[lbo-talk] Slaves and their instruments - was/ poor underpaid CEOs

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Thu Dec 14 11:36:22 PST 2006


Jerry:

In Rome their was for one a great amount of gradation between slaves and their is a lot of indication that it was slaves themselves who monitored other slaves. Greek slaves also often performed clerical functions very well, etc. No doubt some slaves treated the instruments of their masters in such a way as to destroy them, but two kinds of questions immediately occur to me:

[WS:] Which begs the question, what is a definition of a slave? Obviously, this definition includes some restrictions imposed on human beings, but the fact of the matter is that those restrictions vary considerably. Eastern Europ4ean serfs were ascribed to a particular place of residence, were obliged to perform certain services for the lord, needed the lord's permission to marry, yet they are considered serfs not slaves, even though their life circumstances were worse than those of many Roman slaves that you describe. Or take women in harems - they were restricted in every imaginable way, yet they were not slaves.

It seems that the term denotes a specific social status in a particular social context (like working class, or "lesser gentry" in Eastern Europe who were not peasants even though their possessions were similar to those of peasantry), and thus is not transferable outside that social context. In other word, a slave is a person designated as such in a particular society, and his/her condition may be better than that of a person not consider a slave in another society.

Wojtek



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