Slavery in the Roman Empire

Behind the impressive relics the Romans left behind lurks a much darker story: that most of Rome was built on the back of enslaved people. It's shocking to know that up to 30% of Roman society was made up of enslaved people. So how was this represented in every day life? What was life like for different enslaved people in the Roman empire? And was freedom ever a possibility? Joining Kate today is Roman historian Emma Southon, whose new book Servus: The Moving, Enthralling True Story of Slavery in the Roman Empire takes us back to this world. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Betwixt the Sheets is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwix the Sheets. Was this the one that you wanted to listen to? Have you got the right podcast? Because if you haven't, this is your time to get out now, before we're all embarrassed, quite frankly. But if you're choosing to stay, I do have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects that you should be an adult too. Oh, God, that just feels so good saying that, knowing that we're all going to be safer from here on out. Right, on with the show.

• 1:06Kate Lister?

  Rome left behind magnificent monuments, extraordinary engineering and opulent stories of emperors, generals and conquests. But beneath the marble and the mythology was another Rome, one built and maintained by enslaved people. They worked the fields, they raised elite children, ran the households, mined resources and laboured in almost every part of society. And yet, not one story survives in their own voice. In this episode, we're going to step behind the spectacle of the Roman Empire and ask, what was life really like for the millions of people who lived within it without freedom? I am ready, if you are.

• 2:12Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. A reoccurring theme that I have often explored with today's guest is just how messed up were the Romans? And the answer is almost always, very. They were very messed up. And I have a feeling that we're going to be back on that familiar territory today as we delve into the brutal realities of being an enslaved person in the Roman Empire. How prevalent was slavery? How did you end up being enslaved? And was there ever any hope of being freed? Joining me today is the quite wonderful author and historian Emma Southon. So without further ado, let's crack on.

• 2:59Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Emma Southon. How are you doing?

• 3:05Speaker 01

  I'm very well, thank you. I'm very excited to be in your plush palace.

• 3:07Kate Lister?

  It looks good, doesn't it?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Like sexy historical things, yes.

• 3:10Kate Lister?

  It's so nice to actually see you in person.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Not just a tiny little... If I do this, then I...

• 3:16Kate Lister?

  If I kind of buffered?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, it's all coming back.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  If you could really be like fuzzy, that'd be ideal.

• 3:21Kate Lister?

  If the sound could not match what my mouth is doing as well, that would be better.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Then I'd feel really comfortable, yes.

• 3:27Kate Lister?

  But we are here because you have written a brand new book. Do you want to give it the full title?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  It is, it's there.

• 3:32Kate Lister?

  It's right there.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Service: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire.

• 3:36Kate Lister?

  I'm so glad that you wrote this. Why did you write this book?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  I wrote it because I had a kind of epiphany moment. I had one of these like strange galaxy brain moments while I was walking around thinking about Roman coins. And I had just been reading about minting, because I'm a fun, sexy person who reads about minting in my spare time.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  And it suddenly occurred to me, like, all of the coins in the Roman Empire had been minted by enslaved people. And then I started thinking about how many coins there were and how many coins I had seen. And then you think, how many are there in the British Museum? And how many have they got that aren't even on display? And how many are there in every museum? And how many come out of the ground, like every year, that detectorists find? And then I started expanding that across the empire and then across a thousand years. And I had a kind of like moment where I was like, oh, my God, slavery is massive. And then I had one of these like, people must know about this. I have to tell people what's happening here. And then it kind of started cascading into, oh, it's everywhere. And the kind of scale of slavery suddenly became very clear. It's the kind of thing that we talk about all the time.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Like, we're very aware that the Romans had slavery.

• 4:44Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  And we are kind of happy to talk about it as part of the Roman Empire. But the sheer scale of it and the sophistication of the system and the fact that it is in every part of Roman life, and that so many people in the empire experienced slavery as slaves for at least part of their life, is just massive. And so I did then have a kind of, I need to tell everybody about my revelation.

• 5:11Kate Lister?

  And I'm so glad that you did, because one of the things I really don't understand is the Roman system of slavery. Like, I get the headline, they enslaved people and that those people didn't have any rights and they had to do whatever the people with rights told them to do. But it wasn't until I went to Pompeii that I sort of had a little moment, not quite as big as yours, but just like, oh, my God, like, what do you mean doctors were slaves? What do you mean lawyers were slaves? What?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:35Kate Lister?

  What? Like, I'm like trying to get my head around, and I was reading statistics, and like, 30 to 40% of the population was, I don't know if that's even true.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Potentially up to 30%, yeah.

• 5:45Kate Lister?

  See, 30%? A third of people are living lives of slavery? How does that? I still can't get my head around it.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  It's really hard. And it's really like, really hard to try to explain to people because it's so sophisticated and it like infuses every part of their life. Because we're used to this idea of slavery, that it is where you imprison people, you make them do menial work.

• 6:09Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  You do not give them any ability to educate themselves, because then they would know that what was happening to them was wrong. But what the Romans did was infuse slavery into everything and make it so much a part of life that they could have incredibly educated people be enslaved. They could have their entire bureaucratic system be run by enslaved people. And they could have hierarchies within slavery and have everybody accept it, basically, and be like, oh, yeah, it's fine that a third of people are non-people and can be murdered or beaten or have anything happen to them at any time with no consequence. Because the way that it works is basically the same way that any like oppressive system

• 6:54Speaker 01

  that we live in, like patriarchy or capitalism, like globalised capitalism whereby some people are really suffering and everybody is like, well, that's the system.

• 7:03Kate Lister?

  Actually, when you say it like that, we do still live in a time where we just accept that some people are treated appallingly.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And we live in a system where, you know, we have homeless people and we see them every day and we're like, well, that sucks, that's a terrible system. But...

• 7:17Kate Lister?

  And we're all on our iPhones, knowing perfectly well where the materials from that came from and...

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And that's basically how slavery functions in the Roman world. It's much closer to them, because they can't really like go anywhere where there isn't slavery. But it's exactly the same way, they see it every day, a million times a day. And that makes it so normal that the idea of living outside of slavery is just unthinkable.

• 7:42Kate Lister?

  My God, I was just, I was getting ready to be really superior then and snotty, but I'm just like, oh, for, yeah, actually, we do still live in a system that exploits people and that we just turn a blind eye to it often.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And I think that you could write the kind of book that I've written about, like, in 2000 years, people might be writing that about, you know, what day London...

• 8:03Kate Lister?

  No, no, they really were people that just lived on the streets and everybody and everybody just went, nah, yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  And then we say, yeah, like, so you could just walk past somebody being beaten to death or beaten half to death in the Forum.

• 8:16Kate Lister?

  And you'd be like, oh, well.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:18Kate Lister?

  Shit to be you.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And you'd put that on your, it's like from Julia Felix's, in Pompeii, Julia Felix's fresco, which is there, which has got like a, it's a depiction of an average market day in Pompeii. And one of the things it has on it, as well as a homeless person, actually, is a person being beaten, like a enslaved person being held down and whipped.

• 8:41Kate Lister?

  What a nice thing to have in your family home.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, just on the entrance as you come in. The Romans are so weird.

• 8:48Kate Lister?

  They are. That's the Romans that I know and love, because one thing that I have learnt about them from talking to you is they're hideous people.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  They are.

• 8:53Kate Lister?

  They are. If they can do something and make something hurt at the same time, they are happier.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  It's weird to me and I never get over how much they really love it when other people are suffering. The amount of art that they make about enslaved people or captives, like, because a lot of people are taken into slavery through captivity, but enslaved people crying is like a thing that they love to put in their art, which is such a strange thing.

• 9:19Kate Lister?

  So it's like, just guys. How are you making this worse?

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, there's this, like, kind of jug, like a pouring jug, it's in the British Museum, and it's a little boy, a little African boy, for sale, because he's got a little tag around his neck, and he's kind of scrunched up in a kind of fetal position, and he's crying, and it's this beautifully made jug, and you're like, and you wanted the one, you're like, make it, so he's really sad that he's for sale. This is going to cost a fortune, I will pay any amount of money for the sad, crying boy. We will have this pride of place at dinner. You people are very strange.

• 10:01Kate Lister?

  They are, right. We're setting the scene, they're a strange, they're a strange, a violent group of people, it seems. Not unique in using slavery, we have to say, that seems to have been endemic in human societies for a very, very, very long time. But I guess what we're used to seeing, sort of, in the public space is the transatlantic slave trade as represented in TV and books, things like that. And as you say, that's the idea that it's people are denied their rights but are put to very menial work. We might have an idea about Roman slavery from Spartacus.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 10:33Kate Lister?

  And again, that's kind of like, you know, like burly men doing menial work.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Burly men doing fighting in their pants.

• 10:38Kate Lister?

  Fighting in their pants.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Actually, I'll tell you something that I really like about the Spartacus TV show, is there's the only thing I've ever seen that accepts that men could also be objects of sexual violence, and that Gladiator specifically could be objects of sexual violence, because in the early seasons, certainly of Spartacus Blood and Sand, and also in Spartacus the Film, you have men being assaulted and harassed.

• 11:04Kate Lister?

  I haven't seen that, okay.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Like, forced into sexual encounters that they don't want to be in because they are enslaved and their bodies are not their own. And it's one of the few places where you will see the idea, because like, the gladiatorial ideal is that they are powerful and sexy, and we kind of see them as being, like, enjoying that, but a lot of them do not. A lot of them kill themselves in order to get out of it, and part of that is that their bodies are, they are objects of lust, and they have no way of saying no.

• 11:34Kate Lister?

  Wow. All right, a lot of people are slaves, we're going to get on to sexual slavery, a lot of people are slaves. How do you become a slave? Like, what, I mean, if we're talking 30%, a third of everybody, like, this isn't like something you go for at careers day in school.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  No, you wouldn't, ideally. It is, in the early kind of Republic and the Middle Republic through to the Late Republic, a lot of it is captives. So as the Romans are expanding. So when you have slavery, people of property, they're a thing that you can take, when you take their statues, and you take their money, you can also take their boys, and you can also take their girls, and then you can raise those children in slavery, and you can, the second part of it is you can then have children born in slavery, because Romans practise a chattel slavery where children who are born to enslaved mothers are enslaved at the point of birth. So what you have by the time you get to the Imperial Period is vast numbers of people

• 12:33Speaker 01

  being born into slavery, raised in slavery, trained in professions from childhood, and trained into, like, appropriate slave behaviour, basically, from the time that they are born. So you get children who are, have professions by the time they're eight, nine years old, and are working, and then, then they have children, and then they have, so huge amounts of people are born into slavery.

• 12:58Kate Lister?

  Born into slavery. Could you be, so you can be taken as captive, you can be born into it, could you be made a slave by punishment?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  You can, not very often, but it is considered a form of capital punishment, it's basically this, like, effectively the same as being sent to the arena or executed, or, but you will get sent off to some horrible place. So we see lots of Christians get sent off to the mines, for example, or the quarries, which is, you get called the slave of the punishment, because you have no official owner, basically, but you can be sent off to be in the most hideous places, and very often to kind of sent to do the most menial, hideous, horrible work in the empire, often deliberately disfigured or disabled before being sent off to do that. So you, because it is a, like, a really intense form of punishment, so a lot of the

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Christian texts are like, this is really awful, first, they like, burn out your eye, and then send you, so that you know that you are.

• 14:01Kate Lister?

  Just in case you hadn't realised.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  In case you hadn't realised, and so even if you do manage to somehow escape, you're still going to be.

• 14:07Kate Lister?

  Oh, they are vicious.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  They are, and they come up with it a really nasty way, so you can be, I, I don't think this is enormously common, I think that probably being kidnapped and sold into slavery while you're travelling around is potentially relatively common.

• 14:22Kate Lister?

  That, that happened in Gladiator with Russell Crowe, and we've had this conversation before, and we, and you explained that that was bollocks, there's no way that like a Roman general would fall asleep and then wake up as a slave, that's just not going to happen.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely not, but if you are a random, not Roman general with no particular status in the world.

• 14:41Kate Lister?

  It could happen.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  If it was me travelling from one side of the empire to the other, unless I had good protection, it could happen.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  And particularly at times of crisis, and then you end up in like a tile making factory or something.

• 15:11Kate Lister?

  In case you weren't aware, World Mental Health Day takes place in October, and I don't know about you, but I'm taking this as a reminder to practise some proper self-care, saying no to plans I don't want to go to, guilt-free snacking, and Halloween movie marathons. It's also the perfect time to check in with yourself and your mental health. For many, it can mean taking that step and speaking to a professional who can help and guide you through any difficulties you're having. But often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. A lot of online therapy platforms don't accept insurance at all, which means even during a month focused on mental health, you're stuck paying out of pocket or signing up for an expensive monthly subscription. This is where Rula comes in.

• 15:56Kate Lister?

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• 16:44Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters, I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up a camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe, because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 17:13Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 17:26Kate Lister?

  So who's organising this then? Because this is like, this is a mass system.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:31Kate Lister?

  This is like endemic throughout the culture, like, people own other people, so you would have, like, do you have any idea of how many slaves, like, a regular Roman might own?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Potentially quite a few, actually, so from the documents that we have from Egypt, which is the only place that we really get, like, what is happening in regular life, we have from Oxyrhynchus, all of the, like, papyrus, you have quite a lot of census documents and, like, household accounts, where you'll see, like, a kind of middle classy family who have a profession, who might own three people, or two, and then those people have children, sometimes you can see those families growing, like, the households growing because the women are having children. There's one in particular where you see, over time, you can see different census documents,

• 18:24Speaker 01

  and they start off with three women, that this, it's a mother, a father and a child, they own three women, and then those women start having children, and you're like, is this, who is the father of these children? And then one of the women runs away and takes the kids with her, and is hopefully never caught. But potentially, in Egypt at least, there's, like, it'd be fairly regular to own one or two or three people.

• 18:51Kate Lister?

  It sounds expensive.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  You'd think, wouldn't you?

• 18:54Kate Lister?

  Like, because you have to keep these people somewhere, and you have to feed them, and you have to, I suppose what I'm leading up to is basically saying, what quality of life do these people have?

• 19:03Speaker 01

  That depends on where you are in the hierarchy, but probably not great.

• 19:06Kate Lister?

  Of course, there's a hierarchy.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  There's a really severe hierarchy, and most of the evidence that we have is for the people who are at the very top, so the people who are in bureaucratic positions or really specialised positions for the very elite families and the emperor, and who are literate and who have money and who are able to do something.

• 19:25Kate Lister?

  They have money, so slaves are paid?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, they can be. There's this very complicated legal instrument called peculium, which basically is like pocket money for slaves. So legally, they can control money and property, but they don't own it. And the way it works is exactly the same, is if you, if you've got a kid, and you give them, like, I don't know, I don't know what a reasonable pocket money is, like, £5 a week for doing their chores, so they do the washing up, they get £5 a week, and they can choose to save that £5 a week up to buy a PlayStation 5, or they can spend it all immediately on Sweeties.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  But that's their choice and they have like a little bit of autonomy. But at any point as a parent, you, if they stop doing their chores.

• 20:10Kate Lister?

  You can withhold it.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  You can take it away. If they um do something really bad, you can take their Playstation away. And they don't own that at any point. They can say that's mine, but it isn't legally. Um. And you can, as a parent, you're in charge, you can take it away and you can punish them. And it gives them a little bit of autonomy to do like what they want with it, but it also gives them something to lose. Because then they're going to be better behaved because they've got something of theirs to protect.

• 20:33Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Um. And that's exactly how Perculium works. And they can be quite massive amongst the very rich. So you see people who own a lot of their own slaves. So, because you can have layers of people owning some.

• 20:45Kate Lister?

  Slaves owning slaves.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um. But at any point, the kind of final master, the dominus, can take all that away if they misbehave. Um. And um they can remove it from them. So it ends up being a mo- a mechanism of control. Um. As much as it is a mechanism of reward. Uh. And so we know lots about those people. Because those are people who left the most of themselves behind and very little about illiterate people who live in like a small village in Egypt or who live in a tiny little town in southern Italy or Britain or any of these places because they don't have the money or the um ability to leave a bit of stone with their life written on it.

• 21:30Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Um. Which um means that we know very little about them. We just know that they existed. Um. And probably their lives are going to depend on how, entirely going to depend on who owns them as property. Um. Like who enslaves them. It could be, if you get a nice one, then it could be fine. Apart from the fact that you're a slave and you can't do what you want to do. Um. Or if you have a, but you could have a really awful one and you see like terrible stories about people like really abusing um like enslaved people and nobody can really do anything about it. There's no law that says you can't torture enslaved people to death.

• 22:09Kate Lister?

  Any rights for slaves at all? And I mean, I've got a low bar here. Emma, like anything at all, any recourse that a slave could have. I'll, I'll even accept, like, it would be frowned upon, quite frankly. Like that, I'd, I'd accept that. Is like, is there any recourse at all for these people?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Tiny little bits. Uh. For the most part, no. In general, no. Uh. For most people in practice, um, there is nothing. Um. There's not even like a law for most of Roman history that they could try to appeal to. Um. You occasionally get moments of like emperors trying to be a bit liberal. So Hadrian has an edict where there's somebody has come to him because um there's one specific woman in Rome, whose name is not recorded, but she has been doing such terrible things to the people in her household that they have fled um and asked for sanctuary. Um. And so what happens is they are confiscated from her and sold to new owners.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Um. So you're like, well, that's, I guess you're not being tortured anymore, but it's also you're being like that whole household is split up. You have to, you potentially got all of the consequences of being sold, which is one of the most terrifying things in the text. Like whenever you are reading about slavery and Roman, they're all terrified of being sold. Um. So you have that. So there is possibility that you can leave and be like, I want to go to a new owner, basically. Um. And in three, one, nine, you get the first law with uh Constantine says you can't deliberately murder people anymore. And so.

• 23:45Kate Lister?

  Took a while.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Hmm. It's surprisingly detailed. It's like you can no longer poison people, have them hanged, crucify them, uh, throw them off of buildings, drown them, beat them to death. One is like incredibly detailed. It's like you can no longer like torture them until their gore is dripping on the floor. And you're like, all right, Constantine, calm down.

• 24:06Kate Lister?

  Doing that?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Apparently people were.

• 24:09Kate Lister?

  Am I like reading it out in the forum?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:11Kate Lister?

  Just like Horace.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Pretty much, yeah. I see you. Uh. But so, and that's not until like three, one, nine. And it's often kind of pulled out as a like, oh, the Romans were so liberal, you weren't even allowed to murder your slaves anymore. But.

• 24:26Kate Lister?

  It took them a while.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  It took them a long time. Like the American um states slave lawyers um from like the even the late eighteenth century in like Georgia and Virginia. Uh. All of them from the beginning are like, you can't technically murder enslaved people. And we know for a fact that they were constantly.

• 24:44Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  So I feel like um your rights were very, very limited. The only exception is if you were uh owned by a city. So you could be uh an enslaved person who is um not owned by a person, but is owned by the municipality. Uh. And those people are like the people that look after the temples and like do the street cleaning and uh fix the aqueducts and do all of the like.

• 25:08Kate Lister?

  Like council, council owned slavery. Wow, yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  So like all of the council workers were enslaved. And because they don't have a specific person, they are given, they are protected by law. They have to be given shelter. Um. And they have to be given.

• 25:23Kate Lister?

  Well, that's something. I'll take that, that you, you, they have to have somewhere to live.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have to have somewhere to live. Um. And the municipality has to feed them and has to give them some money. So they have a small salary every year. And that is, they're the only people.

• 25:37Kate Lister?

  That's it.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Who have those, like, because otherwise presumably the councils would be like, well, we'll just cut that from the budget. Um. And all of the public slaves can sleep in a field now. Um. But so they have a legal response, like a social care responsibility to the people that they enslave, but no.

• 25:52Kate Lister?

  Very low duty of care, but it's there.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  But it's there. But if you are owned by a person, uh, then there is no.

• 25:59Kate Lister?

  That's that.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:00Kate Lister?

  That's that.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:02Kate Lister?

  Oh, God, it's just, it's just brutal, isn't it? Let's go back to what you're saying about they were scared of being sold. Some like there's the Victorians and the, and the Georgians did like a whole load of art about the slave market and and it's very much kind of eroticised and fetishised and everything. But were there actual slave markets that, yeah, they were, they were.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were. Um. You get not kind of normal slave markets, just kind of where they're.

• 26:28Kate Lister?

  Normal slave markets, right, okay.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  And then you get specialised slave markets as well. So um we have um, there's at least two kind of fairly constant slave markets in Rome where people are just selling people, um, just anybody that they want to sell. But then you also have um what Plutarch calls monster markets, um, which are specifically.

• 26:53Kate Lister?

  Bracing myself for this one.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  For the buying and selling of people with unusual physical characteristics. So it can be people with visible disabilities, people with, who are um, like twins are very often sold in that. Uh. Like identical twins. Um. But people, he does say people with no shins at one point. And I've never been able to work out what people with no shins.

• 27:17Kate Lister?

  Oh, oh, that's tricky.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Um. But you see like people with uh humpbacks, people with microcephaly, uh little people. Um. People with giganticism, like anybody with any kind of like unique physical characteristic would be, could be purchased as a kind of luxury object. And then you have specific markets for very, very beautiful boys, which.

• 27:41Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Which Marshall talks about um as always being kind of behind closed doors and will be very, um, these are young kind of adolescents and prepubescent boys and being sold as sexual objects. Um. And so those markets are very um like inside behind closed doors. And he's like, you don't want to know what goes on in there. Even I don't want to know what goes on in there. And Marshall has a fairly high bar for.

• 28:07Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:09Kate Lister?

  Oh, so well, let's talk about sexual slavery then, as we're, we're.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  As we're there, yeah.

• 28:13Kate Lister?

  As we're on the subject. Um. That's sort of one of the more immediate things that people think of when they think of slavery in, in the Roman period. I remember seeing, and there was a YouTube influencer who was filming herself outside the brothel in Pompeii and saying how terrible it was that they were enslaving these women. And I'm not saying for a second it was, and it was awful. But it's kind of like, but they did it with everybody, like everybody seems to be enslaved. But how did they understand sexual slavery? Was it like, was that, that's something very specific? The way, I mean, you've mentioned the boys already, but.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Um. Basically, all women who are enslaved, all people who are enslaved are like sexually available. Um. And it is um can like so common that um or that women are sexually available, that it's like the prices that are in Pompeii are so cheap. Um. It's like a few pence to buy an hour of a woman's time, like um.

• 29:08Kate Lister?

  How much would a slave cost?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  That really depends on how uh what their skills are.

• 29:14Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Um. The kind of average price for a child who has like the beginnings, who would be kind of between the age of like six and ten across the empire seems to be about six hundred quid, six hundred denari. Um. So, um, which is, yeah. And then when Diocletian does his price edict in the third century, he tries to put a like maximum price on everything. The maximum price for a um an enslaved person is a man aged between sixteen and like thirty five. Um. And that's thirty thousand cisterces.

• 29:49Kate Lister?

  Is that a lot of money?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  It's quite a lot of money. An average price, like an average daily wage is something like. Twenty Sesterces, seven to twenty.

• 29:58Kate Lister?

  I'm not that good at maths.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  So it's a lot of money.

• 30:00Kate Lister?

  It's a lot of money.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It's enough to buy a house.

• 30:03Kate Lister?

  Okay, right. Okay, so they are expensive.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:05Kate Lister?

  And it does sound like you could be sold into sexual slavery, forced to work at a brothel, something like that, but also just, it almost like that's just part of the course.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  That's part of the course if you are a woman in slavery.

• 30:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  And it is, and to be sold, but to be sold into a brothel is something that is particularly horrific.

• 30:22Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  And you see a lot of laws of like, I'm selling this woman, but you have to promise you're not going to put her in a brothel. Because it is, like, yeah, it's just a really horrific, it's exactly as horrific as you can imagine. It could be like, it is, even if they are, try to make the best of what is happening to them, they cannot consent because they cannot not consent. And so you see in, like, there's so much graffiti in the brothel in Pompeii, that you see these women, like, trying to define themselves. So you see, like, the women who calls herself a victor, and like a fucktris, which is one that I like. But at the same time, they can't

• 31:04Speaker 01

  leave and they can't consent. So they're doing their best in a really horrific situation. Because they are, it is, the brothel situation, that is the only brothel that we have, that is a standalone, full-time brothel. Most women are attached to inns and hotels.

• 31:22Kate Lister?

  And houses in some cases.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Houses in some cases. Basically, every, like, bar or restaurant is going to have

• 31:30Speaker 01

  a woman.

• 31:31Kate Lister?

  Sexually available.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Sexually available. And almost all women who work in hospitality, basically. But then also all women who are in the household are also. But they just might have something else to do, rather than just sit and wait. And the brothels have pimps, who are also enslaved or formerly enslaved. And then a lot of those are owned by people who are very high up. Like, all of that money flows up to people who are local elites, who are senators, who are, this is just a line on their, like, business thing, but it is the mass rape of people.

• 32:02Kate Lister?

  How do you get out of it? Can you get out of it? Is there, like?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Like, you can.

• 32:08Kate Lister?

  Like, what's the deal? Can you buy your way out? Does someone have to, like, give you a piece of paper?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Yes. So they're quite liberal with manumission, because it's really useful for keeping people in line. If you always have hope, then the possibility of being able to save up, to buy, so you can buy.

• 32:26Kate Lister?

  Oh, like, the little pocket money that they give them?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:28Kate Lister?

  They could save up to buy them. Is that, like, feasible, or is that just dangling carrots?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Well, I see, this is the thing. It is feasible. You do see people who do buy their freedom. So sometimes they will be so proud of it that they mention it.

• 32:41Kate Lister?

  The Vetty brothers in Pompeii.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. And there's, like, a doctor who is so proud of it, that he puts on his tombstone, not only how much he paid for himself, which is quite a lot of money, I think it's like fifty thousand Sesterces, but also how much he currently has in his bank account at the point of death.

• 32:58Kate Lister?

  Fair, right, okay. He was proud of that.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  And so you can see people do it. Only men, interestingly, we don't have a single example of a woman who purchased her own freedom. Women, we see, get freed to be married to the enslavers, a lot, which is just sort of another form of slavery in a way. But you do see them have freedom through that. But you can be manumitted as an act of kindness, like, as a gift, basically. You have to go through, like, a process with a magistrate, officially, to do it. Or in wills. We see a lot of people get manumitted at the point

• 33:41Speaker 01

  that their dominus dies. So they are then freed in the will, or they'll be freed, like, on a certain condition, like, if the accounts are correct, or on the promise that they, they promise that they'll come and tend to my grave for the next ten years, or whatever. So you see a lot of people get freed in that thing, in that point. One of the things, interestingly, that one of the laws tells you to look out for, if you are a person who owns a lot of slaves, is if you get, double-check the will after you've got an enslaved person to write it up, to make sure they haven't put their own manumission in

• 34:18Speaker 01

  there. And I'm like, no, good for them, let them have it.

• 34:20Kate Lister?

  Well done, play the system.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  So you can, but it all depends on, like, all of the power is in the hands of the enslaver. Because there's a very famous murder that happens by a guy called Lucius Pudanus, who is killed, he's a former consul who's killed by an enslaved man. And one of the reasons given for why he is killed is that he had promised his murderer that he would free him, and then had changed his mind at the last second. And he just lost his temper. The other option that's given is that the murderer had wanted him to stop sexually abusing a child in the household. Those are the two options for why he did it. And both of them, I'm like, fairly reasonable. Like, I'm, like, don't murder people, obviously, but I will

• 35:05Speaker 01

  say, if you're going to have a reason that that could. And you see it in the modern sources. So I read a lot of slave narratives from people enslaved in the Americas and in the Caribbean. And, like, you could see people trying to buy their freedom and being turned down. Like, they've got the money, that had, like, they've got an agreement at some point, and the enslaver's like, oh, no, no, you're too valuable. Like, you've worked too hard, you've worked too well for me. Like, I can't let you go. You can go when I die. And they, they're like, no, but I would like to go now, actually. So the possibility is always there, but it's not something that you can take.

• 35:44Kate Lister?

  You can't guarantee it.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's always something that has to be given to you.

• 36:05Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe, because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.

• 36:47Kate Lister?

  Now, one of the things that I do remember from talking to you before is that if there's, there's a lot of crimes that Romans don't like, but a particular one that they clamp down very hardly on, hardly? The one that they clamp down hard on is enslaved people trying to have a rebellion, or trying to kill their masters. They react quite badly to that one.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  They do. They react incredibly severely, and they will kill everybody in the household. And anybody who isn't killed gets tortured, and possibly then killed. The collective punishment for individual crime is, like, top of their list of things. So any kind of violence towards an enslaver is treated with extreme.

• 37:27Kate Lister?

  Maximum aggression.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Maximum aggression. The other thing that they really hate is enslaved people just leaving, running away.

• 37:35Kate Lister?

  I was going to say, because is running away an option as well? It doesn't sound like it is, really.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  It is, but it's terrifying. And people do do it. Like, people try it all the time, and sometimes they're successful. And we do have some stories of, like, a librarian who runs away from Cicero. And then Cicero spends years trying to, he's last spotted in, like, Croatia. And Cicero spends years writing to people, like, whenever they go over in that direction, he is like.

• 38:02Kate Lister?

  Just in case you see him.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  If you see Dionysus, you bring him back. It's like, I'm adding the affair of Dionysus onto your mission. Like, this is a mission to go.

• 38:11Kate Lister?

  Let it go, man.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But he's furious. And, like, the one time when the Roman state swings into action as a whole, is when an enslaved person has freed themselves, has just left. By the time, it's Marcus Aurelius that, like, formalizes the process. But he's like, everybody has to, has a mandate to search for this person. Like, every magistrate, every soldier has a mandate to keep an eye out, to circulate their description. You can enter any property at any time to search for them if you think that they are there. Like, no property.

• 38:47Kate Lister?

  That's what it's about, isn't it?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, no property is safe. And also, there's no, there's no, like, underground railroad, as far as we're aware, where people can, there's no way of knowing who is going to be safe to go to. So it's terrifying prospect. And then the punishments, if you are caught, are quite severe. Like, a lot of torture, a lot of facial tattooing, in the early part of the empire, collars as well, you get. So it's a terrifying thing to do. But people do do it.

• 39:13Kate Lister?

  Yeah, of course they do.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  And something that we have from Egypt is lots of the, like, flyers that were made, because they were paste flyers about all over, like, the temples and the forum. And this boy who has red hair and lisp and is very chatty.

• 39:30Kate Lister?

  So when you're doing this kind of research, do we have voices from these people, or is it just people talking about them? Is there any, like, first-person account of what happened to somebody?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  No. There, we have no, like, all we have in terms of their voices, we have their epitaphs. So particularly from the cities, and particularly from people who are enslaved bureaucratically, or in domestic situations, we have how they wanted themselves to be remembered. And from that, you can kind of reconstruct things. So from certain cemeteries, we have cemeteries where, like, families will all be interred at various points. So you can see, like, Two parents and they've got married, but that marriage is not a legal marriage. It's just they're describing each other as husband and wife. So two people fall in love and then they have three children.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And then those children grow up and then the family starts dying off. So you see them through the point of death because you'll see like um a child commemorating her mother and then a brother commemorating that, his sister. Um, and then uh two brothers commemorating their father and then one brother commemorating the last brother. And so you see the family kind of dying off basically, but you can see that this family existed and that they all loved each other and that they were able to live like very long lives in slavery, in the house, in this one house, you know where they were, you know what they were doing. And so you can see like what they want people to remember about themselves,

• 41:09Speaker 01

  which is almost entirely that they loved somebody. Um, uh, like we tend to get a bit focused on the professions in those, but almost all of them are just saying who they like, who has commemorated who and that they loved them and that they were like, well deserving is the thing that they say, they well deserve this monument. Um, and like you see so much love in those. Um, and then you have graffiti as well. Um, so there's so Romans love writing on walls, absolutely love it.

• 41:38Kate Lister?

  They do, don't they? They went mad for that.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, and so, and they do it inside their houses as well because the houses, like particularly the big ones, they're not just living spaces, they're working spaces. Um, and so there's like this one stairwell in one of the houses in Pompeii, the house of Marcus Castius, um, where you can see people would just hang out. It's like a kind of slightly grim stairwell from the bottom floor to the second floor. And um it like there's loads of poetry that's just written on the walls and like people writing to each other, like Romula lives here with her boyfriend is my favourite. Uh, like there's loads of Romulas, um, she obviously just loved to write her name wherever. And like, um, two brothers talking to each other like at doorways.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  So they obviously spent time hanging out doorways and those are like the service spaces of the house. Even if you've ever had a service job, there's always like

• 42:29Kate Lister?

  Where you hang out, yeah, you smoke your cigarettes.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Exactly, and it's always covered in graffiti that says like, kill me or um, John is a dick or something like. Cause as you're smoking your cigarette or as you're just kind of waiting for the lift to come or whatever, um, or the glasses to be clean, like you just scribble on the wall because you've got nothing else to do. And those are those spaces. So you can see, and like in kitchens, there's loads. So you can see things like people playing games and like keeping score on the wall. Um, or learning the alphabet. Um, so there's one kitchen where there's the alphabet is written in various different, and it's quite low down, so it's obviously children sitting on the floor, like practising the alphabet. So you can see these like tiny little fragments of a person.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  We don't have a life story for anybody, even those that are quite famous, like freed.

• 43:18Kate Lister?

  Just about to say, are there any, I want to say success stories because all of this is awful. But like, if you have to be an enslaved person, is there anyone that you'd be like, well, I guess that was the best that it could possibly be.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, you want to be a man enslaved in the imperial house. Uh, and then you have a relatively high chance of being freed because by basically by the time of like Claudius, like fairly early in the empire, it becomes quite formalised that enslaved people do the grunt work. And then if you're promoted into management, that promotion comes with a bit of manumission. Um, and you have to pay for it. There's a whole, there's a whole department of manumission, which is people, like the processes, the payments of people buying their own freedom so they can get a promotion.

• 44:02Kate Lister?

  That's just mean.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  So you've got a fairly high chance, if you can get into a management position, of being um freed. Uh, and then you can have some quite a lot of kind of bureaucratic power. Um, and if you are, there's a brief moment uh in the early empire where you can basically be running the empire. Um, everybody will hate you for it, but you're going to be so rich and surrounded by people who are telling you that they love you, that you might not mind. So if people like Pallas and Calystus and Nocisus, who are like the great villains of Claudius's reign, um, but are basically running the empire, like they're just accountants and um, like the ministers of state, basically. Um, and they have loads of power and they've got an astonishing amount of money. Um, and people are constantly giving them presents.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Um, and um, they all basically, Nocisus doesn't, but they, most of them get to retire and kind of die fairly happily. Um, so if you can be a man in the imperial service, that's probably, that's as good as it gets. Like the chances of you coming to harm are minimal. Uh, the chances of you getting a fairly decent job, quite high, as long as you don't mind doing accounts or copying out letters. It's not a very exciting life, but um, it is as good, that's as good as it gets.

• 45:20Kate Lister?

  So there's a final question then. When did they stop this? Like, when did they have a moment of just like, hang on a minute? Uh, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. And was there ever any voices that you found of people throughout the Roman Empire? Was anyone at any point going, maybe this isn't great?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 45:38Kate Lister?

  There was no like anti-slavery movement? There was no kind of like, like nothing at all, everyone was just thoroughly on board with it?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Everyone was just thoroughly on board with it. Well, the only one that I found that is like a fragment of an idea that somebody might have said, maybe we should abolish slavery is in this letter from Seneca where he's telling his peers, basically. So he's like the elite of the elite. Um, and he's like, what I'm seeing at my, at the dinner parties I go to is quite hideous. Um, like people being beaten for sneezing, for coughing, people not being allowed to like breathe too loudly, like people having their hair used as a napkin, that kind of thing. Um, and I, maybe we should remember that these are people. Um, and we should try to treat them um more equitably and maybe just not treat them as objects. Um, and he goes on quite a while.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  And then at the end he says, people are going to say that because I've said we should be a little bit more, bit kinder, a bit more human, um, that I'm talking about abolishing slavery, but I'm not. I wouldn't, uh, don't be ridic, I'm not saying abolish it.

• 46:44Kate Lister?

  I'm not a lunatic over here.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Uh, I just think that we should maybe not be quite so cruel. And like, okay, so that like, that is a, a topic of conversation that people could have. And amongst his peers, people would be like, hmm, I suppose you want to abolish slavery. Um, so it suggests that there might be like some radical elements somewhere who would genuinely be talking about it, but that is it.

• 47:05Kate Lister?

  That's it.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  That's it. We don't have any of their voices. Um, and then it never does get abolished, like the Western Empire kind of gradually falls away. But well into the fifth, sixth century, um, you still have, like when you start getting Christian sources, they're still talking about slavery. You still have bishops being like, um, can you stop having sex with all your enslaved girls? Um, because that counts as adultery. Um, and St Augustine like is trying to free people from slavery all the time. And um slavery continues in the um, all of the post-imperial empire, empires and kingdoms. And it continues in a different form in the Eastern Empire.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  It doesn't go away, it just shifts into a more, I always feel a bit weird saying this, it shifts into a more normal situation. Like the way that the Romans do it is so abnormal, it's so huge.

• 47:59Kate Lister?

  It sounds abnormal. I'm still like, you've explained it really well, but I'm, it's still such a strange system that contained within this, there could be people that were, that were enormously powerful and that had money and that all the bureaucrats were basically enslaved. And it's, it's, yeah, I have a better understanding, but I'm still.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  But it is abnormal.

• 48:19Kate Lister?

  This is an abnormal situation.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Um, and the way that they, they do it is so weird, um, that they

• 48:25Kate Lister?

  Did they know it was weird?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  They kind of do, but they think that other people are weird. They like, there's like this bit of Tacitus where he's writing about the Germans. Um, and he writes that he finds their system of slavery really strange because you don't, they don't live in the house. Um, and they don't have specialised jobs.

• 48:43Kate Lister?

  So what's the other weird thing, right? Is that the people who aren't slaves are working alongside people who are slaves?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:50Kate Lister?

  So like, you know, like going back to the, the council owned slaves. So you'd have like a whole bunch of people who they're slaves, but the, the person they're working with, that's their job.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yes, but people don't really have jobs in the Roman world in the same way. Like the idea of having a job that you go to every day, that where you're working for somebody else or working for another entity is, would be a bit weird. Like you could do short-term contract work, like you might sign up to do a bit of like work for a while.

• 49:17Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  But you would do like the idea of turning up every day and they don't have

• 49:21Kate Lister?

  In, clocking out.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, that's, that's slavery.

• 49:24Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's interesting. See, see like, our, our capitalism, our current system, the Romans would have thought of that as slavery.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  I think that they would show up and be like, and you just show up and you can't leave.

• 49:34Kate Lister?

  And you get a bit of money for it, do you?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  But they're not, but only some of the money.

• 49:38Kate Lister?

  Only some of the money and the big boss person basically holds all the cards and can dispel you without, without much.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  And you're not allowed to wear what you want, like that sounds like slavery.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Uh, they, they would consider, they would consider that to be unfreedom, certainly. Um, like the idea, and they don't really have any legal like

• 49:57Kate Lister?

  And you can't afford your own house. I see, right, okay.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Fascinating. And you're free.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  I mean, I can't afford my own house.

• 50:05Kate Lister?

  And some of you, and some of you don't have enough to, like you can't afford your own food as well, right, okay, but you're free.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. What about, yeah, uh, very different idea of freedom uh that we have to them. Um, but yeah, so they don't really have, like you wouldn't have a council worker who goes in and like works in an office alongside them, that would just be like, they might do some work for other people contractually, but it would be short term.

• 50:30Kate Lister?

  Oh, Emma, you have been incredible, horrifying in fact, to talk to. But amazing nonetheless. Thank you so much. Let's give people the full title of your book once, once again.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Once more, I'm going to get it right. It's Service.

• 50:42Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  How Slavery Made the Roman Empire.

• 50:45Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for coming in and thank you for explaining that.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  That's all right. I'm always happy to horrify and discuss.

• 50:50Kate Lister?

  You absolutely did that.

• 50:57Kate Lister?

  Thank you to Emma for joining me and if you like what you heard, then please don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you wanted us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.