Latest / The Partial Historians / Special Episode - Servus: How Slavery Built the Roman Empire with Dr Emma Southon
Transcript
- Dr Rad 0:15 Welcome to the Partial Historians. We explore all the details of ancient Rome, everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles waged, and when citizens turn against each other. I'm Dr. Rad, Dr G 0:33 and I'm Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories. Dr Rad 0:44 Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Partial Historians. I'm Dr. Rad, and I'm Dr. G. And Dr. G, I think this might be a historical first for our podcast in terms of the amount of times we've had a guest back on the show, but I think people will understand why when they hear who it is, Emma Southern, long-time friend of the show, probably needs no introduction, but we're going to give it a whirl anyway. Emma holds a Ph.D. in ancient history and is the author of a number of fabulous books about the ancient world. This includes a history of the Roman Empire in 20-one women, a fatal thing happened on the way to the forum, and Agrippina, Empress, exile, hustler, whore! We totally recommend you check out our previous interviews with Emma about all of these books, and then obviously add copies to your bookshelf. What are you doing? Not only a writer, Emma also co-hosts the History is Sexy podcast. Besides all this, she's an all-round fabulous human and cat lover, and we are super excited to talk today about her latest book, Servius, or Servius, depending on how you like your Latin. How slavery made the Roman Empire, or if you are based in the U.S. the alternative title is "Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire. Welcome, Emma. Hello. Dr Emma Southon 2:30 So nice to be back. Am I really a historic first to be the most you Speaker 1 2:34 are Dr Emma Southon 2:34 frequent guest? Dr Rad 2:36 I think you definitely. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. This is adequate. Yeah. Got to be fourth time. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and also you're going to have to stop writing books eventually, though, because your intro is getting a bit long. Speaker 2 2:47 It is getting quite long. I did look at my shelf earlier this week and was like, "Oh, I've actually written quite a lot of books. Like, how did that happen? Dr Rad 2:56 What are you doing with your time? Yeah, Speaker 2 2:59 that looks like quite impressive. Dr G 2:59 You're like a proper author, Dr Emma Southon 3:01 yeah. It was, it was, yeah. It was quite a nice moment because I don't know these things kind of happen on a year by year basis, and then all of a sudden you look back and you're like, oh, oh, that looks quite quite impressive, all put together. Dr Rad 3:16 I've actually got like a whole shelf dedicated to myself. Dr Emma Southon 3:19 I do have a whole shelf dedicated to myself, yeah. Dr Rad 3:23 I aspire to that Dr Emma Southon 3:24 one day. One day, just see my Dr Rad 3:27 damn teaching didn't keep getting in the way. Dr Emma Southon 3:29 Yead you see this is this was the trick I left at academia. Dr G 3:34 Yes, frees up the writing time. Yeah, Dr Emma Southon 3:36 no one makes me go to meeting everybody out there. Dr G 3:40 This book, I say, is relatively different from the subjects that you've tackled previously. So I'm really interested to chat about this because, for what it's worth, slavery is not a topic that screams a great read. No, doesn't it doesn't feel like you're you're going to have a good time, and so I think to start us off, why do you think it is so important for us to better understand slavery as it was practiced in the Roman Empire? Dr Emma Southon 4:10 I think just because it's such an important part of the Roman Empire, like the Roman Empire does not exist without slavery. It is like just from the bureaucratic perspective of what the empire is, the like the bureaucracy of building empire doesn't exist without slavery. Almost every single person who is working in the like imperial mechanisms of the paperwork and accountancy and message carrying and like just the sheer amount of busy work that is involved in running an empire is an enslaved person. Almost all of the people who are involved in the commerce of the empire is involved in slavery in some way. Almost everybody who is involved in temple worship is enslaved. Like just. The empire does not exist without it. A huge proportion of people in the empire are enslaved or have experienced slavery for at least part of their life, and every single person in the empire interacts with slavery every day in about a million ways. So it just not having that be part of the story of how we understand the ancient world is just like lopping off, like one of the legs of the empire, basically, and then pretending like we can see it. And like at some point in the book, I use the metaphor of the you know three blind men and an elephant, where one of them they've never seen an elephant, they go and they're using their hands to understand it, one of them says, "Oh, I can feel this part, and it feels long and thick like a boa constrictor because he's touching the trunk. And one is holding the tail and says, "Oh no, it's thin. And none of them can see the whole empire. But and you need slavery in order to understand how the Roman Empire works, what the Roman Empire is, and what it was like to exist in the Roman Empire. Even as a free person, it was a part of your life and a part of your understanding of the world that you just need to know about. Dr Rad 6:08 That is so true. I mean, really, being a free person in Rome is an identity because you exist in opposition to those who are not. Dr Emma Southon 6:16 Exactly. You need the unfree, and you need the those kind of intermediate, the third class, the formerly enslaved, the freed person, in order to make freedom mean something. And that's why they go on about it all the time. Like I read so much Seneca and like Cicero, and they're talking about freedom constantly and calling themselves slaves constantly because they know what slavery is, and because it's like a everyday part of their life, and they're like, "Well, we don't want to be like that. Dr Rad 6:48 Now, you note right at the beginning that there is divided opinion about the terminology that we should be using when we're talking about this topic. So, can you run us through what are the challenges posed by using the term slave as opposed to enslaved person. Dr Emma Southon 7:04 Yes, so there there are divisions in that some people were argued that slave is the more common term, and also the term that almost all enslaved people would use to describe themselves. Like if you were to ask a person in the ancient world what they were, and they do. Like if you read the graffiti, if you read the epigraphs, and you can see the places where people describe themselves, they do say, like they use it as a definitional term, you know, Felix, slave of Servius or whatever, and therefore it is a terminology that's easier and is more accurately descriptive of how they would describe themselves. On the other hand, the argument that I use is that enslaved person deliberately interrupts the kind of mental models that we have of slavery. Easy to say slave, and it kind of slips off the tongue, and then it doesn't challenge the way that you think about enslaved people. And it is we have a mental structure that is largely defined by transatlantic slavery of what an enslaved person looks like, and they're almost always black for a start. They're almost always male, like chaining, and we have these kind of mental models of what a slave is. And using enslaved person, firstly, makes it difficult for you to use those mental models. You have to re, you have to stop and think, like even for half a millisecond when you're reading it, and it kind of forces you and the reader and me to expand the definition of what we think of as an enslaved person, because there are so many different types of slavery in the Roman Empire that range from like luxury slaves whose job is to do nothing but look pretty and be sexually available, down to people who are in penal servitude with their legs broken, like hauling water in a mine, across to people who are working agricultural slavery and then into bureaucratic slavery. There's like a bazillion different ways you can be enslaved, and using enslaved person just kind of interrupts that a little bit, and also I think it does force you to remember that these are people. And if there's one thing that I want to do with the book is be like, these are people's lives. Each of these people is a tiny little universe, just like you, the reader, are a tiny little universe, and they have feelings, and they have toes that get stubbed, and they have wants and needs, and just kind of is a rhetorical strategy to a certain degree of forcing you to just think about it slightly harder than you would if I said slave. Dr G 9:30 And I think this is a really good point because by returning the humanity into the situation, we're forced to think of the real challenges that enslaved people face, Dr Emma Southon 9:41 yeah, Dr G 9:42 and the nature of those challenges, and that sort of leads really nicely into thinking about like what are our real obstacles as historians for investigating the lives of enslaved people? Because you've mentioned the elephant metaphor, and I think that's a really elegant way to sort of describe. We can't really quite see everything. How can we really figure out what it is if we can't see the whole picture? Dr Emma Southon 10:07 Yeah, we can't see the whole picture. There's almost no enslaved lives where we have like more than a fragment. And when we do, it is people who were manumitted generally, and the focus of their life will then be on their post-manumission life. So a lot of books that I read and a lot of stuff that I read about would use people like imperial freedmen, like Callistus and Polybius, and would use the lives of of manumitted freedmen who would then become very very loquacious on their tombstones, or who appear in the sources frequently because they're no longer enslaved, and they will talk about their formerly enslaved, like they don't talk about their enslaved lives, and I really didn't want to fall into that trap. So what you're left with then is kind of fragments, basically, and the epigraphy is unbelievably useful for that kind of thing, and the Columbaria of the Volusii and the Statilli, who were two big families in the early imperial period, mean that you can see you get entire families, entire friendship groups who all chose to commemorate themselves in the same space. They're like family burial spaces for listeners who don't know what columbaria I don't know if you've covered it, but they're like big family burial spaces. They look like dove cots where they were really fashionable, like for about 100 years, for massive like aristocratic families to have a space where all of their enslaved people and formerly enslaved members of the family could choose to be buried there as a member of the family, and so you see all of these like family groups, and you can trace the same names appearing over and over again in commemorations, and you can extrapolate out from that. Basically, there's a lot of extrapolation that happens with building enslaved lives. You can extrapolate that if you see a husband and wife, and then you see them commemorating a child, and then you later see that child commemorating his mother. You can kind of extrapolate the emotional relationships that have happened in that space, and the same with graffiti from Pompeii and Herculaneum. When you see the same names appear, you can see conversations happening, and you can kind of extrapolate out, you know. If you have spaces like kitchens where people are writing poetry on the wall, you know that you have enslaved people who are literate in a kitchen, and they're reading poetry and then they're writing it on the wall. And then there's a lot of kind of creative reading between the lines in both the traditional sources like the, like the Cicero, like the letters of Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny, are amazing for this kind of thing because they are kind of forced to mention slavery a lot because it's such an important part of their everyday lives. Like they can't not, and so when they're telling anecdotes about their days for moral education of their listeners, then they're always mentioning slavery. So they're like, there's a letter of Pliny where he's like, "Oh, today my the the four year old slave that is my exercise partner was making fun of me because he can overtake me now, and he was making fun of me that we're both losing our teeth. And you're like, "Oh, whoa! You have like a child slave who's your exercise partner who is at the age where he's losing his teeth, and then that's a funny anecdote to you. Like, okay. And then at the other end of the scale, you have this bit with Seneca where he's writing that he is at one of his villas in the countryside, and he makes fun of a doorkeeper for being old and ugly to his face. Incidentally, like straight to his face. It's like, where the hell did you get this guy? He's so disgusting. Like, did you dig him out of a grave? Like, he looks like you've stolen him from the dead. And the guy goes, "Oh no, do you not recognize me? I'm Felix. We used to play together when we were children, and I was like your friend, and I'm the son of your like the steward, and we were we were friends when we were younger. And Seneca's like, and the point of his story there is that it made him realize that he was getting kind of old. Dr Emma Southon 14:17 But you can read it and be like, oh, this is a guy who has was born into slavery, who has spent his entire life in slavery on this, on this estate, and is now so old that people are like, "Oh Jesus Christ, you look like you're about to die, and is still in slavery working the door, and you can, you know, you don't know the finer details of his life, but you have a lifetime in that anecdote that Seneca tells, and so there's a lot of finding fragments and then stitching them together into patterns. Dr G 14:50 Yeah, wow, and Seneca as well because he is often lauded as being sort of anti-slavery in some respects. But to tell stories like this, it sounds like maybe he wasn't quite self. Unless in thinking about the others, Dr Emma Southon 15:02 no, because Seneca has this one letter called, which is promoted around on the internet as on master and slave, which is basically writing like, oh, just FYI, slaves are human. But he does have a line in it specifically towards the end where he says, "People are gonna accuse me of wanting to abolish slavery because I've written that we shouldn't beat them for sneezing, and that we should not just feed them scraps. We should maybe let them eat proper food. But I don't. I don't wouldn't say that. I would never say let's abolish slavery. I'm just saying maybe don't abuse them. But so that's that's considered. Dr G 15:36 I'm not trying to bring down the system. Exactly. Stress anybody. I'm just saying. Dr Emma Southon 15:41 I'm not trying to cancel slavery. Like I'm not woke. Dr Rad 15:44 What do you think I am? A monster? Yeah, exactly. Dr Emma Southon 15:47 All I'm saying is that it's uncomfortable when I go to dinner. Dr Rad 15:50 My childhood playmate looks terrible, and then I Dr Emma Southon 15:53 have to watch a beating. Like I just don't like it very much, and that's considered like peak wokery in ancient Rome. Dr G 16:01 Just, just wow. But also this idea that his childhood friend is so unrecognizable that the life of an enslaved person can be even just within a parallel universe where we're thinking about these two men having grown up together, and Seneca getting to the point where he's like, I don't even recognize this person. Yeah, like the the weight of the work that is required, and we don't know what it is for this guy, seems to have really changed his physique in a way that makes him unrecognizable in old age, which is incredible. And Dr Emma Southon 16:34 also, I think the fragility of those like friendships that were obviously like important to this guy. He's like, you know, oh no, we were friends. Like you gave me presents when I was a child, and Seneca has just eradicated him from his mind. They grew up together as children on an estate, and then he's just like, it means nothing to him anymore that he, you know, he's hanging out with the emperor now, like, and because that's the thing that gets brought up a fair amount is that there can be these relationships between enslaved people and the people who enslave them. Like Tiro and Cicero is one that gets brought up all the time because Tiro like tends so gently to his legacy and makes sure that all of Cicero's letters are published and that he is remembered after his death, although having read Cicero's letters and seen like from beginning to end and seen how he comes across, I'm like maybe actually Cicero was not entering to his legacy. It might have been revenge. Maybe it was the show. Maybe he was like, "Oh, this one's a really embarrassing woman. He writes about begging the Senate for a try-off and making sure this one's published. The Dr Rad 17:41 silver lining to some of these stories, although I know that this is not the case for most people who were slave owners in Rome, is that Cicero ends up as Fulvia's pincushion, and Seneca doesn't finish so well either. So, if anyone's thinking that these guys are d-bags, don't worry, they come up as it's coming. Dr Emma Southon 17:57 A lot of them do end up horribly, and you do. One of the fun things was reading all of the stories in Appian and Valerius Maximus about all of the enslaved people who get their revenge during the prescription, so under Sulla and then under the triumvirate, and a load of enslaved people are just like, just straight on the phone to whatever the closest man with the sword is. Dr G 18:21 Put this guy on the list. He's horrible. Yeah, Dr Emma Southon 18:24 and like just absolutely doing anything they can to get rid of these horrible people who have, so they can get some freedom and a bit of control back in their life. Dr Rad 18:33 No, look, I think what you've done is so powerful. The way that you've gone into these individual stories, and as you said, you've kind of inferred as much as possible as we can from these fragments, because obviously slavery is part of the story that I've often looked into in most depths. For those of you who don't listen to this podcast, that would be the story of Spartacus. But it's always been in the background, and I must admit, a lot of the books I've read so far on slavery, they tend to focus, I feel, on you know numbers, and I don't know, like trying to figure out how many slaves exactly were they, and in what proportion were they working, in what industry, and where were they coming from, and where were they being sold. It's it's those sorts of details that you encounter, and sometimes you don't always stop to think about the emotional side of it, especially because I must admit, I've been guilty of saying that. Well, in comparison to some other systems, because you had the chance of being freed, I guess Roman slavery wasn't as bad. And then you're like, no, it was still freaking horrible. That is the lie that they wanted you to fall for. Dr Emma Southon 19:38 It is the lie that they wanted to fall for, and it is the lie that they told themselves, and the lie that they told enslaved people. And I think, see, oh yeah, no, because I also read all those books, and they are like obsessed with like systemizing or like getting really into like what proportion of enslaved people do you think were actually captured in the year 143 C? Exactly. Well, that's an impossible question, but have fun, I guess. Whereas I am interested in that emotional lives, like what is it like to be in this situation? How does it feel to be the person standing next to Cicero when he randomly frees a guy because he gets some good news, and also the guy standing next to Hadrian when he stabs a guy in the eye because he's kind of mad. Dr Rad 20:28 Yeah, Dr Emma Southon 20:28 or to be one of the guys that Seneca describes who is standing around the walls of a dinner party aren't like not even allowed to cough, not even allowed to like breathe loudly in case you are beaten, and just the total lack of control that you have over your life, I think, is the the key thing in Roman slavery, and at every level of it, the total lack of of control that you have, even over manumission, manumission. Manumission is one of the things I thought about a lot when I read that a huge proportion of the manumitted people that we see in the epigraphy of the city of Rome were children who had clearly not earned manumission in their adulthood, but had been granted it probably on their deathbeds. I was like, oh, okay, it's actually not even in the epigraphy. It's not as common as we think it is, and that shifted my thinking a lot. But then I read because I do use comparative material as well. So I used I read a lot of narratives and biographies written and spoken by enslaved people from the Americas and Olaudah Equiano talks about he was kidnapped from Nigeria, then raised in slavery in on in the British Navy, and then ended up in the Caribbean. And his English owner says to him, "Oh yeah, I'll let you buy your slavery for 40 pounds. And so he spends five years raising that money, and then he gets to the point where he can buy his slavery. And his James King, who's the guy who owns him, is like, "Oh, oh, I didn't expect you to actually do it. Like, I don't actually want to let you buy your slavery. And he almost doesn't get it. He spent five years like working incredibly hard on two jobs, basically being an enslaved trader and also running his own business, and he only gets it because he brings another white person into the room, basically to advocate for him. That immediately made me think of the guy who kills Pedanius, the ex-consul who gets killed in Rome by an enslaved person, which then leads to the crucifixion of 400 people under Nero, and one of the reasons given for that is that Podaas had promised him his freedom, and then at the last minute had said he couldn't have it. And you just think that even the dangling of freedom and saying, "Oh no, you could if you just keep going, you you might I'll offer you yeah sure I'll free you is is a is a way of controlling behavior is a way of of having a thing you can hold over somebody and you can give it or you can take it away or you can keep changing the parameters of what it is Dr Rad 23:16 moving the goalpost yeah exactly Dr Emma Southon 23:17 and and oh even like the possibility of freedom, which seems like such a kindness, is act can actually be turned into something incredibly cruel if you are of the persuasion to be that way. Dr Rad 23:31 Yeah. Note to note to our podcast, Doctor G. Never ever let me again underestimate how truly abysmal the Romans are as people. Dr Emma Southon 23:41 They are never give them. them out. Dr G 23:43 Don't worry, better than Dr Rad 23:44 doubt. No, Dr G 23:46 they are not good people, listeners. Just FYI, Dr Emma Southon 23:49 they're not. Dr Rad 23:50 Yeah, one of the interesting things that we've found, obviously, given the way that we're tracing the narrative of Rome's history from the founding of the city, is that slavery really seems to have been a part of the story from the very beginnings, at least as far as we can tell. And as you've highlighted, just penetrates every aspect of life. And you've also sort of mentioned the fact that there are just so many different ways that you can be an enslaved person in terms of the types of work. So, how much difference do you think contextual factors make to the experience in the sense of the time period in which you are enslaved and the type of work that you might be assigned to. I mean, is there such a thing as a best and worst case scenario when we're talking about Roman slavery, or is it just all the bottom of the barrel? Dr Emma Southon 24:38 I do think that there are best and worst case stories, and I also think that one of the very clever things that the Roman system does is build in hierarchies into slavery, so which really effectively prevents any kind of class consciousness from arising. And the times when you see trouble is when they put loads of people together who are suffering the same thing. And are able to come together and be like, oh, yo, hang on a minute. Do we have something in common? Dr Rad 25:05 You hate the Romans! I hate the Romans! Yeah, exactly. Dr Rad 25:08 Let's Rebel!. Dr Emma Southon 25:09 Do you think these guys really suck? And so they are very clever at building in these hierarchies that separate both enslaved people from each other and also the poor free from enslaved people, and make everybody resent each other really well. So you can have kind of contact with the the dominus, the person who who owns you, and having and any kind of public facing role within an aristocratic house or within the imperial kind of structure is going to be your best case scenario because that is after Augustus. Augustus makes it the law that if anyone is going to be manumitted, they have to be manumitted by name. Before that, you can just put basically in your will free all of my hairdressers, free all of my accountants, and you don't really have to, you know, know who they are. You can just do it as a beneficence and feel good about yourself as you die. But there are complaints during the early reign of Augustus that people are doing this so that they can have loads of grateful freed people in their funerary processions. Dr G 26:21 Just as yeah, just just to doing it for show, yeah, basically. So for those of us who honorably refuse to just free any of our slaves at the brink of death, yeah, obviously we're now embarrassed about the funeral. Exactly. Now we've Dr Emma Southon 26:35 only got like 10 people who we freed honorably because of their great service, and that guy over there who freed everybody has like a much better funerary procession and looks better, even though he's not done it right, and it's ruining slavery for everybody. And so after Augustus, basically, you have to name people. You have to say, you know, my accountant Polybius. And so anything where you can get kind of face time with the person who frees you, and anything where you can get where you are a representative of the person who owns you, because the rovers are so obsessed with display and so obsessed with kind of conspicuous like hierarchies that if you are a public-facing member of your familia, if you are in any way associated with the dominus or with the family to other people, then you're you're probably going to look be well fed, have beautiful clothing. You're going to be able to manipulate that access in order to get money and favors, and your slavery is going to be something that is a significant part of your life because you're still an enslaved person, but it is not going to look anything like the slavery of the people who work in the farms of the your dominus. So, like freedom in the agricultural communities, or if you work on one of his banks, like outlets in North Africa, or like if you're the guy who you know works over in Britain or whatever, like like you're not going to have the same privileges or the same access or the same chances of freedom as as that person, and then clearly there are very significant differences as the law changes. Like if you were, if your Dominus happened to die three weeks before Augustus passed that law, then you had a much better chance of walking as a freedman in the funerary procession than you did a year later, and so you do get like fairly fundamental shifts in what slavery can look like, as the Romans really grapple with how big they've their system has become, and how many enslaved people now exist in their cities, and how important slavery is to the the display of wealth. And like it was so common. I was started making notes, and I had like a big file of every time that I found the phrase, like something like a cohort of slaves or a large amount of slaves, or she was walking with a huge collection of like the the display of having a load of enslaved people around you and becomes so important, like in the late Republic and onwards, that the Romans have to grapple with it and have to change the laws and have to change how they they handle the world. So it does shift as it as time moves forward and things kind of gradually solidify into a system. But because the those at the top of that hierarchy are so visible. They're the ones who are so proud of themselves that they left a part of themselves behind in the epigraphy. They're the ones who the writers, the Tacituses and the Senecas and the Ciceros, come into contact with. So they're the ones they complain about. They're the ones who appear in the letters. Because they're the ones who are the closest, and so they become the most visible representation. But they are like the 1% at the top of what Roman slavery is, and the rest of it doesn't look like that at all. And is various hierarchies of getting ever kind of grimmer as you get towards the bottom, and the bottom is the kind of imprisoned, tattooed. beaten, scarred men and women who are on the, who are in the mines, who are on the agricultural farms that are feeding Rome in Sicily and in North Africa, and not like in southern Italy, where their lives have kind of no hope, really. The best they can hope is maybe they'll get out of chains, and they have to build smaller lives. Dr Emma Southon 30:50 But you do sometimes see that what they have done is try to build, like just having a family and a sheep can be a fulfilling life at that end of the scale, and that's where the hierarchies are even there. You have somebody who has a family and somebody who doesn't, somebody who has a sheep and somebody who doesn't, and so there are enormous amounts of shades of gray within slavery. And what I tried to do was push away from the the silken clothed, curly-haired boys at the top and see as much as I could fit into one book of all the rest of Dr Rad 31:25 it. Yeah, we do often wonder when we're talking about this early period of Rome, where the Romans are essentially fighting people that are very close by to them constantly. We often wonder when there are these very limited references to enslaved people who pop up in the record, usually as you sort of highlighted in some sort of story, where oh, an enslaved person betrayed their master or part of the plot or tried to tell someone the truth about something that was going on, and every now and then they pop up, and we're kind of like, what was that like? Because if we're talking about enslaved people at that time period, it's almost like, oh, Bill, Bill, Bill from. I didn't know you got captured. Well, this is a bit awkward, but I'd really just need you to work the fun. How's it going? Dr Emma Southon 32:13 Haven't seen you in a while. Yeah, and this is the thing with like how the system kind of explodes is that it's it's so normal in that period. Like they have the slaves. Latium has slaves. Like the Etruscans have everybody does, and they're effectively the same 500 people being kind of moved around. It Dr G 32:34 does feel like that in our narrative sources. Dr Rad 32:36 We have a theory that the booty that is being captured is actually just the same pair of sandals that everyone exactly. It's just like it's one Dr Emma Southon 32:44 really nice bars and five guys that like just keeps getting passed around. It doesn't even get unboxed because they know another battle's coming. Dr G 32:53 Somebody's gonna take it. I don't know if it'll be me who keeps it. Yeah, it is. It is this really fascinating thing because it seems so embedded even in this early period of Rome's history, and you've talked about like these distinct changes that come in under Augustus as well. But you also make reference to what is happening in Carthage in 146, which is kind of smack in between where we are in our narrative episodes right now and where Augustus is going to end up, and what happens in this moment that is a turning point in terms of slavery? Dr Emma Southon 33:25 So what happens in 146 which I use as a kind of fairly arbitrary date, just because it's a useful monarch, really. But that point is the point at which Rome finally wins the Punic Wars, destroys Carthage, and at the same time, is just exploding outwards across the Mediterranean. Like its power is going in all kinds of different directions. I worry for you when you reach this point because you're gonna have so much that's happening. Dr G 33:52 It's gonna be a lot. Dr Rad 33:54 We're kind of counting on the fact that we probably never will. Dr Emma Southon 33:58 Just never get there. Yeah Dr Rad 34:01 Death will take us before we reach Carthage. Dr Emma Southon 34:04 But like they, they just explode in every direction. Like they've been so focused really on Carthage and its allies for such a long time, and that's fought on lots of different fronts. But as soon as that power collapses, they are able to just burst in every direction, and they start kind of exploding across into the Eastern Mediterranean and going off into the Iberian Peninsula. Like they can now explode up through there, and then once they're there, they can start being like, "Oh, yo, Gaul looks interesting, and they can just keep going. And there is no massive power anywhere that can stop them until they hit Mithradates 100 years later, and so they continue the the system that they had been doing, which is the normal system of the ancient world, which is that booty includes people that you can take everything from the temples, you can take all of their nice. Earrings, and you can also take all of you can take all of their enslaved people, but you can also enslave people, and you can sell them, and the numbers of people that they're suddenly bringing into the market just explode exponentially, and it just completely shifts what their economy looks like because now they can just dump men and women into, and because they're also gathering land. Like every time they defeat someone and burn down their village, all of a sudden that's now a new space where a lovely villa can go to grow wine for some guy, or it can be a lovely new space where they can carve it up and give it to the 50 Roman soldiers with an attitude problem, and they'll all need people to work their land. So they've got loads of land, and they can just fill it with enslaved people who are not mad happy. And this is when you get the servile wars, which are basically the teething problems of the Roman slave economy, when it shifts from being just an economy that has slavery that is growing into an economy that relies completely on slavery to survive and cannot exist without slavery. And three Servilius wars, so two in Sicily and then Spartacus, explode in this 100-year period and terrify the Romans into making sure that the system keeps keeps people so they can't speak the same language together. So they develop a very clear line that you can't dump loads of. They're all Syrian in Sicily. They just put loads and loads of people from the Levant in one place, and then are surprised when they all gather together, can speak the same language, have the same religious beliefs, and are have the same kind of not keenness on being enslaved by the Romans in horrible ways. Dr G 36:49 Wait a minute, Dr Emma Southon 36:51 yeah, and so they learn to not do that. Like, just the owners, the people who are buying enslaved people are like, oh, well, don't don't buy people who can all speak the same language, and they learn to balance kind of punishment and reward on a large scale, and they learn to take every single act of rebellion very, very seriously. Which is how you get the law, which comes in fairly soon after Spartacus. Actually, that if one person rebels and murders somebody, everybody dies. If one person murders a free person in the household, everybody in the household dies. If one person doesn't step up to help, then everybody dies. Like, like they teach, treat every act of rebellion as though it is the biggest act of rebellion, and just respond to it with punishing, overwhelming force, and it is just the point at which things tip into a completely different system. And then when Augustus stops most of the wars of expansion, and you don't get the same level of success after Augustus, like until Trajan, you don't really get those same levels of like expansion and success in huge numbers. That is a point at which the system changes because they have to start handling the fact that they're not getting a new influx of enslaved people, and so the problems that they deal with in maintaining their slave system change, which is why they're suddenly talking about wills all the time and suddenly talking, and the legal, which I don't recognize, recommend this as a way to spend any time at all. But I read the entire Digest. Oh, okay, Dr G 38:31 okay, that's impressive. Kudos to you, everybody. That is a hard text. It's a lot. It's a hard text. Dr Emma Southon 38:37 I understood. I would say a quarter of it, but every single thing to do with slavery are marked, and like you can see the point at which the imperial rescripts start getting really invested in talking about who owns a a fetus, who owns a baby if it is a twin that's born and the woman has been promised freedom if she has three babies, and the second twin is her fourth baby. Who, like, and they get into the the real nitty gritty of buying and selling people, and all of the million million contractual difficulties that can arise from that, which is the thing that they're really interested in, and like once you enter the imperial period, you you get a real shift into how they think about slavery as a contractual issue and as a buying and selling and ownership issue rather than a control issue to a certain extent, which is a whole new way of being horrifying. Dr Rad 39:41 Definitely, only. the Romans. Dr Emma Southon 39:46 Yeah, no, they were quite depressing because they would be like they would, because the digest will have like a heading, and then it will have a collection of thoughts taken mostly from second and third century legal thinkers. So like the worst. Kind of people, people who like thinking about legal hypotheticals, thinking about legal hypotheticals and imagining what the answer would be if this arose, and so they'll be like, and so so and so has sold this woman so that, but has said that she can't be sold into prostitution, but X has sold her into prostitution. Therefore, is the sale not like? Can he claim her back? And then they just go on and on. He had sold her on the condition that. And you're like, this is a person. And why is this other person deciding? Like, these are two guys arguing about whether this woman could be sold as a prostitute or not. I wish she had a say. It is Dr G 40:41 deeply, deeply horrifying. Yeah. Yes. Dr Emma Southon 40:43 It becomes quite numbing after a while, and you can see how all of those like German legal theorists got into like stopped being able to think of these as people because they obviously don't. They think they talk about them in the same way. They talk about property and talk about tables or land, and you can kind of let it wash over you. But the soon as you take that step and go, that's a. If this is a real case, that's a person, that's a woman, that's a woman with a child that we're talking about, and you're saying that one of her twins was born enslaved and is going to be taken away from her, and the other one was born free and she can take that with her. That's a horrific thing to happen to a woman, and this is presumably things that happen to women, and people would then have court cases and argue about them, and the the woman would have to sit there and let this happen, and then her baby would be taken from her. And like as soon as you start thinking, seeing through the language that they use into the realities that they are describing, even the potential realities, you're like, oh, this is evil. Dr G 41:48 Deeply, deeply so. Yes. Dr Rad 41:49 Yeah, I won't do my evil laughter there. It seems inappropriate. It's a different kind of. It's a different kind of evil. Yeah. So then, because Dr Emma Southon 41:57 it's not evil in a like, aha, we're going to take over the world. It's an evil inner. I literally don't care that this person has feelings. I'm entirely concerned with the value and monetary value of this property. Dr Rad 42:08 Yeah, exactly. Now you've highlighted obviously the big servile wars which happen in the late republic. They're very obvious cases of resistance on the behalf of the enslaved people, but there is a wide range of kinds of resistance that you might see coming from an enslaved person. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you found out about the other ways that people could express resistance? Dr Emma Southon 42:36 It is. I think it's Keith Hopkins who was like, once you look at the sources, you see that passive acceptance of slavery was never the norm at any point because you find you can mostly see resistance through enslavers complaining about the things that annoy them, like the fact that petty theft is so common that there is a law that says you cannot prosecute, you cannot bring a public complaint about this. Like, please stop talking about it. And it's just like so normal that enslaved people are going to be like, "Fuck it, I'm taking a sip of the wine, or "This is Falernian. Like, this is really good wine. I want to know what it tastes like. Or that they're going to just pocket something and sell it because they can. Or that sometimes they just go for a wanderer. Lingering or loitering is something that people complain about a lot. Like they'll just wander off Dr Rad 43:28 standing over there. You got time to lean. You got time to clean, buddy. Dr Emma Southon 43:33 Yeah, yeah. They'll be like, "Oh, can you just nip down and get some bread? And they will nip down and get some bread. But they'll also walk around and talk to their friends, and they'll also, or they'll be sent to, you know, from one estate to the other, and they'll just take the longest possible time that it can take to travel 100 miles, because it's just a way of exerting control, and this pisses people off to a massive degree. My absolute favorite example of this, just because it's it's so horrific, it becomes funny. Is a there's a story of Valerius Maximus about a guy who is sent on an errand and he just doesn't come back, and for weeks, and for some reason his Dominus thinks that he's been murdered and that this other guy's slave has done it. Like there must be some kind of feud that had been happening, but he's convinced that this is what's happening, and so they torture this guy, this other slave. The Romans are quite inventive with torture, so this is like racking and burning and whipping and very medieval kind of stuff. And then until he confesses to this murder, at which point they crucify him, and everyone's like, "Brilliant! Can't believe that he did this murder and thought that he would get away with it. And then, like a week later, the victim just comes back, like he just Dr G 44:52 oh no Dr Emma Southon 44:53 done as long as possible on whatever this errand was, and presumably had some kind of excuse as to like what he had been doing. Thought that he would just be like, oh yeah, got delayed in Brindisi or whatever, and turns up and finds someone who's been like horrifically tortured and executed for his murder, and it's so horrific. But I just imagine like the awkward silence as he walks in and like, hey guys, what I miss. And then Dr G 45:21 also immediately regretting it, being like, I could have just never come back. Yeah, Dr Rad 45:26 that would have been your chance. No one was gonna chase me. Yeah, that that would have been such a moment of like sliding doors, where you you would sit there for the rest of your life, being like, God damn it, why the? Yeah, I could have just kept Dr Emma Southon 45:39 going. And so, like you, and this is a thing that people, you know, just did, and it's so common that that they just kind of huff about it in in a very kind of formulaic way, or they'll, you know, they'll people just don't do their jobs very well all the time because they don't give a fuck. Like, what are they getting out of it? And you get these stories of like, oh, I think it's in Horace. There's a story of a going to a dinner party and they've hung up all of these drapes, and they just haven't done it very well, and they just fall on people during the. Dr G 46:13 I did the best that I could. Yeah, or Dr Emma Southon 46:15 they'll like running away and hiding when someone's got the whips out is a really common one. Like they'll get the whip out in order to, and so they just disappear until he's moved on and forgotten about it in the hope that they won't. And you just like constant moments of refusing to be enslaved, basically. Like what the Romans want, what an enslaver wants is a fully enslaved person who totally believes that their job is to submit every part of themselves, and to see themselves as the property of and an extension of the will of their dominus, of their enslaver, and to be like, yes, I will do it. I will grovel and crawl, and nothing. I have no will of my own. And what you see is just a bazillion people being like, I really want to know what that wine tastes like, though. Or I'm just going to have a nap over here. There's a brilliant book called The Material Life of Slaves by Sandra Joshell and I think it's Elizabeth Peterson, where they spend ages. There's a whole chapter where they spend time creeping around one of the houses in Pompeii, with one of them pretending to be the dominant, and one of them pretending to like seeing how far they can get before they're spotted. Like if I hide over here, like how much like moving around the house can I do without being seen from this room? How much moving around the house can I do? Like how much creeping about can I do? Dr G 47:34 I kind of love this. This puts the Romans in a whole new light because they're lauded so commonly as this sort of militaristic, incredible force, impossible to resist, and in the background, it's just annoyed Romans being like, "But my slaves just never do what I ask, and they always take so much time, and I'm just really frustrated, and I also can't prosecute. Dr Emma Southon 47:55 And if I get, if I threaten to beat them, then they just hide, and I, and I'm not going down those horrible little corridors to find them. So, and like there's a bit in one of Pliny's letters where it's like, oh, it's so it was so nice to be at your house because your slave didn't know me, so they treated me like with intense respect because presumably they thought that he might be like a violent man. Whereas when I come back here, they know that I won't hit them, so they're just like real lags. And you can just imagine him sitting there being like, "Can I get a glass of water? And everyone's just like not hearing. Dr Rad 48:29 Someone, anyone, Dr Emma Southon 48:30 anyone, and he talks about his. He takes two teenage boys with him on a trip to Rome to, like, they're his not my clutches, like the guys who remember the names of people, and somebody offers them some money to go to a poetry reading, which is another glorious like insight into people paying members of the audience to go to see them read poetry. So it looks like they have loads of people in the audience to listen to their Dr Rad 48:56 poetry, Dr Emma Southon 48:59 and so someone pays them and they just disappear, and Pliny is like left wondering where they have gone because they've just like gone. Oh, okay, yeah, I'll take a sesterces and go and listen to some shit poetry, and and he's like, guys, guys, yeah, and it is a like because of the one side you have the guys who are like will not let anybody breathe, and like the terror that they assert over people. But you know that those people in the background were just like dropping as many plates as they can because they hate that guy so much, or stealing as much wine as they can. But even like the guys who imagine themselves to be the good guys. Like Pliny just really thinks of himself as like the best of guys because he's non-violent. He says that he allows his he allows his slaves to make wills as long as they own they leave their possessions to somebody within the household. So it can't leave the household, but. He lets them like have this kind of illusion of autonomy, and he'll often free them on their deathbeds, which he thinks of himself as being like profoundly kindly for doing this. And how generous? Exactly, like words of no loss to you, is it, Penny? But Dr Rad 50:15 yeah. Dr Emma Southon 50:15 So he like imagines himself as being this lovely guy, but even then, people are just like, you know, I just don't really like. I just don't really feel like it today. And like you see everywhere, just constant resistance to the concept of being enslaved. Like they might be a slave, they're aware that that is a possibility, but in the end, they have a human will, and they're gonna live their own lives anyway. Dr G 50:39 They find a way around the system. Yeah. Well, good for them. Yeah. I have to say, it puts it in a in a slightly better light, I suppose. If the level of resistance is like everyday and quite common for for a lot of them, Dr Emma Southon 50:54 it is. And the way the only like they this is why they're constantly like trying to balance this. Like, oh, if you're good, you can have some money of your own, and you can maybe get manumitted. And if you're bad, we'll beat you to death. But most people don't use either of those particularly as as much as we think they do. Like they're not manumitting on a mass scale like every day. They're not only a few people will ever get that, and they're not beating people to death every day because that would be very messy, and most people don't actually like beating people that much. Like even the Romans have levels of like they don't want to be doing that constantly every day, and the ones that do are a bit freakish, and so for the most part, they just everybody is just enduring a real shit situation where the enslaved people don't want to be there, and the enslaver is like, have the fuck's sake! Like they just keep stealing my stuff. And you're like, well, both the easy way to solve this would just be to not have slavery. But sure, continue. Dr Rad 51:53 The Romans really persisted. Yeah, like there's got to be a way. Yeah, there's got to be a way we can make this system work for our benefit. If only, Dr Emma Southon 52:01 yeah, yeah, and so you see a concept, and even like people leaving, people running away from slavery, just freeing yourself is a terrifying thing to do. Like, and I think there's a really good thriller to be written about somebody trying to run away because the way that the Roman state suddenly shifted into action, and the way that you can suddenly see how pervasive the army and surveillance system of like like you cannot move along the roads without being seen constantly. You cannot get in and out of the city without being seen. You cannot the mechanisms of the army are are a surveillance system as well as a security system, but people still do it. People do it all the time, and plenty of them get away and do manage to end up in either some distant part of the empire on the other side of the world. They have to leave everything to do it. They have to restart their life in like the Balkans or Egypt or somewhere where they don't speak the language. But they do do it, and they can do it, and it infuriates the Romans. Plenty of them are recaptured and reenslaved, but they still tried it. They still caused some havoc while they were doing it, and had some time where they were free before they were reenslaved and tattooed or collared or whatever. But they still had a bash at it, and good for them. Dr G 53:23 Yeah, fair enough as well. I mean, for every individual who's in that situation, it's not like the other examples are going to deter you, because it's still your life that you're trying to find a way to live as freely as possible. So you mentioned manumission, and we get a lot of stories where manumission is granted on the deathbed of the slave-that feels like a useless kind of manumission in some respects. But for those who were managed to be manumitted before the end of their life, what was it like for people post-slavery? Dr Emma Southon 53:57 So when you are freed in the Roman world, you become a third type of person, so you enter in their legal system a third space of being a person who has experienced slavery and is stained by slavery forever, and it can still be called a slave as an insult, but does have freedom, a conditional freedom, because it can be taken away from you, and sometimes is if you're not grateful enough, if you're freed during the lifetime of the person who owned you, but it is nonetheless freedom. And if you're owned by a Roman citizen, then you get citizenship, which is obviously brilliant because you go from being completely unprotected by the law, like your body and your soul are meaningless, into being the most protected person in the empire, all of a sudden, even throwing stuff at you as an insult to the empire, and you can do you can prosecute people for it, and you can never be put in chains by anyone other than the Roman authorities ever again. And like it's a real kind of shooting straight to the top of the citizenship hierarchy. I think that you have to remember that most people in the empire. And enslaved people can't be properly rational because they have had to submit their will, and that means that they can will never be able to form a proper masculine citizen Roman brain. It's Dr Rad 1:00:10 not the Roman identity that we're going for, guys. It's off-brand. So perhaps to wrap things up, you've given us some fantastic stories today about some of the lives you've encountered, but is there one that you'd like to finish off with that you haven't mentioned so far that you felt was really compelling in all of the stories that you came across? Speaker 4 1:00:31 I'd say the one that really stuck with me was one from one of the columbaria from the Statilii, which is this family that you can piece together through the epigraphy, and there's a guy called Euticus, and he is married to a white woman called Aphrodisia, and they have three children who all live to adulthood. So they have a daughter and two sons, and then you can see them die basically. So they are all then commemorated at various ages. So their daughter dies at 16, and then their son dies, and then Aphrodisia dies, and then Euticus dies, and you can see them commemorating each other. On the one hand, you're like, oh, this is like the tiniest little fragment of this family, but on the other hand, you're like this family. Eutychus was born into slavery, it seems, because he is described as being a faithful, faithful something of Messalina, and he has brothers who are in slavery. At some point, he met Aphrodisia, and they fell in love enough to have three children, and they had at least three who grew into adulthood, which means that Aphrodicia was pregnant three times as an enslaved woman, and then you can imagine the what it is like to be in love, to find out that you are pregnant to be a pregnant woman to then give birth in wherever she gave birth in this household three times and to hold a baby and then to raise those children into adulthood and go through all of the experiences of first talking first walking learning to read they all they all end up in quite close positions to the family, like one of them is a as a dresser. One of them is something to do with curtains that nobody understands. One of them is a the daughter is just a pediske, like a foot woman, footman of Messalina, and so they're all they all end up in these quite close positions, and then they all die of various things in their late teens and early 20s until there is just one son left, but then you can see this mourning, like the way they describe one another as you know, like they have gone out of their way to raise this money to buy these things, and sometimes they have to club together with a friend. So when Euticus dies, like a bunch of friends have to get together because Aphrodisia is already dead, and he's only got one son left. And like, this is a whole family that comes together and lives together and loves each other in slavery. And we don't know what happens to the son Aphrodisias, like whether he makes it out or whether he also is sold somewhere if he dies because he nobody commemorates him. But it's a whole family. It's a whole family life. It is all the emotions that are of falling in love, of marrying, of describing each other as husband and wife, which they're not legally allowed to do. They're not legally husband and wife, but that's what they describe each other as calling each other mother and son and father and son, which they're not legally allowed to do, but they do it anyway. And just all of the the beauty that there is in that being a human and having a human life and having that much love for one another that continues into death. That because they're Romans, they are then going to that, like they've put each other in that space, so they can go there and they can clean the tombs and they can do the rituals of of ancestor worship that occur in Roman religion, and that they're doing that over and over again, and it's beautiful, and it's heart wrenching that this happened in slavery, and it's heart wrenching that they all died so young, but they, what you see in those moments of pain is is their humanity and their essential humanity that is the same as all of our humanity of wanting to love and be loved and doing that in like quite horrific circumstances. And so those are the ones that I think of whenever I think about even the highest echelons of slavery. Like they lived in slavery, they died in slavery, but they loved in slavery as well. Dr G 1:04:45 Thank you. I think holding on to that essence of the human spirit is really where we want to end up with all of this, because the numbers are horrifying, the stories are so largely traumatizing. That to find an essence of hope somewhere in there, I think, is vitally important because it's such a human story, and so many people experienced it in the Roman Empire. Dr Emma Southon 1:05:09 Exactly, and it is, you know, it is a as much the story of Rome as the story of Cicero is, or the story of any of the, if anything, it is there were only like at max 900 senators, and each of those probably own 900 people. So it's a more representative story of Rome than than the story of any senator. And so, what I hope people get from the book is is that these are people's lives, and that they're as important to the the story of Roman history as any other human life. Dr Rad 1:05:41 Yeah, no. Look, I really love the way that you have explored these various themes throughout the chapters. I must admit, there were times where it felt like each chapter was like a punch to the gut, where I'm like, oh ,really? Just they just keep coming. The blues just keep coming. But it's really important to think about, especially considering obviously that it's not like slavery is an issue that doesn't exist in our modern world, and so it is really important to think about these questions because unfortunately there are still so many enslaved people that exist in this world right now. It Dr Emma Southon 1:06:13 is, and also because people will still use this imagined version of the Roman Empire that doesn't include slavery to to argue for ideas today, but also to argue for the bringing back of slavery. And people, you know, there are people in this world who argue for slavery, and so confronting the reality of what slavery is for the people who are enslaved, I think, is important to counter people who who think that slavery is something that is either fine or not worth considering, or a a sacrifice worth making for the glory of Rome? Dr Rad 1:06:50 Listeners, I definitely advise that you rush out and pick up a copy of Emma's latest book. It really does highlight those emotional aspects, the lived aspects of what it would be actually like to be an enslaved person in the Roman Empire, which isn't often a perspective that you get even in books on ancient slavery. Dr Emma Southon 1:07:10 Yeah, and gosh, have I read them? Dr Rad 1:07:14 So thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing that with us. Are there any other book projects on the horizon before we bid you farewell, I Dr Emma Southon 1:07:22 am currently working on another children's book by myself. So yeah, which is hopefully out next year. But is by far. I thought that this was the hardest thing I'd ever written in my life, and now I'm writing for children. I'm like, oh no, this is the hardest thing I've ever written. This is my childhood. Can't even swear. Dr G 1:07:45 Oh dear goodness me! Well, looking forward to hearing more about that as the time gets close. Thank Dr Emma Southon 1:07:51 you so much for having me back. It's always so fun to talk to you. Dr Rad 1:08:03 Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Partial Historians. You can find our sources, sound credits, and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman. The Partial Historians is part of the Memory Collective, creators and educators dedicated to sharing knowledge that is accessible, contextualized, socially conscious, and inclusive. To find more from the Memory Collective, head to collectivemem.com. 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