The Unspeakable Things Masters Did To Slaves in Ancient Rome

At one point during the short rule of Julius Caesar (49 BCE to 44 BCE), he decided that he needed to shore up his support in the Senate by adding a number of new seats. This had been done before, but this time the men coming to Rome were not Roman; they were from Gaul, what is now France, and they had only recently been defeated by Rome. Though we now know that Gaulish society was more advanced and intricate than was believed for centuries, it was nowhere near as advanced as that of the Romans, and the newly appointed senators were by all accounts stunned by the city of Rome: the size of it, the buildings of a type that existed nowhere else on this planet, the crowds, the teeming streets, the art, and the technology. It was like they were on another planet. They did recognize one thing right away: Rome was full of slaves. Some were Gauls captured during Rome’s wars with their homeland. Could the Romans have built their great city without slaves? Probably, but that wasn’t the way of things in ancient Rome or most other places in the world at that time. And like most other people that owned slaves, the Romans could be brutal—very, very brutal.

It’s estimated that at the time of Caesar’s ascent to power, the slaves of Roman Italy numbered anywhere between 20 to 30 percent of the population. This may have been greater in Rome itself, with its constant building and growing population of citizens who needed to be supplied with labor, services, education, and more, and that more very much included sex, often in the form of sexual assault. Slaves did a variety of things for the Romans, and just like Roman society, the slave population was stratified. At the top were learned advisors to the leading men of Rome, many of them Greeks who were regarded by the Romans as the epitome of civilization until the Romans crushed them. Greek tutors, though still slaves despite the elevated title and likely better living conditions, were a status symbol in Roman High Society. Next were domestic slaves, personal servants, servers, kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. Any Roman citizen that could afford a slave had one; it was a status symbol. At the bottom—though not on the ground floor, so to speak—were workers on large farms, quarries, mines, marshes, and the like. These men, women, and children most often endured short, painful, miserable lives, though this depended to a large degree on their owners, sometimes a family or individual, but most often a company or group of wealthy people who might treat their slaves with a little bit more humanity than others.

The absolute worst situation for a slave was that of a galley slave or a worker in the mines. Galley slaves were the men who rode Roman warships; they were often chained to their benches, left there in all weather, and abandoned to die in times of trouble or defeat. Life in the mines was, as you can imagine, hell on earth, especially when you consider that Rome used tons of lead and knew nothing of lead poisoning and its effects. The bottom line for the slaves, however, is that they were not free, and if they escaped and were recaptured, or attempted escape and were caught in the act, they could be sure of one thing: punishment would be soon incoming and likely very harsh or fatal. One group of slaves was actually exalted in Rome to a degree: gladiators, with some rising to a popularity rivaling that of a modern pop music superstar. Some gladiators lived through a number of fights or gained their freedom because of the glory they had brought to their owners; they were given their freedom, and in turn, they frequently owned their own stable of slaves or gladiators. Some slaves were skilled actors or singers and traveled the Italian Peninsula entertaining people, always supervised by their owners. Many of these people were extremely popular and did enjoy some privilege, but no matter how successful they were, they were not free.

Freedom was a dream for most slaves, one which they never achieved. Many had been slaves since childhood, taken during war or born by a slave mother. These boys and girls knew nothing of freedom, and to some degree, when the occasional slave revolt did occur, many had to be told what freedom actually meant. To be honest, many slaves preferred the devil they knew in Rome to a life on the run with possible excruciating torture at its end. What is the most well-known form of punishment for slaves, criminals, and traitors in Rome? You’ve likely thought of it before we can even say it: crucifixion, which comes from the Latin word meaning to fasten to a cross. The most famous crucifixion, of course, is that of Jesus, who was accused of claiming to be King of the Jews, a title the Romans, who had conquered Israel, were not too keen on. There was nothing different about the crucifixion of Christ except that the story of Jesus didn’t end with his death on the cross. Thousands, likely millions, of people were crucified by the Romans in the centuries they ruled much of Europe, the Mediterranean coastline, and the Middle East. Crucifixion wasn’t unique to Rome, but the death of Christ made Rome synonymous with this excruciating act itself—a word that comes from the same Latin root as crucify.

Crucifixion could take hours; most times, death came by way of drowning in the fluid that filled your lungs because gravity made it impossible to take a normal breath. Death could also come through exposure in the heat or cold, and pain and shock could also kill. Remember, most people who were crucified were not exactly treated well before they were nailed by their wrists and ankles to wooden boards. Of course, death could come in many ways to slaves who attempted escape, plotted with others to revolt, disobeyed an order, or displeased their owners or perhaps their wives, mistresses, or children in some way. What’s worse is that sometimes other slaves were the executioners. We might call them overseers: other slaves who were given more privileges and power for keeping the rest of the slaves in line. Slaves were beaten to death, sentenced to die in the arena, whipped to death, and in some cases in Africa, trampled by elephants.

There were two ancient Romes: the city and the empire. One of the things the city was and is known for is the Colosseum, the stadium where huge gladiatorial and other events were held. However, many Roman cities had coliseums, which means amphitheatres; one of the most intact Roman coliseums is in Nîmes, France, and gladiatorial games were held there too. There were hundreds of coliseums throughout the empire, some large, some small, and most were stained in blood. Not only did local and regional coliseums hold gladiatorial games, but they also acted as places of execution, and most horrifyingly, places for execution as entertainment. Slaves were often executed or punished there; these were most often slaves guilty of revolt or, most famously, for being Christian before Rome adopted that religion. Slaves were sometimes dressed as former Roman enemies to reenact great battles from Rome’s recent or distant past, and as you likely know, many Christians and others were literally fed to lions, tigers, or bears—oh my. They were gored by bulls and oxen, trampled or gored by elephants, and much else. Whatever the Roman imagination could think of was often done. Wrapping people in pitch-covered linen and setting them on fire was a popular punishment at the beginning of the Christian era, the worst part of an awful end, while people were cheering while other people suffered.

Roman slave owners could be brutal, but many were also realistic. They knew some things that business people and governments today, if they’re smart, keep in mind: people don’t work as hard for a slave driver as they do for someone they trust and who treats them with respect, and they’ll revolt if they are driven too hard or insulted too often. Of course, even the kindest of Roman slave owners likely cracked the whip or flagellum to get their slaves to work at times, and of course, they always had their eyes open for possible revolt and crushed it as soon as they could. But some slave owners treated their slaves better than average, and generally speaking, slave revolts at these places were kept to a minimum, except when they weren’t. The most famous slave revolt occurred in 73 to 71 BCE and was led by the Thracian-Greek gladiator Spartacus. Spartacus and several other gladiators escaped from captivity and made their way south, hoping to reach Sicily, where two other slave revolts had occurred in the previous 100 years. Spartacus’s uprising was not called a revolt by the Romans or historians; it’s called the Third Servile War, for that’s precisely what it was: a war. Spartacus was killed in combat, but many of his followers were not; perhaps 6,000 were crucified on the hills overlooking the famous Appian Way leading into Rome.

If you watched one of our recent videos on the unspeakable things Americans did to capture breeding slaves, you saw just how inhuman people can be. Slaves in ancient Rome were just taken during the war; they were sold to the Romans by the peoples of their empire, especially in Africa and the Middle East, and sold between Romans throughout their domain. However, if you were rich and owned many slaves, why spend money buying more? Why not just breed them yourself? As inhuman as it sounds, this is precisely what happened. Women and girls were purposely impregnated either by other slaves or their owners for a ready-made slave population; that was economics. And economics was also behind other forms of sexual slavery: prostitution. Rome and its empire were famous for its brothels, however, not all brothel workers were slaves. Some prostitutes catered only to the rich and famous and could wield a considerable amount of influence, but not slaves—mostly more attractive women and girls, but also young men and boys, as Rome before Christianity had no real taboo on homosexuality or the sexual exploitation of slaves.

Once a slave, always a slave was the case for most Roman slaves, but not all. Many could and did get their freedom, most often these were the men and women that worked directly for their owners in the house or smaller farms where people got to know each other well. Many were the slaves of rich and powerful men who rewarded their slaves with freedom in their wills or for some other specific reason, perhaps saving their lives, etc. However, most freed slaves could not become Roman citizens unless they served a particular amount of time in the Roman auxiliary forces; this privilege was reserved for men of a certain age and took years to achieve. This is history on fleek, and we’ll see you next time.