Slavery and Society at Rome by Keith Bradley

Slavery and Society at Rome by Keith Bradley

I admit it, I have fallen for the propaganda. The victor writes the history, as we all well know. The Roman empire was nothing if not good at selling itself. Scholars have been knee-deep in ancient Latin texts since the days of … well, the Roman empire, really. Of course, back then it was the very height of modern contemporary and that’s sort of part of the problem.

What with all the flowing togas, laurel wreaths and poetry, the marble statues and the tile mosaics and the splendid villas and the exploits and the Colosseum it is easy to get a little blinded to the fact that despite all its fancy words and thoughts on philosophy and democracy the Roman society was underscored by violence and inequality in a way that creates a massive case of cognitive dissonance.

Keith Bradley writes about slavery as an institution in Roman society and the impact it has on the economy as well as individual lives. This is not a lurid account, but rather academic, written for history students and those with a curious mind, such as myself. It examines the basic attitudes and the conditions under which slavery was upheld and rationalized as a perfectly reasonable use of resources.

What draws me in and holds my interest is of course first and foremost the idea of slavery in general. The very notion that you can own another human being and treat them in any way you see fit, because that is what it all boils down to in the end. I find it endlessly fascinating that the domestics didn’t just slit the throats of their masters while they slept, but that’s just me. It is a case of dominant rhetoric at its wildest, seen from a societal perspective, when each case of slavery must have been an individual tragedy.

It is also fascinating that even some higher level administrators in the Roman bureaucracy were slaves and that they in turn owned slaves. What that basically means is that they served an institution of the government that had enslaved them, they in turn enslaved others and at the end of the day they did not even own themselves. No matter if slaves were sometimes treated well, as members of the household, they were still not basically in possession of that most basic of all things, the illusion of free will.

Keith Bradley writes about the slave supply, the quality of life for the slave, resisting slavery and changes in attitude and progress. He also writes about what it is to be a slave. His prose is clean and easy, his examples many and detailed and well referenced. It is obvious that we are dealing with his area of expertise. Many of the thoughts and questions I have raised above stem from the text itself.

When dealing with things like manumission and the way that actually could mean that the quality of life became worse for the freed slaves, or when speaking of how slaves were the first to feel the brunt of a thing like lacking food supply, Bradley is dispassionate enough that you have to infer what that would mean for the individual yourself.

I like scholarly texts for precisely that reason. There is no sentimentality in this account, merely a stating of established facts. Bradley comments on the life of Epictetus, a philosopher who was born into slavery. Epictetus was much concerned with freedom, as you would assume, in his philosophy. He writes about the violence and cruelty of a slave’s life, and above all the caprice of the everyday existence, where the slave is subjected to the slave owner’s temper and whims and he asks pertinent questions as to how it would feel to live under these conditions, something the reader can benefit from thinking about.

Being a child of the postmodern, or liquid modernity, I have the warped and twisted perception of time that is the bane of linear thinking. This is history, but at the same time all these concerns are alive in the present tense. And my referential grid tends to play all over the intertextual, which is a fancy way of saying my brain is full of random text, quotes and movies. Roy Batty, the lead replicant in the movie Blade Runner tells Deckard “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave” and that about sums it up on an individual level.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in history, in psychology, in slavery and in civilisation. I recommend it to anyone who has bought the propaganda that Roman society was civilised in the first place and that it was not built on a foundation of blood, violence and random cruelty.

Mule