Slavery is bad. Strange as it might seem, this sometimes appears to be a rather unclear distinction among modern humans, but let’s not fuck around here.
Slavery is bad. Slavery has always been bad. All forms of it. Ancient slavery, modern slavery, African slavery, black slavery, white slavery, Irish slavery, pirate slavery, Vikings, barbary cut-throats, Chinese, Aztecs, ginger people, all of it.
Unless you’re into that sort of kink, and it’s entirely your business if you are, and it’s consensual, slavery is bad.
Even in The Bible.
The lives and morality of ancient people must always be contextualized with relation to modern sensibilities, but that doesn’t mean we cannot still judge those lives and morality with modern sensibilities.
What may have seemed normal to them doesn’t excuse that normality from being bad. Slavery is bad now and it was bad then. That it was more commonplace then doesn’t make it any less bad.
Even back then there were people who knew it was bad. There were slavery abolitionists in ancient Rome, too.
Neither does it mean that people back then were bad as a whole. Slavery was bad and the mass slaughter of people for entertainment in the arena was bad, but other aspects of Roman society were far more enlightened than modern people.
Racism is virtually unknown in ancient Rome, for example. Homosexuality was broadly seen normal, and the concept of gender fluidity was just seen as another aspect of the human construct.
Tough shit if you were a woman, mind you.
Just as all modern humans aren’t seen as universally bad just because some of them are homophobic, racist bigots, not all ancient people were bad because of slavery.
But slavery is bad. Racism is bad. Murder is bad. Bigotry is bad. Nazis bad. Fascists bad.
Ok? Cool. We’ve established that.
Slavery is bad, even when it was the slavery that The Bible very clearly condones.
Let’s take some of the sting out of this particular part of the conversation.
Nobody minds if you think that The Bible is evidence for the existence of God. That’s your prerogative. Nobody minds if you think it is a spiritual, theological and moral guidebook to your life. You go fucking nuts.
I don’t care what you think about the theological stance regarding the existence of God. I don’t care if you believe in God or if you don’t believe in God. I have no interest in theological debate. If I had wanted to be engaged in theological debate, I wouldn’t have studied ancient history in university and made it my life’s work, I would have studied theology instead. The theology department had a much nicer, and free, coffee machine in their office, the same access to cheap cider and, perhaps surprisingly, even more girls, making it the motherlode of university courses for degenerate young men in their twenties who wished to do something other than get a job for a living.
But I chose history instead. Specifically, early Christian iconography in the Roman empire, because it’s a fascinating subject. So, I’ve read The Bible. I use it to teach Roman history because where else do you get to see the lives of, say, Jewish Roman citizens in the 1st Century AD? I love The Bible. Some of it is plainly fucking mental, but it’s still a valuable resource for Roman history. Revelation is absolutely glorious.
And, yes, I’m an atheist.
When we say that The Bible condones slavery, which it very clearly does, the counter argument from some people tries to layer what it says with all sorts of smokescreens of context. And some of those counter claims are valid ones. Some of them are not. But none of it excuses the basic fact that slavery is fucking bad.
So, without any fist-waving about whether God exists or not, or if The Bible is ‘true’ (whatever the hell that means), or any of that other bullshit, let’s take a look at what slavery in the Roman empire means, so next time you come across this argument on the internet and the swivel-eyed loons on both sides are throwing claim and counterclaim at each other, at least then you can just look the facts.
The claim that slavery in ancient times was different to our commonly held reference point for slavery, namely African slavery in the New World, has some validity. It doesn’t, however, then mean that slavery was ever ‘voluntary’ or that people entered slavery for a contracted period of time.
Debt bondage has been around for centuries and still exists to this day. It existed in the ancient world, too. People who failed to pay a debt could, in some cases, be forced to pay off the rest of their loan via bonded servitude. The Romans had a word for it - Nexum. People are still ‘working off debts’ as we speak. A person who enters into a contract with a lender in which they will become ‘bound’ to that lender in the respect of owing some form of manual labor in exchange for that debt may be said to have entered into that bondage ‘voluntarily’ by agreeing the contract, but this is a simplistic answer.
One might also say that a person who takes out a mortgage has voluntarily agreed to become homeless at some point during the life of that mortgage but try telling that to the poor soul standing on the curb with all their belongings in a plastic bag.
Whilst someone may willingly enter into a contract that may have terrible consequences for them at some point, that’s a far cry from ‘willingly becoming a slave’ just as defaulting on your mortgage and being evicted is a far cry from ‘willingly becoming homeless’.
Even if the contract is willingly entered into, that doesn’t make it right. Slavery is slavery and slavery is bad, remember? People in this situation aren’t operating with free consent; they have been backed into a situation they would rather not be in. They are left with no choice. They might well have known that this may be the case right from the outset, but accepting the risk is not the same as consenting to the outcome of the risk.
You accept the risk when you get on a train, but that doesn’t mean you consented to being flattened to a pancake when the train hurtles off a bridge into a ravine.
There’s also the problem of these contracts being an abuse of power. Nobody with a range of options available to them would actively choose a contract that may demand their enslavement at some point in that contract’s life. These people enter into such agreements because they are either forced to, or they have no other option. There’s a reason why the United Nations describes debt bondage as ‘modern day slavery’.
Nexum had other problems. The alternative to bonded servitude might be death, for example. Which might not have been expressly agreed in the original contract at all, it’s just one of a series of outcomes for the relief of lenders. The contract might simply have stated that legal actions would be taken to recover the debt and the debtor would then have been offered, by a magistrate, the option of execution, and all their belongings being sold, or servitude.
That’s not a free choice at all.
The outcome of a Nexum contract would probably have been dealt with on a case-by-case basis, so the debtor would have no idea what the consequences of defaulting might be. A person ordered into bondage via Nexum might find themselves in that bondage for life. And a Nexi was a slave, and, as The Bible and Roman Law clearly state, you can beat your slave.
So even if the claim that slavery could be ‘consensual’, is true, it still has to be taken within the context that even if it is voluntary slavery, it is still slavery and anyway, the relationship is primarily one of abuse. Whichever way you look at it, this isn’t much of an improvement. There isn’t much ‘yeah but..’ mileage in this line of defense. Debt bondage is the province of the sex trafficker and if your defense of slavery is ‘hey calm down, they might have been sex traffickers instead’, you’re not really making their moral stance much stronger.
There are some other caveats to attach to Nexum. Firstly, it was abolished in the Roman world sometime in the latter half of the 4th Century BC, seemingly via something known as the lex Poetilia Papiria.
The existence of this law, and perhaps even Nexum itself, is questionable as records of it only exist via the Augustan era writings of people like Livy. Later Roman writers were as fond of a myth, and of spinning one for one’s own political agenda, as writers ever since and it’s possible that Livy et al are simply repeating something they heard, or that it has been mistranslated since.
According to another account, the lex Poetilia Papiria came about when a lender took a particular shine to a young man in his debt. When the young man refused his advances, the lender reminded him of his bondage, had him enslaved, whipped and beaten for refusing him.
Public outrage and a need to soothe a general malcontent among the plebs saw the practice of Nexum abolished and it was never restored to the legal framework. However, a debtor could still be forced into bondage if a magistrate ordered it at trial. Nothing about that, of course, is voluntary.
There is also some suggestion that a debtor forced into bondage under Nexum could simply get one of their own slaves to perform the bondage and even that if the said debtor was himself a lender with people in default, he could get one of those poor bastards to work off the lender’s own debt for him.
The chances of any of this being as ‘voluntary’ as some people try to make it out to be is virtually zero.
For any other reason than debt bondage, legal forms of forced or voluntary enslavement do not exist. One of the greatest legal protections someone in the Roman Empire could have would be their status as a citizen and slaves are, by their very nature, non-citizens.
Episodes from Acts show how Paul, dragged in for ‘questioning’ by the Roman guard, uses his status as a citizen to point out that he is exempt from questioning, particularly the kind of questioning that involves being beaten over the head with something heavy until you’ve answered correctly.
Slaves are not entitled to this protection, and it was even deemed that, for example, evidence in a trial given by a slave could only be used if it had been extracted under torture. Giving up such rights voluntarily is not only absolutely deranged and unheard of; it goes against the very essence of what Roman society stands for.
People might voluntarily give up all sorts of rights or enter into forms of penance. People obviously volunteer their own lives sometimes, making the ultimate sacrifice. But nobody ever voluntarily does a 15-year stretch in San Quentin. Not only is that unheard of, there’s not even a legal framework in which it could happen. Knock on the gates of San Quentin and ask to be let in to serve a 15-year prison sentence and they’ll just look confused and turn you away. Voluntarily becoming a slave in the Roman world would be met with equally blank stares. The Romans were nothing if not sticklers for the rules.
By the middle of the 1st Century AD, the majority of slaves in the empire were provided via captive means. There was still a market for captured slaves from other parts of the empire or outside it, but most of them came from breeding.
Female pagan (as in rural) slaves would be encouraged to bear as many children as possible, with all of them instantly becoming the property of the slave owner. These slaves could either then be used to replenish stocks or sold for profit. Indeed, females could earn rest from work by bearing children, the rewards increasing with each child until, eventually, they would be allowed to semi ‘retire’ from normal, daily, stressed work.
The life of the pagan slave was short, brutal and cruel. These slaves, who worked on villas and farmsteads, is closest in comparison to the similarly appalling lives lead by African slaves in the plantations of the New World.
They were chained day and night, confined to filthy and inhuman barracks, beaten, raped and murdered with impunity. Treated as sub-human, they had no rights under law and whilst there were people, among the Stoics, for example, who championed better conditions for slaves, and even the abolition of slavery, and they were, at various times, given improvements in their lot, the life of a pagan slave was a hopeless one full of cruelty.
These desperate souls made up the vast majority of the slave population in the empire. Outside of the great urban centers in the provinces, people living in rural communities made up as much as 97% of the population and a big villa with agriculture on an industrial scale could require hundreds of slaves at a time to keep it running.
Like everyone poor and lowly in ancient history, we barely ever get to hear about these people. History may not always be written by the victor, as claimed, but it was normally always written by the rich if for no other reason than they were the literate ones. Rich people don’t tend to write about poor people.
Another thing that one can always count on for the rich writers of ancient Roman sources is that they are fantastic hypocrites. They might all own nice villas in the country, run by an army of slaves, and they might wax lyrical about how wonderful villa life was compared to the stench and squalor of Rome, but they all lived in Rome nonetheless because to not be in Rome was tantamount to living in exile. They might have pretended to hate everything about it, but they sure as hell wouldn’t be seen dead anywhere else.
So, one tends to hear a lot more about the lives of urban slaves and in this respect, slave life could, sometimes, be relatively comfortable.
Slow down there, chief. They are still slaves and slavery is still bad, remember!? Owning another person is still fucking evil, even if you do give them a nicer bed and olives to eat.
Urban slaves, particularly those in large households, could operate within an internal hierarchy that could see them elevated to positions of great responsibility. Educated slaves, particularly if they were educated in Greek ways, could work as tutors. Slaves would run the household finances or act as housekeepers. Slaves could be valets, musicians, chefs of renown, bed slaves, craftspeople, smiths, skilled laborers or artisans.
They could even earn money by performing their duties. Whilst there was no legal obligation to pay a slave a wage, there was nothing to say they couldn’t be rewarded financially, either.
Slaves could have days off and there were specific bars where they could go at night to spend their earnings on booze and prostitutes who, in some respects, were even lowlier than the slave class.
And with the ability to earn money came the opportunity, eventually, to earn enough money to buy something very special.
Their freedom.
Papyri from Egypt reveal how slaves could buy their freedom from their master. It might have been that this manumission came for an agreed price, and it was simply a case of the slave working for long enough to earn the money to do so. Or it may have come at the end of a set period of servitude. But we have to be careful when deciding that these arrangements were something that was agreed upon as any part of a contract with the slave, particularly one that would be set out at the start of bondage.
Instead, these are more likely to be conditions agreed upon later in the slave’s service or ones that become apparent as circumstances arise.
Slaves cost money and the idea of getting one’s money back after a certain period of time might have been a tempting one for the owner, particularly as slaves lost value as they got older. Getting your money back after 20 years of service seems like good business and tempting a slave to work harder and better towards that goal is good for efficiency.
A favored slave could simply be manumitted at any time, for free. The only condition required was that there be the obligatory seven witnesses Roman law normally required for such things.
There are papyri that record a female slave, Helene, ‘about thirty-four years old’, buying her own freedom, for 2,200 drachmas, from money given to her as a gift by one Ales, son of Inarous, of the village of Tisichis.
The slave owner releases her on payment, without any further bond, and Ales states that he, too, makes no claim on her, with his part of the contract being signed for him because he is illiterate.
The inference here is quite obvious. Ales has fallen in love. 2,200 drachmas is a sizable chunk of change for an illiterate village boy and as he is not buying her, but her freedom, they obviously must have some sort of future plans in mind.
Once manumitted, a freedperson could, if eligible, be granted nearly all the same rights as a citizen although their new status was depended largely on the status of their previous owner. If an owner wasn’t a citizen, the freedperson wouldn’t be one, either, although the ability to become one was theoretically available to both.
Freedpeople could also be bound to their former owners in a number of ways. Many of them would take the standard Roman tria nomina, the three names, used by most citizens, but part of their new name, the middle nomen would form the gens or family name of their former owner. One way of identifying a freedperson in Roman history is to spot what is an obvious slave name allied to that of a famous Roman family who used to own them.
A freedperson was limited in other areas of Roman life. They ordinarily couldn’t become members of an ordo, or town council, although their children, if they were born free, could. Part of the allure or manumission was not only one’s own freedom, but the opportunities it offered one’s heirs.
An inscription on the temple of Isis in Pompeii which was being restored following an earthquake in 62AD that was a precursor to the eruption that destroyed the city, contains the dedication:
“Numerius Popidius Celsinus, son of Numerius, rebuilt at his own expense from its foundations, the Temple of Isis, which had collapsed in an earthquake; because of his generosity, although he was only six years old, the town councilors nominated him into their number free of charge.”
Numerius is a clear slave name and the Popidian family one of Pompeii’s most famous old families. Numerius is obviously a freedman and as such is not eligible to serve on the town council. However, he has become obviously very wealthy, rich enough to engage in the rich person’s sport of public endowment. Someone rich enough to sponsor the rebuilding of a temple is somebody not only with a lot of money, but with a lot of social standing. Regardless of his social standing and wealth, he is ineligible to serve and, as a compromise, the councilors have offered a position on the council to his son, despite him being way below the ordinary age required for office, 25 years old, and foregoing the financial obligation that would normally be required.
They are almost desperate to get Numerius, a former slave, onto the council and are willing to bend their own rules, but not society’s rules in order to allow him to serve vicariously through a six-year-old boy.
Which raises the question of how freedpeople could become so wealthy. Freedpeople could exploit networks built up during bondage, particularly if they worked in the finances of large households. They could be given endowments by their former masters to help set them up in business with the proviso that the former master would take a cut of future profits. No self-respecting Roman toff would be seen dead lowering himself to become involved in the ungentlemanly business of a grain merchant, but having five freedmen engaged in that trade and taking a cut is lucrative and doesn’t affect one’s own social standing.
What’s more, freedpeople could do something that nobody else in Roman society could do. They could be upwardly mobile.
The triangle of Roman hierarchical society is relatively straightforward. Emperor at the top, senate below him and way down at the bottom, beneath the plebs, the slaves, prostitutes and other degenerates like actors.
And everyone stayed, pretty much, in their respective ranks. Plebeians could never become equestrians and vice versa. Even the emperor couldn’t marry a commoner.
But a freedperson could climb through these ranks, or more illustratively, climb up the outside of them and shimmy in a window. Narcissus, the freedman of the Emperor Claudius not only became, probably, the richest man in the Roman Empire at the time, richer even than his patron, he became the gatekeeper to the emperor himself, wielding the power of access that could make or destroy petitioners. He became so powerful that, on Claudius’ death, Nero’s mother Agrippina had him executed to keep him out of the way.
So, in some respects, a slave could lead a comfortable life and one that might even be arguably better than the life of an ordinary pleb. But not all of them. The majority of slaves lead pitiful lives full of violence and toil.
No success story of the lives of freedpeople can cover up the fact that the ownership of a human by another human is immoral and evil. Nothing can make that better. Nothing.
Certainly not the passing of time and certainly not the exegetical sleight-of-hand employed by some theological scholars and apologists to try and justify the fact that The Bible condones slavery.
It just does.
But look, that shouldn’t shake your faith in God, if you have any. If your faith is built on foundations so shallow that an argument over the status of slaves 3,000 years ago shakes it to its core, you might not be as strong in your faith as you believe.
And I don’t want you to re-evaluate your faith in God, either. If I’m brutally honest, I genuinely don’t care one way or the other. Believe what you want to believe. As long as you leave other people alone, particularly, for example, children and pregnant women, then carry on. Your faith is your business.
But I love The Bible, too. Even as an atheist I think it’s one of my favorite books of all time. I might not get from it what people of faith get from it, but you don’t get from it what I get from it, either. It’s not just your book. It’s everyone’s.
I don’t believe half it, but then I don’t believe Tacitus when he wrote about miracles, either and that doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of him, nor devalue his work as an ancient source.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Sometimes The Bible is cloaked in metaphor and context and sometimes it isn’t. And when it condones slavery, it isn’t.
Just as some people believe that when The Bible tells you not to lay with animals, that it means nothing else but ‘do not fuck a goat’, then when it tells you how you may beat the living fuck out of your slave as long as they don’t die immediately, it means nothing else but that.
You can still believe in God, Jesus and the Resurrection. You can still believe in Revelation and have all the cornerstones of your belief system intact and understand that, y’know, all them years ago people could be utter fucks to each other just like they are now, and you can still believe that The Bible is utterly infallible if you wish.
Because people sure as fuck aren’t.