Video Transcript: Enslaved Persons

This time, we're going to take a look at something that is difficult to consider. And that is the  presence of slaves and the practice of slavery in the Roman Empire and in early Christianity.  So, first, let's take a look at the Empire itself. It was one of what historians call the Great slave societies that are known in the world, almost every culture engages in some form of slavery,  of involuntary servitude, and it can be called by all kinds of different names. But very few  societies actually had an economic system that depended on it. Ancient Greece was one,  ancient Rome was one the United States until less than 200 years ago, was another. So we,  when we consider slavery here, those of you who are watching from the United States, you  will find some similarities and other things that are very different. We, today want to refer  rather to, instead of slaves to enslaved persons, so the person is the is the noun and, and  that's a very good practice, when we're looking at the history of American slavery. I think I  may find myself trying to do that in sometimes flipping back into slaves, when we're talking  about this ancient situation, because in most of the scholarship about this, we do talk about  slaves, but you understand the difference. And it's important because the word slave doesn't  grant the big personal dignity to to the person, the enslaved person. principal means of  acquisition of slaves. were war, capturing war, and what's called a very nice singular as  vernae, which means a house born slave, a slave who is born into the familia into the  household and lives his or her whole life there. The word vernae na if you know, some Latin,  usually that's a feminine form. But in this case, it's a masculine word and the plural is vernae  which is the feminine form of the plural, but the, the, the word can refer to a man or a  woman, in that form, in terms of war captive, in Rome was in in, involved in wars for a whole  century, at least a century just before this time, the time of Augustus. And then, of course,  you had the the Jewish revolt in the first century, and the capture of Jerusalem in 70. And that meant a massive number of Jewish slaves who were sent to the slave markets of the Roman  Empire. And the the Colosseum in Rome was built in the years after that. And there's some  speculation that a lot of Jewish war captives, enslaved Jewish war captives may have actually  worked on the building of the Coliseum. It's a speculation, but they certainly needed some  extra labor at that time, just right after that. And well I'll say more later. And one of the things  that that's important to know here is that, that slaves did not look any different from anybody  else. It was, there was nothing to do with skin color. And they did not dress differently from  ordinary people on the street. You had, you had no way by sight to distinguish an enslaved  person from a free person. And there were there were speculations about how many slaves  were actually in any given city. They didn't want to know terribly much because they think  they didn't want anybody to realize the large number of enslaved people. Had there been  anything anything like a slave revolt. Now there were two or three of them not in Rome itself,  but particularly in the south in Sicily and a couple of other places. They were always brutally  put down by the army because they had to be sure that there was complete control, and  everything everything indicates that there were far more male slaves than females. And that  would be because of the capture in war. What happened to the women and children we don't  know. But in even in households, waiters at meals, everything indicates a larger number of  men then of women that are enslaved. Now there's implications for demography, it means  that the slave population could not replicate itself. And so that it depended on the influx of  new enslaved peoples. And you can imagine what that was like, for slave owners who needed  to continually acquire new slaves, train them, domesticate them, people who men who had  been warriors who had been soldiers, now, enslaved are not going to be your best house  servants. So all kinds of problems there that arose. And there are indications that that house,  the people, three people in households, were often afraid of their slaves, because they, they  could be surrounded by enslaved peoples who were supposed to be loyal and obedient to  them, but maybe weren't. And they were people lived in fear of their, their slave household,  killing them. And there were indication there were examples of that known examples of that.  The other thing is that they, the enslaved people around them had ears, they could hear  everything that was said they could see everything that went on. And when, when the  authorities would suspect that some kind of a crime had been committed by the householders themselves. The first people they interrogated were the slaves, and they would interrogate  them with torture. So being, you can get a sense of the vulnerability there on both sides, the 

the vulnerability of the enslaved people, of course, whose lives dependent on on the situation, but also the fear and the vulnerability of the householders. And if they did not completely  trust, if they did so, they couldn't completely trust their own enslaved people. Now, to give  some sense of relative autonomy of the enslaved, this is a funerary inscription that that is  rather fascinating. It is in the it is in a cemetery on the via viatrium farlis, which ran north, on  the west side of the Tiber in Rome. Today, it's under the parking lot of the Vatican City. And it  is a cemetery of ordinary people there's there are no great mausolea in this cemetery. And in  this cemetery is this little monument and it is put up by a man named Suatricus, who is an  imperial slave. He is someone enslaved in the in the large system of the the Imperial Palace  and the Imperial administration. And he erects this monument to his contubernalis, which  means a common law wife, her name is Fanne Secunde and slaves could not contract legal  marriages. Nor could people of disparate social rank. If, for instance, somebody from a  senatorial class wanted to marry a freedwoman, it could not be matrimonium, it could not be  a legal marriage, it would be contubernalia. So, contubernalis, we we translate that as  common law, but it didn't have any kind of disparaging sense to it. It's simply what people did according to their social class. So this is an enslaved man it's an imperial slave who is who  has enough money enough assets to consecrate a very simple or rather commemorate a very simple funerary monument to his his wife Fanne Secunde who died before him. So you get a  sense of you know, the the enslaved were not necessarily, you know, it chains all the time or  anything. They they they had a great deal of. Urban slaves had a great deal of movement and Freedom. The evidence indicates that somewhere around the age of 30, let's say in the in the  30s, a high number of urban enslaved people gained Manumission, which meant that they  were now free to Freedman or a freedwoman. And the way in which they were manumitted,  there were a number of ways of one was by the death of their owner in their will. And that's  quite often, when slave owners died, their their wills specified that their slaves should be  freed. And that's a legal Manumission. They would then contain they would keep a  relationship to their owners, their former owners, descendants, but we'll talk about that.  Another way was for their slave owner to simply legally Manumit them, there was a legal  process for doing that. There were more informal ways of Manumission, which weren't always  good, because it put the free person into a sort of a middle kind of a category that wasn't  clear. There were a good number of freedmen and freedwomen in the society and the two  Fermia people, the couple with the little child that we just saw, they were examples of that.  And this population of freedmen and freedwomen were the most upwardly mobile segment of  Roman society. They were the ones who had more possibility than anybody else, to change  their, their their wealth status, to change their achievements. And freedmen themselves,  were never going to be elected to public office, they could not. But we have ample evidence  that in the next generation, they could sons and grandsons of freedmen. were eligible for  election to public office. And so you can say that there's a kind of public advancement there  that that happened. If you're at all familiar with Latin literature. The Satyricon has a character to Trimalchio who is a freedman, who is exaggeratedly rich, it's a satire, the whole thing is a  satire. And it's a satire written by an elite Roman, but a Trimalchio was kind of the the  example of the of the freedmen Who is he so wealthy, doesn't know what to do with himself,  himself, and he tries to emulate the high education of the elites. And he fails at it because he  doesn't really understand because he's not really well educated. It's a funny kind of thing. But it, it says something about how the elites, the Roman elites, despised these freedmen who got ahead who got the higher than their, their social level should have been you know, they they  got wealthy and therefore were had some kind of power. Now Roman freedwomen also, were  had that had the same kind of upward mobility in terms of marriage, for example. And here is  an example of a Roman freedwoman and she's also in the museum in Ravenna, and name is  Paccia Helpide And she is a freedwoman of Gaius Paccius. And she is married to Marcus  Valerius Corvinus. So often Manumission of a woman was what they called matrimonii causa,  for, in order to marry the person who had been her slaveholder. The the man who had who  had owned her, in this case, though, it's different. And you kind of expect when you go on to  this inscription to find that but in fact, both her former owner and her husband commemorate  her together. So we would love to know what was their relationship to how well they got along

with each other, but the two of them contribute to this funerary monument for her. And I  should say something here, here about what happens in the relationship of a freedperson to  their former owner. And there are two terms that are used in obsequium and operae.  Obsequium means giving honor to a freedperson was expected to be utterly loyal to their  former slave owner there that now their patrons patronage. It's a case of formal patronage.  We're gonna talk about patronage later and both formal and informal. But in this case, it's  formal patronage, it's it's built into law, and so utter loyalty. And when your patron wants you  to show up to, to show how important he is, to have all these people flocking around, you  have to do it. That's all part of obsequium, the others operae, which is to contribute labor for  a specified number of days per year. And we don't know how many days it seems to have  been by contract in different ways. So that the freedperson could go off and start a business  do things on their own or contribute a business they may already have had as a slave. And,  and, and to to keep the profits. But there were certain number of days a year when you had to contribute your your labor free to your, to your patrons. So there was a continuing  relationship between the patron and the freedperson. There were many probable freedmen  and freedwomen in the New Testament, we don't know for sure, but some that are really good possibilities. Joseph Barsabbas Justus in Acts they're trying to elect someone to replace Judas  and it's this man or Matthias and the lot falls on Matthias. And you'll wonder what happened  to this poor guy. But the fact that he has two Jewish names, and a Latin name is kind of a  giveaway, because the people in the eastern Mediterranean, they were Jews or Syrians or  something like that, if they had a Latin name, it's quite possible that that he was a freedmen.  Lydia in Acts 16, it's often been pointed out, her name is the name of place. And so it's, and  she is a merchant of purple cloth. And it's a perfect setup for a freedwoman who is keeping  her own the name that she was given by her owner, maybe she didn't have any other  personal name. And then she's in this little business by herself. Now, one that we know was a  freedman is Antonius Claudius Felix. He, he's just called Felix in Acts 24. And he was the  procurator of Judea, from 52 to 60, of the first century. And, and Paul has an audience that  Paul under arrest has an audience with the governor Felix, that's this person who we know  was a Roman freedman. And in Acts 6, it refers to a number of synagogues in Jerusalem and  one of them is a synagogue of the freedmen. Some translations I noticed, said the synagogue  of the Libertini and it that is exactly what it says in the Greek but Libertini are freedmen, it  doesn't mean libertines and one of the translations of the synagogue of The Libertines, which  may that's a good example of, of how word meanings changed, because it's not libertine in  the sense of, you know, people who do anything, it's, it's freedmen, and freedwomen. So  those are some examples of possible freedpeople. They were because they were all over Paul  himself may have been the son of a freedman, and a freedwoman. Jerome, who was several  centuries later, says that Paul's parents were from Gischala in Upper Galilee and that they  were enslaved by a Roman and that they gained their freedom with citizenship and I should  have said something about citizenship. When in most times in the empire, when you a slave  was freed in the legal way, the slave also became a Roman citizen. So that really extended  the sense of the the, the domain of loyalty to Rome you see by having the citizens all over the empire. And if Jerome is right, then Paul is the son of a freedman which is very interesting.  And in Acts 22, says that Paul was born a Roman citizen, which he would have been as a son  of a freedman who was a Roman citizen, in his encounter with a soldier I think it is, who says,  I acquired the citizenship with great price You know, he bought his citizenship and Paul says  but I was born with it. So that's an interaction there with slavery. This is another family of  three persons. And mother and father, the mother's name is is Sempronia Eune. And the  father is Servilius Hilarus And they have a son, who His name is Servilius Clausitus. These are  this is the same monument from two different perspectives to get to give you better light. It's  in the Gregorio Profano Museum in the in the Vatican. And just once more, the Firmius family,  we have identified at the in the second from the top rank, we've identified this couple with  their little daughter. The woman at the top is her name is Firmia and she is also a freedwoman of the same household. In the, the third from the top with the two young men, they have  entirely different names, and they are freeborn. And we know that from their inscription,  probably they were adopted children in this household. And at the bottom is what's his name?

Sperato. Yes, Sperato is a Vernae. He is a house born slave who died as a child. And so I find  this this monument really fascinating because none of them are Christians of course, but it  really shows you the kinds of complicated family relationships that could happen because  probably all of these people lived in the same house.