The Fear of Economic Instability: A Study of Rural Slaves in Roman Antiquity

Posted bykamilastlovePosted inUncategorized

My final paper for my Slavery in the Ancient Mediterranean Classics class:

Since Moses Finley first published his ground-breaking work, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, in 1980,1 classicists and scholars alike have investigated the institutions of slavery in antiquity, particularly in the Roman context. While this field has sought to remove the idealistic lens historians often use when studying the life of the ancients in all their architectural, governmental, and philosophical genius, the research of ancient slavery has yet to factor in the interdisciplinary identities of these slaves in regards to how their background, gender, and regionality affected their treatment as enslaved peoples, particularly with this final component concerning urban slaves, urbani, versus rural slaves, rustici. Some historians, such as Keith Bradley, have commented on this dichotomy: 

In (Roman) society as a whole, there was also a de facto hierarchy of servile statuses, positioning in which was determined by not only the type of work done but also its context: so rustici were automatically inferior to urbani (at least in a slave owner’s judgment).2 

However, the conversation about rural versus urban slaves simply stops here; yes, historians have, for the most part, established the fact rural slaves were treated relatively harsher in comparison with and believed to be subordinate to their urban counterparts, but no research nor scholarship has been devoted to determine why this was the case, nor how rural slaves’ inferiority played a part in their daily lives. 

In spite of this oversight, Bradley does reveal a small thread in which I wish to tug on, unravel, and examine throughout the course of this essay: that ancient Roman masters thought their rural slaves were inferior to their urban ones, but that their rustici may have actually been more valuable than their urbani. Thus, I will pick up where Bradley and other modern scholars have left off, arguing that rural slaves were not only treated relatively worse than the urban slaves of Roman antiquity but were in reality more important in Roman society due to their economic contributions. Following this assertion, I will then argue that this same rationale added to, though certainly did not constitute all of, the inhumane treatment enslaved peoples in the Americans faced, particularly in the continental U.S.

Before I begin my analysis, I wish to establish the specifications of my argument, starting with a quick clarification regarding the treatment of slaves based on geographic locale and the exact differences between what I mean by a rural slave versus an urban one. Indicative by their title, urban slaves were still individuals whose whole persons were owned by another human being and were denied autonomy of nearly any sort. My investigation is not to understand why rural slaves were treated poorly and why urban slaves were not, but rather why rural slaves were given far fewer rights and much harsher treatments than their urbani counterparts. 

Similarly, I’d like to clarify which slave group I am specifically referring to. In the context of Ancient Rome, there were two types of rural properties: villas and country estates. Traditionally, villas were grand houses beyond the city limits in a sparsely populated region that served the purpose of providing the owners with a relaxing place to escape the hustle and bustle of the Italian metropolises.3 These villas were not designed for the sole purpose of producing cash crops, although if an owner wanted to have fruits, flowers, or other vegetation filling their grounds, they would have likely had some sort of farm or agriculture on a small scale, albeit for little to no profit. The country estates, on the other hand, served both pleasure and financial purposes for the owners, but mainly as farms to produce crops such as wheat, grapes, and olives.4 In these pages, I will examine the slaves who lived primarily on the country estates, even though I will later pull from Columella’s Digest for rural slaves according to his villa records. Yet since villas had the potential to operate in a manner similar to miniature farms, I see no reason exclude Columella’s list in regards to agricultural workers on the grounds that their estate may have been more pleasure based as opposed to profit driven.

To now commence my argument, I will elaborate on the question of What is a rural slave versus an urban one? which may have more implications and layered meaning than one might be initially inclined to consider. The first difference between the two comes from their physical location; urban slaves lived and primarily worked in metropolitans, while rural slaves spent their days living and laboring on country estates and villas. Consequently, urban slaves would have slept usually in some room in the master’s house, worn relatively nice clothes, since they would have been seen by all of their master’s guests and in public semi-regularly, depending on the specific job of the slave, and had a contextually fair chance at making money for their own peculium through various side jobs that could have one day bought them their freedom.5 

Rural slaves, however, due to their geographical isolation did not likely have as many opportunities to earn coins for their purse, because of the drastically lower population density of the countryside and lack of miscellaneous shops and clients that one could make or sell goods and services to. Additionally, rural slaves would often receive only one garment for summer and one for winter,6 most likely for two reasons: not only would few people of elevated status or the master’s personal guests have seen these rural slaves, meaning there was no point for a master to spend extravagantly on their attire, but these rustici performed manual labor outdoors in all sorts of weather, meaning no master would rationally spend a huge chunk of change on clothes only for them to become covered in dirt, grime, and sweat. And even if those factors did not exist, only rural slaves are believed to have been chained up at night in cramped and crowded quarters or spent their sleeping hours in poorly constructed huts using whatever leftover lumber or materials they could find and cobble together. Solely in the rural areas and country estates have archaeologists found collars that enslaved peoples had forged onto them in order to prevent them from running away, akin to how urban slaves would rarely, if ever, have been branded or tattooed for all the master’s guests to spectacle and gossip over.7

Although one could argue that rural slaves were more likely to run away, which is why owners physically marred and chained them, it seems to me that this rationale is rather simplistic; for though it is true that rural slaves had less oversight than their urban counterparts and thus could slip away less notably, they still had to contend with the lawlessness of the wilderness, from predators to bandits to slave-catchers.8 Furthermore, since rustici lived in the countryside, they still had to either travel over the terrain that would’ve proved extremely dangerous from the threat of wild animals or bandits or by the roads where they could’ve easily been seen, recognized, and caught. Even if the rustici wanted to leave the Italian peninsula, they nevertheless had to catch a boat from a port, which would’ve been in an urban center, hence the urbani would have likely had an easier time escaping in this sense. Therefore, it appears that not only were rural slaves treated more harshly and had less access to manumission and other relative privileges urban slaves obtained during Roman antiquity, but that they had even less, or at most the same, level of access to freedom via flight. During the duration of this discussion, I will attempt to show why this was the case and how this dichotomy between rural and urban slaves has trickled into modern American slavery, as well.

Rural slaves in Ancient Rome seem to have been treated more cruelly and inhumanely than the urban slaves of the day due to the second difference between the two slave groups I will now identify: their specific occupations. For example, in his Digest, ancient Roman writer Paulus notes:

When “urban slaves” have been specified in a legacy, some authorities distinguish property in urban slaves not by place, but by the type of work done, so that even if they are on a rural estate, they are considered to be urban slaves so long as they do not do agricultural work.9

Three things can be deduced from this passage, the first being that the Roman authorities thought this divide was important enough to pen into their official documents and decrees. The fact that the patriarchs felt the need to codify the hierarchical division between rustici and urbani, specifically that urbani may still retain their title despite living among rustici, hints that the Roman owners may have wanted to have on record that they had more urban slaves than rural ones. Both urbani and rustici were still seen as property, meaning that even though both were the bottom of Rome’s social hierarchy, some pieces of property were worth more than others.

To elaborate on this point, Cato the Elder wrote that he “never once bought a slave for more than 1,500 drachmae, since he didn’t want luxurious (trypher n) or beautiful ones, but hard workers, like herdsmen or cattle-drovers.”10 While Cato could have chosen any slave occupation when describing which slaves he would purchase, it’s interesting to note that he chose specifically rural slave jobs, even more noteworthy that he did so for the reason that these slaves cost less than the “luxurious” or “beautiful” slaves. Though he does not specify which slaves qualified as luxurious and beautiful, it seems clear that rustici did not meet these ramifications and therefore were not only less expensive on the slave market itself but were seen as lesser by the masters who bought them compared to the urban slaves available for purchase. Coupled with the fact that urbani were still allowed to obtain their status as urban slaves on rural estates, it’s logical to infer that slaves who performed agricultural labor were seen as less valuable and thus were of a lower status than their urban counterparts, meaning that the country estate owners who needed many rural slaves to run their farms would have wanted them to come at a cheaper price, since they had to buy them in bulk fashion to work every part of the farm.

The second thing to conclude from Paulus’ writing is that it’s possible urban slaves also may have wanted this distinction to be established due to the language of the text. While slave voices are rarely, if ever, recorded in antiquity, the way Paulus writes this section is from the vantage of the urban slaves, for even if the urbani are sent to rural estates, they would not obtain the title of rustici. The fact that he writes with the urban slaves as his subject hints that he is being somewhat favorable to the urban slaves as opposed to harsher towards the rural slaves, indicating that perhaps urbani wanted to retain their status even if living on country estates for a time. As Paulus also pens, “Sending a slave from the urban household to work on a country estate was considered a punishment and a degradation.”11 Consequently, it seems that urban slaves in antiquity were well aware of the fact that rural slaves were not only treated more harshly but fell lower on the social ladder than their current position as an urban slave, and thus these urbani wanted to at least retain their title as to not completely lose their status and their relative superiority over the rustici, even if they were all still enslaved. 

The third and final thread I will pull out of this passage, as well as the most important element I wish to extrapolate, is that it was not the geographic locale that made rural slaves perceived as inferior to their urban counterparts, but rather the labor they were forced to perform. Oftentimes, urbani had what we in modern-day American would refer to as white-collar jobs – secretarial work, educating the master’s sons, and administrative detail.12 Most of these labors would have required some type of official schooling, such as literacy, arithmetic, civics, and other components most Americans today would associate with a traditional, standard education. Contrary to the urban slaves’ training though, the rural slaves most likely were not literate and received an education closer to a twenty-first century trade-school degree: geoscience, food science, and manual labor such as farming, quarrying, and bee-keeping.13 Although the labor of rural slaves still requires an education, albeit a more practical and applicable one, the urban slaves may have seen the physically demanding work of the rural slaves as demeaning and less skillful in juxtaposition with theirs, which also was quite possibly a sentiment shared by the Roman masters and causing therefore rustici to be perceived as inferior in comparison to their urbani counterparts. 

Nonetheless, in order to argue against this point I’d like to now examine and analyze Columella’s list of rural slave occupations versus urban slave ones, beginning with the rustici. According to his Digest, Columella records that some of, but certainly not all, the rural slaves’ jobs were “bulbucus: ploughman,” “pastor: herdsman,” “aquarius: watercarrier,”14 “mulieres quae panem coquant quaeque villam servant: women who bake bread and look after the villa,” and “faber qui villae reficendae causa paratus sit: mason intended to repair the villa.”15 Despite the fact that one could argue that a water carrier does not require any specialized or intellectually stimulating training, the other four occupations noted here all require some sort of intellectual education and knowledge. 

The plowman needed to know where and how to use the plough, when the soil was at the peak quality for planting, how to evenly and properly disperse the seeds, and when was the right time to harvest the crops. The herdsman would have needed a keen awareness of the physical conditions of his animals, if and when they needed medical attention, how to keep the herd together, and the soft skills to work with these creatures and take care of them. The women had to learn baking akin to chemistry when working with yeast and were responsible for keeping the household up and running, which would’ve been no small task on a self-sufficient country estate with a huge number of slaves. The masons would have needed an extensive education in science and engineering, as well as the knowledge to repair any parts of the villa that may have been in poor condition and the makeup of cement and other resources necessary for construction. And even the water carrier had to have the physical stamina to carry gallons of water to and from the estate to ensure the farmworkers and animals had enough water to stay hydrated and for the women to bloom the yeast for baking and for other food preparations. Consequently, it does not seem that the rural slaves had any less demeaning nor difficult jobs than their urban counterparts, but rather that their occupations were just as mentally active and even more physically demanding than those of the urbani. 

In contrast, Columella wrote that some of his urban slave’s jobs included but were not limited to “Ad imagines: servant in charge of pictures and busts,”16 “Margaritarius: pearl setter,” “Ad inguenta: servant in charge of perfume oils,” and last but certainly not least, “A purpurius: servant in charge of purple clothes.”17 Despite the fact that these slaves worked with much more expensive materials than the rustici, the urbani’s jobs were not all that, if at all, more highly skilled than their rural counterparts and certainly did not require anywhere near the same physical endurance, which would have made the urbani’s occupations far less exhausting and draining. The busts may have required daily care and cleaning, the purple clothes may have needed separate washing and drying, and the slave in charge of the pearls likely needed a steady hand to set the stones into jewelry and clothing, but unlike the rural slaves, none of the urban jobs mentioned above were essential to the well-being and daily life of their owners. A maidservant could have dusted the patriarch’s bust during her morning rounds, and another slave could have bought and stored the master’s perfumes when they were out on another errand; none of the jobs above would have been so time consuming nor vital to the basic needs of the master that another slave could not have performed the task. Why then would a Roman noble have paid for additional bodies for non-essential tasks? 

Unlike the rural slaves whose occupations all contributed to the upkeep, efficiency, and productivity of the farm, the urban slave’s jobs did not contribute to the financial stability and well-being of the owner but rather how luxurious the owner’s life was and how high their status was in their community and aristocratic circles, similar to Cato’s assertion earlier regarding “luxurious” and “beautiful” slaves. Only the richest elites could have afforded slaves whose sole job it was to care for and maintain their artwork and to produce exquisite pieces of jewelry and clothing. Moreover, agriculture was the backbone of the Roman economy,18 making the rural slaves’ jobs not only as important as the urbani’s but even more so, since having a spotless bust of the patriarch wasn’t going to make a dime for the owner and ensure they could afford to commission such a piece in the first place. Yet if the rustici were essential to the economy and by extension the noble’s pocketbooks, why, as Bradley stated at the start of this essay, did the owners perceive their rural slaves as inferior to their urban slaves and treated the former relatively worse?

Although this dichotomy seems perplexing, few scholars seem to question the harsher treatment the rural slaves received, despite their greater economic value and production in comparison with their urban counterparts. Some, such as late twentieth-century scholar Stephano Fenoaltea, seem not only to accept this difference in treatment but rationalize the more brutal treatment rural slaves faced due to the quantity of intellect needed to perform their jobs. The Italian economist argued that slaves who performed “low-skilled activities,”19 such as farming, mining, and construction, in other words, rural slaves, were more incentivized to produce a higher quantity and quality of labor by pain incentives, such as whipping and branding. On the other hand, he claimed that such pain incentives to slaves in “high-skilled activities,”20 such as administrative work, craftsmanship, and education, or urban slaves’ occupations, would have only inhibited their productivity due to anxiety from this threat of pain, and thus these latter slaves would have needed to have been motivated by rewards, including eventual manumission.21 

Even though Fenoaltea’s theory has been accepted largely in regards to New World Slavery, he seems to ignore the fact that these rustici, or in his own words, “low-skilled” slaves, performed intensive manual labor to the point where if they were whipped, beaten, or had some other form of physical trauma inflicted upon their bodies, they would not have been able to work. Although the master or overseer may have forced these slaves back into the fields or kitchens a few days later, they certainly were not foolish enough to expect the slave could produce the same quantity or quality of work before the beating. And since the entire job of rural slaves’ was to see to the country estate’s highest capacity to produce a cash crop and by extension profit, the masters would have hurt not only their slaves but themselves as well if they had used only pain incentives for their “low-skilled” slaves. Besides this fact, most urbani would have likely been able to perform at or near the same level of productivity as before, depending on their specific labor, if they were physically punished. If the pearl setter would have been whipped, they may not have been able to walk, but as long as they still had mobility and dexterity in their hands, they still had the capacity to perform their labor. Thus, it seems odd that Fenoaltea appears to have missed this factor when deducing what types of slave economies succeeded, for it logically makes no sense why a master would purposely inhibit his slave’s productivity and thus reduce their own income. 

Yet if one takes his concept as true, for a moment, and considers the implication of his terminology, it’s possible to see through the bias he not only had but that the Ancient Romans seem to have had, additionally. While the word “low-skilled” is surely questionable in twenty-first century scholarship and historically inaccurate in regards to the types of labor rural slaves performed, Fenoaltea’s logic and thought process seem to flow alongside that of the Roman authorities who allowed urbani to keep their status while living on rural estates as long as they performed no agricultural labor and Bradley’s assertion that masters in antiquity saw rustici as inferior to urbani.  All three of these sources inherently place rural slaves beneath their urban counterparts because of the labor they performed, despite the fact that their occupations directly contributed to the economy and their owner’s pocketbooks. But perhaps this is not a contradictory conclusion; rather, perhaps it is a logical cause and effect. 

For instance, in his De Agricultura, Cato the Elder wrote how masters of farms, as well as the overseers, must keep track of how their rustici were performing, and if their work did not meet the standards of the owner, either the slaves had not been well cared for or the slaves had been unproductive and rebellious.22 In the former case, Cato advised that “the master must personally inspect and taste the rations the vilicus prepared to make sure they (are) edible; and from time to time the vilicia was to inspect the kitchen and the workers who made the slaves food,”23 which initially seems to contradict his earlier notions degrading rural slaves. Yet here, his motive is not the well-being of his rustici but rather the productivity of his farm. He was not naïve enough to miss the fact that slaves in physically demanding jobs needed to be fed and fueled efficiently, indicating that he recognized their economic importance and saw them purely as profit-makers for his pocketbook. However, if the slaves argued they were sick, Cato wrote how the owner should distribute to them less rations than before in order to cause the rustici to stop faking their illness.24 Not only do Cato’s words towards rural slaves seem more like words one would hear spoken to slaves in the American context as opposed to the Roman, but Cato’s entire rationale behind his harsh treatment of rural slaves stems from the farm’s productability. Since agriculture was the basis of the Roman economy and that many of the Roman nobles made significant money off of owning land, it looks as though Cato fears his farm’s ruin at the hands of his slaves and consequently places heavier restrictions and harsher punishments on his rustici instead of his urbani in order to keep the former in line, ensuring his finances were stable and secure. 

Despite the fact that rural slaves could not control certain factors contributing to the farm’s productivity, such as unusual weather patterns, the quality of seeds, and natural disasters, it looks as though the Roman aristocrats held them accountable for their cash crops, and that the fear of a poor harvest, hence not merely a lower quantity of food but just as, if not more importantly, a lower quantity of income, drove the Romans to treat their rural slaves more harshly than their non-essential and status symbol urbani counterparts. For if a slave who performed administrative detail or took care of the master’s purple clothes did not perform their duty efficiently, a master could always find another slave who would be more productive and would simply have to catch up on paperwork later or have another slave wash their finest garments. However, if a rural slave was unproductive during planting season, the owner likely would have had a less abundant crop, meaning they would have had less goods to sell and make a profit from, consequently threatening the stability of their purse and way of life. Thus, the rural slaves’ imperative role in their master’s bank account possibly made the Roman masters uncomfortable with how much they relied on their rustici for their income, therefore causing the patriarchs in antiquity to treat them worse than their urban counterparts and paint them as inferior to the urban slaves in order to reassert their power over them. What’s more than this though is that this further degradation against rural slaves in contrast to urban ones was not solely a part of the Roman institution of slavery but that of its American counterpart, as well. 

Before I begin this final section of my analysis, I wish to clarify that the following quarter of my argument is not that enslaved peoples in America were treated so brutally because they fell under the umbrella of rural slaves as opposed to urban ones. The American institution of enslavement was based on a hideous hate towards a specific race and that, above all other factors, drove slavery in the United States, quite unlike the Roman enslavement in antiquity, where nearly any Roman citizen could be enslaved through piracy, abandonment, or warfare.25 The only relative comparison in the ancient world that somewhat correlates to slavery in America is the ancient Greek slavery, due to the fact that slaves there, more often than not, were of an ethnicity other than Greek. However, even this pales in comparison to the targeting of Black people white colonists committed, since Greeks saw all who were not a part of their race, whether their skin was lighter or darker, as barbaric, making an open generalization that all races were inferior to them as opposed to the white Europeans and Americans who claimed Black people were of the lowest race to justify the former’s enslavement of the latter. Consequently, my argument here is that similarly to the way the ancient Romans used their rustici’s manual labor as an excuse to treat them more harshly than their urban counterparts, the enslavers in the New World forced their enslaved peoples into manual and essential rural labor to reinforce the latter’s inferiority and the former’s supremacy. 

Although it’s essential to keep in mind that the American enslaved peoples were treated significantly worse, had far less access to manumission, and essentially no legal protection from their enslavers as opposed to their Roman counterparts, it’s also vital to note that there was no urbani equivalent in the American context of slavery. Unlike in antiquity, where urban slaves could be found in governmental positions and highly-trained arts, American slaves almost exclusively worked in agriculture in regards to the production of cash crops from cotton to tobacco to sugar cane. American slave owners did often have enslaved peoples work in their houses as maids, footmen, and personal attendants, but not only do these labors fall under the Digest’s rustici list,26 but these enslaved peoples did not have anywhere near the types of academic training or official trust as the urbani. American enslaved peoples, even the ones technically referred to as “house slaves” as opposed to “field slaves,” would have never been in charge of an owner’s precious oils or jewels, for American owners would have likely never trusted their enslaved peoples with such precious objects. At best, they were the equivalent of the overseers or the women as the head of the villas mentioned previously, who may have, as Cato indicates, have had a closer relationship with their owner than the agricultural slaves27 and thus a higher chance of manumission,28 but they did not have the relatively better treatment nor the higher status that the urbani enjoyed over the rustici in Roman antiquity. 

This may be, in part, due to the work American enslaved peoples and rustici were forced to perform, for as Keith Bradley writes in his piece, Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction, “There is little divergence in the way (slaves and tamed animals) are used; both of them provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs.”29 Contrary to the labor of their ancient Roman urbani counterparts, the specifically agricultural work of the rustici and the American enslaved peoples was manual labor, akin to the work that animals on the farm would have performed. Since horses cannot set pearls into jewelry nor clean marble busts, it seems reasonable that the closeness of the enslaved people’s labor in agriculture to that of the animal’s work gave owners an excuse to treat rustici and even more so American enslaved peoples poorly, the latter so much so that the American institution of slavery “transform[ed] the African man into the American beast.”30 In this vein, it’s plausible that American slave owners intentionally forced enslaved peoples into these agricultural labors in order to further paint the American enslaved peoples as inferior and to maintain the Southern economy.

Due to the economic importance of the rustici in antiquity, the ancient Roman masters seem to have treated their rural slaves more harshly than their urban counterparts for the sake of solidifying their economic stability and well-being. Similarly, the American institution of slavery built their economy on enslaved people’s agricultural labor, widening the gap between the enslaved and the enslaver and thus arguing, in one rationale, that slavery could not be abolished because of the economic instability that would occur in the aftermath. Although I have briefly analyzed some of the disparities rural slaves faced in antiquity in contrast with the lifestyles of the urban slaves, as well as the rationales behind these differences and the current scholarship on this dichotomy, I am well aware of the fact that more research on this subject is desperately needed. Not only does more scholarship concerning relationships between urbani and rustici need to be conducted, but a deeper analysis of why Black enslaved peoples in America were not only solely in agricultural, or what we would today refer to as blue-collar, labor, but how legal codes banning American enslaved peoples from receiving the same education or training as urban slaves akin to white-collar jobs differed from their Roman counterparts. However, this essay serves not as any answer to all of these questions but rather as a jumping off point for further research regarding rural slaves in antiquity and beyond. 

 

  1. Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery And Modern Ideology, (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers Princeton, 2017). ↩︎
  2.  Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, ed. P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 70. ↩︎
  3.  Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, March 1, 2023. ↩︎
  4.  Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.”
    ↩︎
  5.  Lester Stephens, “Manumission,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, February 21, 2023. ↩︎
  6.   Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.” ↩︎
  7.  Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.” ↩︎
  8.  Lester Stephens, “Flights and Runaways,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, March 29, 2023. ↩︎
  9.  Paulus, The Meaning of the Term ‘Equipment,’ cited in Thomas Wiedemann, Greek & Roman Slavery, (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005), 117. ↩︎
  10.  Plutarch, Cato the Elder, cited in Thomas Wiedemann, Greek & Roman Slavery, (Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005),175 (emphasis mine). ↩︎
  11.  Paulus, The Meaning of the Term ‘Equipment,’ cited in Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery, 117. ↩︎
  12.  Lester Stephens, “Domestic Slaves,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, February 27, 2023. ↩︎
  13.  Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.” ↩︎
  14.  Columella, Digest 33.7 (‘The legacy of instructum or instrumentum’), first-century CE, cited in Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, ed. P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60. ↩︎
  15.  Columella, Digest 33.7 (‘The legacy of instructum or instrumentum’), cited in Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 59.
    ↩︎
  16.  Further slave jobs in elite households, cited in Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, ed. P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 63. ↩︎
  17.  Slave jobs in the household of Livia, cited in Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, ed. P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62.
    ↩︎
  18.  Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.” ↩︎
  19.  Lester Stephens, “The Economics of Slavery,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, February 1, 2023.
    ↩︎
  20.  Lester Stephens, “The Economics of Slavery.” ↩︎
  21.  Lester Stephens, “The Economics of Slavery.”
    ↩︎
  22.  Cato, De Agriculture, 2.4, 2.7, cited in Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, March 1, 2023. ↩︎
  23.  Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 82. ↩︎
  24.  Cato, De Agriculture, 12.3.7, cited in Lester Stephens, “Rural/Agricultural Slaves,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, March 1, 2023.
    ↩︎
  25.  Lester Stephens, “The Process of Becoming a Slave,” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285, Georgetown University, January 25, 2023.
    ↩︎
  26.  Slave jobs in the household of Livia, cited in Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome, 62.
    ↩︎
  27.  See Cato’s De Agricultura, 5.1-5, where he describes how “(The overseer) must consider the master’s friends his own friends. He must extend credit to no one without orders from the master and must collect the loans made by the master.” Cato’s rationale that the overseers needed to appear friendly to their master’s friends and handle his credit indicates that the two had to have some form of frequent communication, inferring a more active relationship than the slaves working the fields obtained. ↩︎
  28.  See Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, pg. 269, where he discusses the high correlation between slaves living in urban areas and eventual manumission through the majority of slave societies, including Ancient Rome. While he does acknowledge that historians have less sources from rural areas than urban ones, meaning it’s possible more rural slaves were manumitted than classicists have on record today, it seems to me that the fact that this phenomenon was across almost all slave societies indicates that this is not purely an isolated phenomenon but rather a larger commonality among slave institutions, including the American institution. Patterson likely did not include American enslaved peoples in this study, since persons enslaved by the American institution were almost exclusively rural. Notably, the American institution of slavery had one of the lowest rates of manumission in juxtaposition to its world counterparts, although this was first and foremost driven almost assuredly by the hate-based nature of U.S. slavery. ↩︎
  29.  Keith Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 90 (2000), pp.110-125, https://www.jstor.org/stable/300203, (emphasis mine).
    ↩︎
  30.  Bradley, “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,” 119.

    Works Cited
    Bradley, Keith.“Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction.” The Journal of Roman Studies. Vol. 90 (2000). pp.110-125. https://www.jstor.org/stable/300203.

    Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome, edited by P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1994.

    Cato, De Agricultura. Cited in Stephens, Lester. “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.” PowerPoint Presentation. CLSS 285. Georgetown University, March 1, 2023.

    Columella. Digest 33.7 (‘The legacy of instructum or instrumentum’). First-century CE. Cited in Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome, edited by P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1994.

    Finley, Moses. Ancient Slavery And Modern Ideology. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers Princeton. 2017.

    Further slave jobs in elite households. Cited in Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome, edited by P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1994. 

    Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge and London. Harvard University Press. 1982.

    Paulus. The Meaning of the Term ‘Equipment.’ Cited in Wiedemann, Thomas. Greek & Roman Slavery. Taylor & Francis e-Library. 2005.

    Slave jobs in the household of Livia. Cited in Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome, edited by P.A. Cartledge and P.D.A. Garnsey. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1994.

    Stephens, Lester. “Domestic Slaves.” PowerPoint Presentation. CLSS 285. Georgetown University. February 27, 2023.

    Stephens, Lester. “Flights and Runaways.” PowerPoint Presentation. CLSS 285. Georgetown University. March 29, 2023.

    Stephens, Lester. “Manumission.” PowerPoint Presentation, CLSS 285. Georgetown University, February 21, 2023.

    Stephens, Lester. “Rural/Agricultural Slaves.” PowerPoint Presentation. CLSS 285. Georgetown University. March 1, 2023.

    Stephens, Lester. “The Economics of Slavery.” PowerPoint Presentation. CLSS 285. Georgetown University. February 1, 2023.

    Stephens, Lester. “The Process of Becoming a Slave.” PowerPoint Presentation. CLSS 285. Georgetown University. January 25, 2023.

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