regarded as part of the family household. Only the very
rich would have large numbers of slaves.
The Roman conquest of the Mediterranean brought
a drastic change in the use of slaves. Large numbers of
foreign slaves were brought back to Italy. During the
republic, then, the chief source of slaves was from cap-
ture in war, followed by piracy. Of course, the children
of slaves also became slaves. Although some Roman
generals brought back slaves to be sold to benefit the
public treasury, ambitious generals of the first century
B.C.E., such as Pompey and Caesar, made personal for-
tunes by treating slaves captured by their armies as pri-
vate property.
Slaves were used in many ways in Roman society.
The rich, of course, owned the most and the best. In
the late republic, it became a badge of prestige to be
attended by many slaves. Greeks were in much demand
as tutors, musicians, doctors, and artists, and Roman
businessmen would employ them as shop assistants or
artisans. Slaves were also used as farm laborers; huge
gangs of slaves living in pitiful conditions worked the
large landed estates known aslatifundia(lat-i-FOON-
dee-uh). Cato the Elder argued that it was cheaper to
work slaves to death and then replace them than to
treat them well. Many slaves of all nationalities were
used as menial household workers, such as cooks, val-
ets, waiters, cleaners, and gardeners. Contractors used
slave labor to build roads, aqueducts, and other public
facilities. The total number of slaves is difficult to
judge—estimates range from 20 to 30 percent of the
population.
It is also difficult to generalize about the treatment
of Roman slaves. There are numerous instances of
humane treatment by masters and situations where
slaves even protected their owners from danger out of
gratitude and esteem. But slaves were also subject to
severe punishments, torture, abuse, and hard labor
that drove some to run away or even revolt against
their owners. The republic had stringent laws against
aiding a runaway slave. The murder of a master by a
slave might mean the execution of all the other house-
hold slaves. Near the end of the second centuryB.C.E.,
large-scale slave revolts occurred in Sicily, where enor-
mous gangs of slaves were subjected to horrible work-
ing conditions on large landed estates. Slaves were
branded, beaten, inadequately fed, worked in chains,
and housed at night in underground prisons. One
revolt of 70,000 slaves lasted three years (135–132
B.C.E.) before it was crushed. The most famous revolt
on the Italian peninsula occurred in 73B.C.E. Led by
Spartacus, a slave who had been a Thracian gladiator,the revolt broke out in southern Italy and involved
70,000 slaves. Spartacus managed to defeat several
Roman armies before he was finally trapped and killed
in southern Italy in 71B.C.E. Six thousand of his fol-
lowers were crucified, the traditional form of execution
for slaves.The Roman Family
At the heart of the Roman social structure stood the
family, headed by the paterfamilias—the dominant
male. The household also included the wife, sons with
their wives and children, unmarried daughters, and
slaves. A family was virtually a small state within the
state, and the power of the paterfamilias was parallel
to that of the state magistrates over citizens. Like the
Greeks, Roman males believed that the weakness of the
female sex necessitated male guardians (see the box on
p. 108). The paterfamilias exercised that authority; on
his death, sons or close male relatives assumed the role
of guardians. By the late republic, however, although
the rights of male guardians remained legally in effect,
upper-class women found numerous ways to circum-
vent the power of their guardians.
Fathers arranged the marriages of daughters,
although there are instances of mothers and daughters
having influence on the choice. In the republic, women
marriedcum manu, “with legal control” passing from fa-
ther to husband. By the mid-first centuryB.C.E., the
dominant practice had changed tosine manu, “without
legal control,” which meant that married daughters
officially remained within the father’s legal power.
Since the fathers of most married women were dead,
not being in the “legal control” of a husband made pos-
sible independent property rights that forceful women
could translate into considerable power within the
household and outside it. Traditionally, Roman mar-
riages were intended to be for life, but divorce was
introduced in the third centuryB.C.E. and became rela-
tively easy to obtain: either party could initiate it, and
no one needed to prove the breakdown of the mar-
riage. Divorce became especially prevalent in the first
centuryB.C.E.—a period of political turmoil, when mar-
riages were used to cement political alliances.
Some upper-class parents provided education for
their daughters. Some girls had private tutors, and
others may have gone to primary schools. But at the
age when boys were entering secondary schools, girls
were pushed into marriage. The legal minimum age
for marriage was twelve, although fourteen was a
more common age in practice. Although some RomanSociety and Culture in the Roman World 107Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
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