On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 10:40:38 -0700 (PDT) andie nachgeborenen
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
> 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.
As I understand it there was a whole hierarchy of different strata of slaves in Roman society. The upper strata of slaves (who were usually well educated) could be quite wealthy and powerful in their own right, such as some of the imperial slaves and the slaves who manned much of the Roman bureaucracy. Manumission of slaves was not uncommon, and the Roman rags-to-riches story might be one of say a young man who is taken captive in the provinces and brought back to Rome to serve as a slave in the household of a wealthy Roman. Said slave earns favorable attention from his master because of his intelligence and hard work, eventually he earns his freedom, enjoys the patronage of his former master and eventually becomes a wealthy and powerful personage in his own right in Rome.
>
> 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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