishop Synesius of Cyrene argued that every Roman household, even the most modest, had Gothic slaves. In this chapter, I examine how late antique writers, Synesius among them, dealt with the enslavement of foreigners. Foreigners here refer to non-Roman and non-Greek people outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire, conventionally called ‘barbarians’. War on the frontiers stimulated commerce in humans – namely, slave trade – and vice versa: the activities of slave merchants at least partly motivated warfare in the frontier regions. Non-Roman groups took captives, Romans among them, and made a profit selling them as slaves or returning them for ransom. For their part, Romans took captives and sold them into slavery. We also have several attestations of kidnappers who abducted people during peacetime and even within the Roman Empire. Late antique bishops complained about the slave trade of Roman citizens. Augustine, for example, condemned the business of so-called ‘Galatian’ slave traders.