AMDG

5 Classical Studies 1

No-one knows how slavery was 'invented' or when. But every ancient society of which we know anything used some form of unfree labour, whether slavery, serfdom, helotage, debt-bondage or whatever. So some people, usually a majority, were forced to work to provide a living and leisure for owners or masters, the 'free' population. The Digest of Roman Law (a legal encyclopaedia compiled in the 6th cent. AD) put it like this: slavery was, although...
contra ius naturale, nevertheless a universal
ius gentium
i.e., 'against natural justice but anyway a fact of life everywhere'. Romans could then accept that there was something unfair about exploiting slaves, but they could always claim, truthfully, that 'everybody else does it'.
Legally speaking, Romans' slaves were, like Athenians', the property of their masters, in the same way as their furniture or their livestock, and masters were absolutely free to do what they liked with their slaves—even to the point of having the power of life & death over them. This is not surprising. The unavoidable fact of slavery almost everywhere in the ancient world was widely recognised even by slaves themselves, and so although philosophers such as Aristotle often discussed slavery, what makes a good slave, how best to manage slaves &c., they hardly ever tried either to criticize or defend slavery in principle. Plato & Aristotle even held that some peoples (non-Greeks!) were fitted by nature to be slaves—a racist belief that reminds us of the Nazi theory that Jews, slavs and other non-Aryan peoples were Untermenschen—'Underhumans' or 'Subhumans' (cf. Cic. prov. cons. 10 on Jews & Syrians; Livy 36.17.5 includes Asian Greeks too). This theory emerged afresh in the cotton states of the American South in the 18th-19th centuries, when a slave-owner called George Fitzhugh wrote a pamphlet in which he remarked 'Some men are born with saddles on their backs, and others born to ride them'. Even the advent of Christianity did little to change this way of thinking in the ancient world.

Slavery went back a long way at Rome. Two pieces of evidence show how far:
(a) Servius Tullius is said in 516 BC to have made laws about manumission (on which see below);
(b) slaves are mentioned in the XII Tables, the earliest document of Roman law we possess—mid 5th century BC.
Romans recognised that slavery meant the absence of political rights. As Cicero said (Caec. 96):
We have inherited the same tradition with regard to both freedom and citizenship, and if once it is possible to take away citizenship, it is impossible to preserve freedom.
To put it another way: being a free man & being a citizen were one & the same thing. This is slightly modified by the position of liberti ('freedmen' or 'ex-slaves'), about which more later. Essentially, however, this is right. Now since the distinction between slave & free is established by the rules that determine who is actually full member of the citizen community & who is not, it means in turn that Rome was fundamentally a slave society, & not merely a society in which there happen to be slaves. As in Athens, slavery was crucial, by exclusive definition, to the status & rights of citizens. Poorer free Romans probably thought much the same, & could perhaps more easily endure their own hardships because they could console themselves with the thought that they were at least better off in terms of status (if not always in terms of material standard of living) than their slave neighbours.
In short: Romans did not think much about slavery, & certainly did not question it; when they did, they tended to think that if you were a slave, that was just tough—or even your own fault.

1. Sources. Threre were three main sources of slaves:
(a) prisoners captured in war;
(b) persons captured by pirates or brigands & sold into slavery;
(c) vernae, i.e. 'home-grown' slaves brought up in the slave quarters of private houses.

(a) Prisoners of War. From roughly 200 to AD 9 Rome was almost continually at war somewhere on the frontiers of her existing territory. Usually, males of military age were killed when Romans captured a city or won a battle. Women & children were regularly raped then as a rule enslaved & sold. We hear some frightful statistics. E.g.:
(i) Polybius & Livy report that after the sack of Epirus in n-w Greece in 167, 150,000 persons were carried off into slavery;
(ii) Livy (again) tells us that 140,000 Cimbri & Teutones were enslaved by Marius in 102;
(iii) Plutarch (Caes. 15) claims that Caesar's 9-year Gallic wars produced 1,000,000 prisoners, who will have been enslaved wholesale—among other things to pay the troops.
These individual figures are probably exaggerated, since Romans always tended to give high estimates of their 'achievements' in war. But two further points suggest that during this century-&-a-half period, continual warfare produced a steady supply of slaves:
(i) Apart from these exceptional figures, we hear of numerous smaller atrocities involving wholesale enslavements—for an idea of this, glance at A. J. Toynbee, Hannibal's Legacy, vol. ii pp. 168ff. (xeroxed Annex);
(ii) the evidence for the growth of the Italian latifundia in the 2nd cent. BC (i.e. large private estates like the cotton-ranches of the American South, with hordes of slaves as labourers—see below, Part V) implies a constant demand for slaves, which no historian believes could have been met without foreign conquests & consequent enslavements.
(b) Piracy/brigandage. Piracy was a constant problem. Until 167 BC the people of Rhodes (a large island in the south-eastern Aegean) had more or less policed the eastern Mediterranean. But in that year the Romans destroyed the Rhodian fleet, & thereafter, for most of the 2nd cent., either could not care less, or gave positive encouragement to the pirates, whose activities provided them with a plentiful supply of cheap slaves. The government only began to take an interest in the problem later, when members of their own class began to be endangered. (The problem continued even after Pompey's mainly successful campaign against the pirates in 67). Cicero again (leg. Man. 31ff.):
Who sailed the seas without exposing himself to the risk either of death or of slavery...? ...from Misenum the children of the very man [M. Antonius, cos. 99 BC—LGHH] who had made war against the pirates were captured.
So too the historian Appian (BC 12.93), referring to the same period (around 100 BC):
The pirates attacked the very coast of Italy, seized & carried off some women of noble families, as well as two praetors with their insignia of office.
The cheek of it. Now Appian describes Pompey's campaign (BC 12.96):
His fame & preparations produced a panic among the pirates...they gave up a great quantity of arms...also their ships....and finally a multitude of captives either held for ransom or chained to their tasks...many of them [once liberated by Pompey—LGHH] found at home their own cenotaphs, for they were supposed to be dead.
Cicero can claim that Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily, on capturing a pirate vessel (Verr. 2.5.63f.)...
...gave his Sicilian & Roman friends those of the prisoners who were young & had been taught a skill or trade [i.e. those who would be particularly valuable—LGHH].
Remember too the story in Suetonius (Jul. 4) & Plutarch (Caes. 1f.) of Caesar's capture by pirates ca. 80 BC, & his ransom for 50 talents (not chickenfeed). Less eminent people captured by pirates, however, will have been sold as slaves since they & their families will not have been able to pay enough ransom to make it worth collecting. It is not surprising that we hear of 'tens of thousands' of slaves changing hands in one day during the late R. p. at a market on the Greek island of Delos (from the generally responsible geographer Strabo, 14.5.2).
(c) Home-bred slaves (vernae). Plenty of evidence exists for home-breeding of slaves, in:
(i) the agronomists—i.e. agricultural writers such as Cato, Varro & Columella, whose books are manuals of estate management. These works contain recommendations about the use & treatment of slaves in farming, with a view to getting the best work from them & hence the highest revenue;
(ii) Roman legal sources such as the Digest, which discuss questions about the legal status of freedmen, sexual liaisons between free persons & slaves &c.
The evidence is too plentiful to cite or quote all of it. I must therefore be selective, & present only a few passages, together with a summary of the main points.
Appian, writing of the middle R. p. (BC 12.7):
Ownership of slaves brought the rich great profit from the numerous children of the slaves, whose number increased without hindrance because they were exempt from military service.
Varro (RR 1.17.5, written in 36 BC):
The foremen are to be made more zealous by rewards, & care must be taken that they have a bit of property of their own, & mates from among their fellow-slaves to bear them children: for by this means they are made more steady & more attached to the place. Thus it is on account of such relationships that the slave families of Epirus have the best reputation & fetch the highest prices.
Cicero's friend Atticus is said by his biographer Cornelius Nepos to have had not a single slave who was not born & trained in his own house (Att. 13.3f.), but since this is thought to be worth mentioning, it was probably unusual.
Columella, finally, recommends in his book (1st cent.AD) giving rewards to female slaves who bear children. He himself exempted them from work if they have borne three, & freed them altogether if they bore four or more (RR 1.8.19).
Children born to slave women might then be the offspring of unions between slaves of the kind recommended by Varro. One must remember also, however, that no female slave could normally refuse sexual intercourse with her master or other free males of the household. Such unions will sometimes have resulted in conception, even if (as we learn from the Digest) a master could force the slave woman to take abortion-inducing drugs.
The crucial points are:
(a) home-breeding of slaves was known, but not common, in the Greek world: instead, Greeks' slaves were imported foreigners, victims of war or brigandage;
(b) this was largely true in the Roman world too, until towards the end of the R. p.;
(c) some increase in the proportion of home-bred slaves (as opposed to imports) seems to have taken place with the growth of the latifundia in the 2nd cent. BC;
(d) foreign wars of conquest sill provided Romans with a majority of their slaves in the 1st cent. BC; BUT...
(e) the suppression of piracy by Pompey will have diminished somewhat the supply of foreign slaves;
(f) stabilisation of the frontiers of the Roman empire in & after the principate of Augustus will have reduced the numbers of prisoners of war who would enter the Roman world as slaves;
(g) the proportion of home-bred slaves probably therefore grew significantly.

Slave populations are hard to estimate, because:
(a) all ancient 'statistics' are unreliable—& no-one could ever do a head-count at any time, even if they had wanted to;
(b) slaves were by definition excluded from Roman census-figures, which of course only applied to free citizens;
(c) figures preserved in literary texts are notoriously liable to corruption in transmission—i.e. to being miscopied from one manuscript to another;
(d) the evidence we possess about individual estates relates exclusively to a tiny upper-class minority, all of whom owned slaves, some in very large numbers, but who can tell us little of the 'average', 'medium-sized, property-holding;
(e) slave numbers are only mentioned in exceptional circumstances, when for example a single individual owns an unusually large number, for instance, or when a particularly spectaular number of prisoners are captured after a battle (cf. e.g. Sen. de clem. 24.1).
Nevertheless, Prof. Brunt (Italian Manpower (1987 repr.) 124, with addendum at 702f.) guesses that in the mid-1st century BC slaves accounted for up to 3,000,000 of a total Italian population of ca. 7,500,000, an 'extraordinarily high ratio' of slaves to free people. Some individual figures are worth mentioning, for we can at least say a little about the numbers of slaves owned by people in the wealthiest sector of Roman society.
(a) Livy & Appian record that 100,000 slaves were killed in the course of the revolt of Spartacus (73-71 BC) & the mopping-up operations afterwards;
(b) in the 1st cent. AD, a lady of equestrian family, Aemilia Pudentilla, who was not especially rich, owned 400 agricultural slaves (Apul. Apol. 77, 93);
(c) Pliny the Younger (late 1st/early 2nd cent. AD) provided in his will for the maintenance of 100 freedmen. This was only possible in Roman law for someone who owned more than 500 slaves altogether (cf. W. W. Buckland, Textbook of Roman Law, 78 & n. 2).
It is safe to say that rich Romans, with large farming estates &, in the city, posh houses, will often have had slave retinues of several hundred. Since it was not uncommon for individuals of Pliny's class & wealth—comparable with Cicero's in our period—to have several landed estates, an expensive town house or three, & possibly commercial interests too (in banks, 'factories', or public works), you can assume that the figures offered by the sources for Pliny & Aemilia Pudentilla are not too unrepresentative.
The satirical writer Petronius (reign of Nero, AD 54-68) suggests that the imaginary vulgar freedman Trimalchio could have 30 boys & 40 girls, all slaves, born on a single day on his estate at Cumae (Satyr. 53), but this is plainly a comic exaggeration, & it is unlikely that any Roman could ever make such a boast as this.

For the most part slaves were astonishingly cheap. The monstrous emperor Heliogabalus paid HS 100,000 for a prostitute in the early 3rd cent. AD (HA Elag. 31.1), & we hear of a price of HS 700,000 for a grammaticus (i.e. an educated scribe-cum-tutor) in the time of the Elder Pliny (NH 7.128). These figures, however, are quite exceptional, like the prices paid for successful racehorses in comparison with those for a pit-pony. Prices of HS 1,000 & below are widely attested for ordinary labourers, at least by the 2nd cent. AD, putting them well within the range of what an ordinary legionary soldier could afford on discharge; & a few thousands more would be a flea-bite for a Roman in your period of equestrian standing, who would probably own at any rate some dozens. We have to assume that most free Romans would at least hope to acquire a slave or two, & if they could they would—it represented an expense much nearer (in modern terms) to buying a car than to buying a house—& prices seem to have varied as much—compare the cost of a few hundred for a 2nd-hand runabout with the £100,000+ you would need for a Rolls with all the trimmings.

Here we cannot generalise. On one hand a slave might be or become a tried & trusted assistant, confidante, even in a sense a friend, of his master—& in the process earn his manumission. A good example is Cicero's slave Tiro, who not only acted as his secretary, took copies of his letters & eventually profited—one hopes—from their publication, but was a domestic steward as well (fam. 16.22.1 for him organising a dinner party. He was manumitted for his loyal service, becoming thereby M. Tullius Tiro, a Roman citizen. As evidence for the relations between the two men, here is Cicero writing to Tiro (fam. 16.4.3):
Countless have been your services to me—at home, in my legal activity, at Rome and in the provinces, in private life and public affairs, in my literary and intellectual pursuits...
And on the occasion (about 53 BC) of Tiro's manumission, Q. Cicero wrote to congratulate his brother on having lost a slave, but gained a friend for the family—fam. 16.16.2.
On the other hand we hear quite frequently of cruel masters: the generally humane Cicero was extremely keen to inflict dire punishment on a runaway called Dionysius, who had stolen some of his books: (fam. 13.77.3). And there is no doubt that the living & working conditions of the slaves who followed Spartacus were unspeakably awful. In between would fall various degrees of comfort & hardship. As examples:
(a) In Roman comedy a stock figure appears, the clever slave who knows how best to organise his young master's love-life—a Jeeves-type character, though earthier & more cunning than Jeeves;
(b) Pliny (Ep. 3.14 = GRS 209) tells us of a particularly savage master called Larcius Macedo, who was done to death by his slaves (whom Pliny, of course, thinks should be executed)—but, surprisingly in view of his treatment of them, some of them remained loyal & tried to help Macedo to recover.
The condition of slaves would not only vary from one master to another: a trusted household slave in a comfortable house with perhaps his own slave 'wife' & a reasonably kind master in Rome would enjoy a much higher standard of living than the members of chain-gangs working the fields under an estate-manager for an absentee landlord.
On this, Columella is instructive. This (RR 1.8) needs quotation at length:
The overseer..., in the care & clothing of the slave household, should have an eye to usefulness rather than appearance, taking care to keep them fortified against wind, cold & rain with long-sleeved leather tunics, garments of patchwork or hooded cloaks. If this is done, no weather is so intolerable that work cannot continue out of doors...
In the case of the other slaves, the following precepts are to be observed—I do not regret having held to them myself. Talk rather familiarly with the country slaves, provided that they have not misbehaved, & more often than with town slaves. When I saw that their unending toil was lightened by such friendliness on their master's part, I would even joke with them sometimes & also allow them to joke quite freely... Nowadays I generally take them into consultation on any new work, as they are more experienced, & I thereby discover how intelligent each of them is. Furthermore...they are more willing to set about a task on which they feel that their opinions have been asked & their advice followed. Careful men also visit the slaves in the prison, to establish that they have been properly chained, & to check that the place of confinement is secure...The housholder's investigation should be quite painstaking in the interest of slaves in this position, so that they may not be unjustly treated in the matter of clothing & rations; for as they are subject to a greater number of overseers, taskmasters & jailers, they are more liable to unjust punishment, and, when smarting under cruelty or greed, they are more to be feared...Also, a sensible master will give them frequent opportunities for making complaints against those who have treated them cruelly or dishonestly. Now & then I avenge those who have just cause for grievance, as well as punishing those who incite the slaves to revolt or who are rude to their taskmasters; on the other hand I reward those who work energetically & diligently...

Several interesting points emerge. In Columella's favour:
(a) he is concerned that his slaves should be adequately protected against the weather when they are outdoors;
(b) he is willing to talk in a friendly, eve a familiar, way with them sometimes;
(c) He bows to their advice sometimes on aspects of their work;
(d) he has a sense of justice, & is concerned that his foremen should not treat his slaves more severely than they deserve;
(e) he punishes foremen who treat the slaves unreasonably (sometimes);
(f) he rewards slaves who do their jobs well.
On the other hand:
(a) his friendliness with the slaves & strictness with the foremen is designed to extract the best possible results from his slaves' work;
(b) his concern that they should be properly clothed in bad weather arises from his wish to ensure that they are at work in all weathers;
(c) he recognises that the foremen are apt to behave unjustly to the men under them, but he cannot or does not always prevent this from happening;
(d) his estate has its own private prison, where slaves are kept in chains (such prisons were common on landed estates);
(e) he is aware that the slaves may mutiny if he does not take precautions.

1. Roman law offered, to begin with, no protection whatever to slaves from abuse by their masters, & treated rebellious slaves very severely. A striking illustration comes from AD 60, described for us by Tacitus (Ann. 14.42, written in the early 2nd cent. AD):
One of his own slaves murdered the Prefect of the City, Pedanius Secundus...according to ancient custom the whole slave household was to be led to execution...a sudden massing of the populace, bent on protecting so many innocent lives, brought matters to the point of civil disturbance, & the Senate was besieged. In the Senate itself there was a strong feeling on the part of some who were against excessive severity, but most felt that no change should be made. One of these, C. Cassius [a descendant of the tyrannicide—LGHH] argued as follows.
And Cassius' argument tells us a lot: here it is:
An ex-consul has been murdered in his own home by a slave's treachery, which no-one reported...Whom will rank protect, when it failed to protect the Prefect of the City? Whom will a large number of slaves protect, when four hundred [a typical figure for the city establishment of a rich man—see above—LGHH] failed to keep Pedanius Secundus safe? Many clues precede a crime: if our slaves report these, we may live on our own amid numbers, safe amid an insecure throng. And if perish we must, then at least it will not be unavenged on the guilty. To our ancestors, the temper of their slaves was always suspect, even if they were born on the same farm or under the same roof, & thereby acquired affection for their masters. But now that we have in our households foreigners with customs different from our own, with alien religious traditions or none at all, you will not restrain such a mottley rabble save by fear. But, it will be objected, innocent lives will be lost. Well, when every tenth man of a routed army is felled by the club, the lot falls on the brave also. In every wholesale punishment there is some injustice to individuals, which is compensated by advantage to the state.
Ann. 14.43 (For 'advantage to the state', read 'advantage to those of us who own numerous slaves & rule the state').
From this episode we learn two things. First, that Roman tradition demanded that if a single slave murdered his master, all the others would be executed as well.

Secondly, from Cassius' speech in particular, we gather that masters & slaves were generally assumed to live on terms of mutual distrust, suspicion & fear. This cannot have been always & everywhere the case—but that it was believed to be is borne out by the proverbial doctrine 'quot servi, tot hostes'—'You have as many enemies as you have slaves'.

In the sequel, incidentally, despite the protests of the poorer free Romans who had gathered outside the Senate-house, on Nero's orders the troops imposed a curfew while the slaves, including women & children, were indeed executed.

2. Some modifications & improvements took place in the living & working conditions of slaves during the first centuries BC & AD thanks to the spread of the philosophy of Stoicism. Stoic doctrine preached a concept of the 'brotherhood of man', regardless of social status (though without ever advocating that existing class distinctions should be eliminated: the equality of human beings in Stoicism was only at a highly theoretical level). In other words, if you were a Stoic you recognised that your slave was a human being, & held it to be purely accidental that you were made different socially, and you could have found yourself with your roles reversed. This did not mean that you had a duty to try to change things, only that you should not treat your slaves too badly.

Seneca (contemporary & political agent of Nero, AD 54-68) was an eminent Stoic philosopher who wrote, among other things, Moral Epistles—sermons, if you like—including one too long to quote here arguing against the proverb 'quot servi, tot hostes'. He said your slave does not have to be your enemy, provided that in certain respects you treat him reasonably, remembering that your social situations might just as well have been the other way around.
Likewise the younger Pliny (not a devotee of Stoicism, but influenced by the general moral climate) can remark with some disapproval in connexion with the killing of Macedo that he had been a notably cruel master—though going on to say that of course the culprits must be severely punished as a deterrent to others.
The spread of Stoicism—a philosophical code that had some similar beliefs to Christianity, notably in the fundamental equivalence of all human beings, and which gained many adherents in the early Roman empire, had some beneficial effects, as far as the treatment of some individual slaves is concerned; but we must always remember that men like Seneca would not have felt the need to write their attacks on the cruelty of some people towards their slaves if they did not behave badly towards them in the first place.

3. Partly through the impact of Stoical thought, partly because of aristocrats' fears of plebeian unrest in episodes such as the murder of Pedanius Secundus, a number of laws were introduced in the century & a half from the beginning of the Empire, which protected slaves from excessively severe treatment:
(a) A 1st-century law prescribed that only slaves condemned by a court could be sent into the arena to fight (& die) as gladiators;
(b) The emperor Claudius (37-54) forbade masters to kill or discard sick slaves;
(c) Vespasian (69-79) forbade the sale of slaves for use as prostitutes;
(d) Domitian (81-96) outlawed castration of slaves for commercial purposes;
(e) Hadrian (117-138) outlawed private slave-prisons, like Columella's, and the killing of a slave without a hearing before a court;
(f) Antoninus Pius (138-161) made the killer of a slave liable for homicide and provided other forms of protection against cruelty & personal abuse (Justinian, Institutes 1.8.2). It should be remembered, however, that no legislator, ancient or modern, ever seeks to prohibit things that are not in fact quite common. So while on the one hand these laws were a good & humane development, they would not have been necessary had not the behaviour they penalise been constantly going on; and it is a moot question how effectively these beneficial laws were actually enforced, since slaves (especially dead slaves) remained completely powerless to bring their offending masters to book before the courts.
But we end this section on a lighter & more optimistic note. This is the text of a tombstone inscription near Philippi in Macedonia (CIL III.14, 206 = ILS 7,479):
Here lies Vitalis, freedman of C. Lavius Faustus and also his son, a slave born in his own home. He lived sixteen years as a clerk at the Aprian shop, was popular with the public, but snatched away by the gods. I beg your pardon, passers-by, if ever I gave short measure to make more profit for my father. I beg you by the gods above and below to take good care of my father and mother.
Here we encounter slavery at its least repulsive. The epitaph commemorates a young man, either the illegitimate son of his master, or perhaps just a favoured boy slave born in the household, whose close relationship with his master led to his manumission & adoption by him as his legal heir. This may reflect the natural enough desire of a childless couple to adopt a slave-child as their own, & the bonds of affection shown here would be similar to those between adoptive parents & their adoptees in the modern world. It is sad that such close ties of affection between free persons & their slaves seem to be rather rare in our evidence, but heartening to know that they were possible.

You have of course heard of Spartacus, & probably seen the Stanley Kubrick film. This was only one of several large-scale uprisings during the last two centuries of the R. p. Athenaeus, writing about AD 200, says (6.272f.):
There were many of these revolts, and more than a million slaves were killed in them.
'Many' here may be an exaggeration, but this emphasizes that relations between masters & slaves were usually testy at the best of times, &, apart from the three big episodes mentioned below, there is good evidence for a lot of smaller revolts.
Slaves would not have rebelled, of course, if their living- & working-conditions had not been dreadful, for on the whole life on the run was even worse than life as a member of an established household or estate, which would at least provide you with some sort of living & security, a roof over your head, clothing &c.—& if you were lucky enough to have a reasonably decent master, even a degree of comfort, even if you had no rights.

There were three major slave risings. These were:
(a) The Great Slave War, which erupted in Sicily from 134-131 BC. As many as 70,000 slaves downed tools on the latifundia, & caused the Romans to mount a major military offensive against them. This provoked 'copy-cat' rebellions in other parts of the empire, of which the most important & (for the Romans) dangerous was the revolt of Aristonicus at Pergamum in Asia Minor. The Romans retaliated with everything they had, & completely crushed the rebels.
(b) The Second Sicilian Slave Rebellion, from 104-100 BC, was clearly serious because of the length of time it took the Romans to deal with it. But there is a good deal less evidence about it, perhaps because the Romans were by then already involved in other hostilities & in major internal political turmoil, with the result that they could not present such a united front as they had thirty years before. It shows, however, that the grievances felt in the previous rebellion were still there.
(c) The revolt of Spartacus. Spartacus himself was a gladiator, who with others of his 'profession' started the major rebellion among the unfree population of southern Italy of 73-71. He was especially difficult for the Romans to deal with because (i) he had a very large number of followers; (ii) the Romans were badly divided among themselves politically, & could not agree on an effective strategy to deal with the challenge; (iii) Spartacus was able to mobilise support all over the Italian peninsula. He was eventually crushed by Crassus (with help from Pompey), & no fewer than 100,000 slaves are said to have perished in the fighting. 6,000 were taken prisoner & crucified along the Appian Way as a deterrent to others.

Ill-treatment was obviously one reason for these revolts. They need also, however, to be explained in the context of a major change in the economic structure of land-holding & agriculture in Italy & Sicily in the 2nd century BC. It is very important that you understand this development.
The traditional ideal of the free Roman was to be a small, independent freeholder, owning & farming just enough of his own land to support himself & his dependants, including perhaps a handful of slaves: a few acres of arable land & orchards or vineyards supplied the grain, the fruit and the grapes, & he would leave a portion to be grazed on by an ox or two, perhaps some sheep or goats, & he would keep chickens, pigs &c. in his back yard for his eggs & occasional Sunday joint. He hoped to be self-sufficient, but little more.
One result of the Punic Wars (3rd century BC), in which Rome emerged as the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, was that richer Romans began to see that they could use their land not only to support themselves, their families & their personal slaves, but actually to make money. The Punic Wars also had an inflationary impact on prices for commodities, since they brought large quantities of gold & silver into Italy, but without significantly increasing the agricultural productivity of the land—& as any economist will tell you, the laws of supply & demand mean that more money chasing the same amount of goods = price inflation. Prisoners taken in these Wars also greatly increased the availability of cheap slave labour. Among the citizens the lucky few now bought up ever larger estates (or called in their debts from poorer neighbours forced to borrow in bad years, thus often taking possession of their land). It became feasible now to have the land economically worked by increasingly large armies of slaves, now cheaply available & less costly to employ than free agricultural labourers, engaged in 'cash-cropping'. The unlucky many found the land too expensive to buy, or were forced off it by their rich neighbours (who could always use thugs to expel them).
So the rich got richer & the poor poorer. Those who could afford to buy large numbers of slaves & seize the land did so, while those who could not were squeezed out. As a result:
(a) instead of the land in Italy being divided up into a large number of small property-units owned by small-scale independent peasants, it became divided up into a smaller number of large 'ranches' (latifundia);
(b) the poor dispossessed became a political problem (cf. demands for land-distributions in your period); many, with no future in their home villages, migrated to Rome in the futile hope of making a living there, swelling the number of the urban plebs;
(c) the owners of these latifundia began importing even more slaves to farm their lands, in place of the handfuls traditionally employed by small independent producers—so in Italy as a whole the total number of mouths to be fed grew;
(d) by the time our period begins there were tens if not hundreds of thousands of these agricultural slaves on these latifundia, who hardly ever saw their masters, & could not therefore develop a sense of personal attachment or responsibility to them: all they saw was the foreman who told them what to do & punished them when they failed to do it. This was a fertile ground for the seeds of resentment.
In short: during the second century, the pattern of land-tenure changed, creating with it certain major social tensions & problems. Pliny the Elder wrote:
The latifundia have ruined Italy.
He may have been thinking only of the social problems created by the existence of large numbers of resentful slaves, who had no reason not to rebel if they saw half a chance; but if he also meant to imply that the consequences of the development of the latifundia for the poor free population were potentially disastrous for the political stability of the Roman world, he would have been right, as so much of what happens in your period shows.
As regards the slave revolts, the question is not so much why they took place, but why they did not happen more often. Two answers can be given:
(a) It was difficult for slaves who did not always speak the same language as one another to communicate & co-operate for the purpose of organising themselves into an effective fighting force, competent to face disciplined & determined Roman troops;
(b) Hard though a slave's life usually was, it was at least some sort of living, & as a rule less dreadful than the prospects of life on the run. And as we shall see, there were some ways in which a slave could hope for improvements in his lot, as in the case of Vitalis (mentioned above).

manu = 'from the hand'; missio = 'release' (manus is an important concept in Roman law, meaning something half-way between 'ownership' & 'guardianship'. It has implications not only for master-slave relations, but also for those between a head of household & his womenfolk, children &c., as we shall see when we consider the structure of the Roman household & the legal position of women.)

To manumit a slave is to give him his freedom. This was a much commoner practice in Roman than it ever was in Greek society. Down to Augustus' time, manumission automatically conferred Roman citizenship on the ex-slave, & he would then be registered in one of the tribes (with the tria nomina), as a rule taking his praenomen & gentilicium from his master. A slave called, say, 'Thrax', freed by a master called 'C. Aelius Rufus' becomes thereby 'C. Aelius Thrax'. The only restrictions that applied in the R. p. to these 'freedmen' (liberti) were that they were not eligible to hold office—but their free-born sons could do so (this did not, of course, apply to females—though it appears that women slaves were often freed too)—& that they carried with them to the ends of their lives some legal obligations to their former masters. Persons of slave origin or ancestry are described as libertini ('libertines'). It is revealing that in the mid first century AD, a Senator can point out in the debate over the murder of Pedanius Secundus that 'many' Senators were of libertine origins, i.e. descended from people who had once been slaves—this attests what historians & sociologists call 'social mobility' within the Roman world (see also Pliny, NH 33.8).

There were three main procedures by which a master could free a slave:
(a) 'testamentary' manumission (i.e. by the terms of his will)
(b) the vindicta-ceremony
(c) private declarations
(a) A master could provide in his will for (a) slave(s) to be granted their freedom. This became extremely common, as we shall see shortly.
(b) This was an ancient ritual involving a mock lawsuit before a magistrate & witnesses: after a ritual blow from the master with the vindicta (a cane or stick) symbolizing the slave's last corporal punishment, the magistrate declared his future immunity from such indignities & with it his freedom;
(c) A master could simply inform a slave that he was free, by word of mouth in front of witnesses or by writing a letter, which would be admissible as evidence in court. This method would not, however, automatically confer citizenship on the ex-slave, for it would amount simply to a private arrangement between them, according to which the master now claims only to be able to demand the services from his ex-slave which freedmen would normally expect to have to perform.

Why did masters free slaves? Sometimes simply as a reward for loyal service (cf. Augustine, Sermons 21.6). Manumission might also spare masters the costs of having to support them (especially if they had outlived their productive capacity, cf. Dio 60.29); besides which freedmen who became citizens qualified for the corn-dole (cf. Suet. Aug. 40; Rickman, Corn Supply 170ff.), so this too could spare a master money, while still ensuring that the masters in question had some of the benefits of their freedmen's labour, since often they will have been set up in small businesses by their masters, in return for a share of the profits or rents on the property where the business was transacted &c. Freedmen in any case still had certain specific duties to work for their masters who had freed them. Since moreover freedmen also became automatically clientes of their masters, they could swell his personal retinue (& hence his public profile) in Rome itself, & be useful lobby-fodder for elections &c. (cf. Balsdon, Romans & Aliens 86, on a measure of Sulla's to stem this practice). Where testamentary manumission is concerned, it could be designed to relieve the heirs of the costs of maintaining large slave households for which they had no need, while at the same time swelling the numbers of mourners at funerals—another measure of an individual's personal importance.

Briefly: the number of persons of libertine stock in Rome & Italy in Augustus' time had assumed alarming proportions, & Augustus had several laws enacted, affecting the rights of masters & freedmen (/-women), & the procedures by which slaves could be manumitted (cf. RG 8.5: ''By new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors which were disappearing in our time'). Notably:
(a) Under the lex Junia (17 BC) freedmen no longer became citizens automatically, but had only 'Latin' rights, a form of half-citizenship entitling them to vote, but not to hold office, nor to claim all the protections of the civil law; & only manumissions by the formal ceremony of the vindicta (the 'rod') or by will were legally recognised.
(b) the lex Fufia Caninia (2 BC), limiting the numbers of slaves who could be freed by testament, particularly with reference to larger slave households (GRS 5, 43-6):
A person who has more than two but not more than ten slaves is permitted to manumit half of them. A person who has more than ten but not more than thirty slaves is permitted to manumit one third of them. A person who has more than thirty but not more than one hundred may manumit...one fourth. Finally, a person who has more than one hundred but not more than five hundred may manumit not more than one fifth...No-one may manumit more than one hundred...If anyone has only one or two slaves, he is not affected by this law, and may manumit as many as he likes.
(c) the lex Aelia Sentia (AD 4). Here are some of its provisions (legal sources, quoted by L/R II, 12, pp. 54f.):
Under the law, a master under twenty years of age is not permitted to manumit a slave in any other manner except by the rod after proof of adequate cause for manumission before a council. ( The manumission councils set up by this law consisted of five senators & five equites in Rome & of twenty citizens in the provinces, chosen by the magistrate who presided at the hearings.': L/R II p. 54 n.156.)

This law did not allow slaves under thirty to become manumitted Roman citizens in any other way than through emancipation by the rod, after proof of adequate cause for manumission before a council.
The same law provides that a slave under thirty years who has been manumitted by the rod shall not become a Roman citizen unless cause has been proven before a council...but it stipulates that a person manumitted by will is in the same status as if he were free with the consent of the master, & therefore he becomes a Latin.
In accordance with the Aelian-Sentian Law, anyone under thirty who has been manumitted & has become a Latin, if he marries either a Roman citizen or a Latin colonist or a woman of the same status as himself, & so attests with not less than seven adult Roman citizens as witnesses, & begets a child, when this child reaches the age of one the right is granted him by this law to come before a praetor, or in the provinces the provincial governor, & prove that, in accordance with the Aelian-Sentian Law, he has married & has a one-year-old child from this marriage; & if the one before whom the case is proven finds that this is so, then the Latin himself & his wife, if she also is of the same status, are ordained to be Roman citizens.
This law then introduced further restrictions, particularly against younger masters using private declarations, & against younger slaves being manumitted by will; it also abolished the automatic rights of freedmen to citizen-status unless they were manumitted by the rod: apart from the categories specified above, they now became peregrini dedicitii, permanently debarred from Roman citizenship & obliged to live at least 100 miles from Rome (Digest, quoted by GRS 5, 13, 18, 29, 31, 37, 40 &c.).

What lay behind these measures?

(1) The slave- & libertine population of Rome & Italy was already numerous before the end of the second century BC, because of (among other things) a huge influx of foreign prisoners taken & enslaved in Rome's wars of conquest in the late third & first half of the second century. Brunt estimates (Italian Manpower 67) that of a total free population of about 1,000,000-2,000,000 in Italy in the decades from 85-49 BC, 500,000 may have been freedmen; and (IM 102) that in Rome itself, up to three quarters of the population, say 700,000, may have been composed of freedmen & their families. Of these, the vast majority will have been of foreign descent, or of mixed foreign/Italian blood; & at least in Rome & the south of Italy, the main language of communication between them & their masters will have been Greek, since this was the lingua franca of the eastern half of the Empire, & therefore nearly everyone's second language, even if their mother-tongue was Egyptian, Syriac, or Phoenician. The wars of Pompey vs. Mithridates & Caesar in Gaul will have added considerably to the slave-population; & in due course many of these too, or their children, will have become freedmen & -women. Since we also know that the citizen-population of the city of Rome was not reproducing itself, it is an obvious assumption that if the population as a whole was stable or growing, then the proportion of those of servile origins was growing steadily during our period.

(2) Two literary texts now become highly significant. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (a Greek historian who lived in Rome from 30 BC onwards & wrote a history called Roman Antiquities which began to appear in 7 BC) has this to say:
Things have come to such a state of confusion, & the noble traditions of the Roman commonwealth have become so debased and sullied, that some who have made a fortune by robbery, housebreaking, prostitution & every other means, purchase their freedom with the money so acquired & straightaway are Romans. Others, who have been confidants & accomplices of their masters in poisonings, murders & crimes against the gods or the state, receive from them this reward. Some are freed so that they can receive the monthly allowance of grain issued at public expense, or any other largesse distributed by the leading men to the poor among the citizens, & bring it to those who have granted them their freedom. And others owe their freedom to the levity of their masters & to their vain thirst for popularity. I, at any rate, know of some men who have allowed all their slaves to be freed after their deaths, so that they might be attended by a throng of mourners...
Such disgraces should not be allowed into the body politic. I should like to see the censors take this matter in hand, inquiring of those freed each year who they are & why & how they were freed... After which they should enrol in the tribes [i.e., in the citizen voting-registers] such of them as they find worthy of citizenship, but should expel from the city the foul & corrupt herd.
AR 4.24.4-8 = L/R II 12, p. 53
Secondly, Juvenal was a writer of social satire in the early second century BC. His Satire 3 is a diatribe against all the unpleasant features of life in the city of Rome, including a section lamenting the abominable influx of Greeks & orientals—'the Tiber's pure waters stained with the polluting streams of the Syrian Orontes', as he puts it. 'I cannot stand a Greek city' (Sat. 3.58ff. = L/R II 59, p. 239).
Dionysius' remarks are one-sided & exaggerated, & Juvenal's are intended as comic. From them nevertheless emerges a clear impression that from the point of view of the free-born, especially from that of the free-born native Roman, the hordes of slaves & freedmen of foreign origin who seemed to dominate the city's population in & after Augustus' time were distinctly unwelcome. It is relevant that Suetonius tells us that Augustus himself was keen 'not to let the native Roman stock be tainted with foreign or servile blood, and was therefore very unwilling to create new Roman citizens, or to permit the manumission of more than a limited number of slaves' (Aug. 40).

(3) Why were the numbers of freedmen so growing? Dionysius' remarks are telling: even if we leave aside (as we probably should) his vitriol about thieves, prostitutes &c., he has distinguished, or at least hinted at, three serious reasons:
(a) Masters freeing their slaves in order to claim the corn-dole & other hand-outs due to citizens (cf. Suet. Aug. 42)—they presumably did this not because they wanted the dole for themselves but because their dependants were then partially fed at state expense;
(b) Masters freeing their slaves 'in a vain thirst for popularity': public men at Rome measured their own status & importance partly by the numbers of clientes & other hangers-on they could rely on to attend them in public, or call on to vote for them at election-time—freeing slaves was an easy & cheap way of enlarging your following;
(c) Mass-manumissions of slave households by the terms of masters' wills (testamentary manumission) had become exceedingly common—not necessarily for the reason Dionysius gives, to swell the numbers of mourners (though it would be wrong to think that Romans did not take funeral ceremonies very seriously indeed), but to show off one's generosity at no cost to oneself, & possibly sometimes to spare the legitimate heirs the trouble & expense of maintaining or disposing of large slave establishments.
To this we should add the common procedure of informal manumissions—essentially a purely private arrangement between masters & slaves, under which the slave did not receive citizenship or legal status, but nevertheless swelled the numbers of those not directly under a master's control.

(4) Suetonius makes clear (Aug. 40, cf. 42) that the number of citizens claiming the corn-dole & other hand-outs was a problem for Augustus, as it had been for Caesar, particularly in times of shortage.

The fact remains, however, that freedmen/freedwomen were there to stay in Roman society, an integral part of its make-up virtually until slavery itself was abolished under the Christian emperors of the 4th-5th centuries AD.
{Manumission (unusually common in Roman society) a safety-valve or ventilator; and Augustus' efforts to control it and its effects were, so far as the effects were concerned, 'viel zu spät'—Christ. Importance of freedmen's economic activity: 'neben den Rittern, [die Freigelassenen] zu den wirtschaftlich aktivsten Kräften des Imperiums zählten' (Christ, Caesar 21) [a fallacy? 'Most active as independent agents' maybe, though this may be to under-rate the importance of the tenant-farmer or the citizen shopkeeper in Rome.] Cicero wrote to Tiro (who was not only Cicero's amanuensis—fam. 16.22.1 for him organising a dinner party):}

In a word, it was vital. Given the state—or rather the lack of—ancient technology, the rich could not enjoy their leisure & play at politics without having armies of slaves to produce the food they ate, build their houses, maintain their households &c. (In modern terms, most of the energy that went into either productive or service 'industries' was human energy, supplied by slaves.) Slaves did every conceivable kind of productive work, in workshops & on the land, & assisting the property-owning classes in trade, banking & as personal secretaries. They were even employed as tutors, physicians, accountants & in other occupations that would count as 'professions' today.

Slaves even had a measure of political influence, though this was indirect, since:
(a) property-owners (i.e. slave-owners) constantly had to worry about the loyalty of their slaves, & this influenced their own political decisions at times;
(b) the growth of the latifundia in the second century was perhaps the chief single cause of the entire Roman revolution, since it led to agitation from the lower orders which populares were able to exploit (or even revolutionaries such as Catiline); & it was not until Augustus realised that Italy, & not just Rome, had to be politically settled & found ways of satisfying just enough people's demands enough of the time to bring this about, that the strictly Roman domestic political scene could be made to function without constant conflict (cf. Syme, RP I 91f.).