[lbo-talk] Ancient Slavery (was: Democracy and Constitutional Rights)

[andie nachgeborenen]

My impression is that there was a sort of division between something like house slaves and field slaves. "House" slaves were often not only better educated but sometimes even richer than some masters, could own slaves themselves (right?) and even be paid; and those were the ones where educated Romans would say, There but for the grace of the Gods go I. Then there were the disposible field slaves whose lives were used up in the latifundia, galleys, and mines -- and they were viewed as naturally subordinate. Not necessarily because of anything Aristotle said, of course. 

 
Is that right? 

 
jks

Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:

--- andie nachgeborenen
wrote:
As fara s I can tell, one difference wasn't the idea
that there were special groups of people, races or
whatever, tahtw ere natuiral slaves, but just that
siome (many) people, even Romans or Greeks or
whatever, who were natural slaves.
---

I think it's interesting to look at Seneca's letters
in this context. As an advisor to Nero, he was hardly
antiestablishment. Insofar as I recollect, in his
letters advising people to treat their slaves fairly
and with dignity, he often uses the argument that it
is only because of a quirk of fate that you are this
slave's master and not vice-versa, that history could
have turned out such that Egypt, say, conquered Rome,
and the Egyptians would have enslaved the Romans. He
also has that great anecdote about the master who
treated his slave disgracefully, and then, after the
slave was freed, became a favorite at court and
wealthy, the former master came grovelling for favors.
(This shows BTW, I think, how much more flexible and
less malevolent ancient slavery, at least in Rome, was
in comparison to slavery of Africans in the New World,
probably because there was not an ideology of racism
in the Roman Empire -- the idea seems to have been
that might makes right and that you enslave the people
you conquer b/c that's just the way things are, not
b/c they are inferior. And may slaves were very
well-educated. I don't think the Romans appropriated
Aristotle's idea of natural slavery much, just like
the hardly used any Aristotle outside of the works and
logic and maybe natural philosophy. Epictetus was a
freed slave, after all.)

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