CW: topics discussed in this series include slavery and has mentions violence (physical, sexual and psychological).
“At its best, Roman material culture brings a dimension to historical inquiry that written sources cannot by recapturing the texture of daily life and by providing a unique angle from which to interpret cultural attitudes and behaviour” (George, 2011, 385)
In this essay series, I study the manner and extent in which the day to day lives of Roman slaves can be established though archaeological evidence. I focus mainly on means of restraint, slave housing, and representations of slavery in art, as those are the areas from which there seems to be most evidence, and to present multiple perspectives to the issue. The first part of the series focuses on slave housing, whereas the following essays will focus on art, shackles and restrains and the Zoninus collar.
The explicit evidence of Roman material slave culture is rather scant due to the quality of goods, accommodation and clothing that were available for them, which in turn prevents scholars from gaining a conclusive picture of a variety of aspects (such as diet and religion) of slave life (George, 2011, 385). It is also worth noting that there is no description that can adequately describe the lives of all slaves. Indeed, rural slaves could be used in i.e. in minework, villas and quarries, whereas urban slaves worked in shops, mills, potteries, fulleries and domestic context (George, 2011, 386). There is evidence of i.e. cooking tools that were in all likelihood used by slaves, but such evidence is indirect (George, 2011, 386).
Housing: From Pigsties to Ergastula
Scholars often struggle with identifying slave quarters, and possible slave quarters have been interpreted i.e. as brothels and hotels (George, 2011, 387). Some slave quarters, however, have been identified. These share some similarities; they tend to be small, austere and undecorated, and they often consist of rows of similar small rooms that might have, however, housed multiple slaves (George, 2011). In the ancient Cosa, for example, Caravani estimated that each small cell (3 x 3.35 m) that housed slaves who worked with animals might have housed four to six people (George, 2011, 387). Furthermore, he suggested that some slaves probably slept in the pigsty, granary and other places where they worked close to the main house (George, 2011, 387-8). Similar slave quarters have been located i.e. in Campania (George, 2011, 388). Slaves were probably often housed in work areas, i.e. mines and kitchens, or in low-quality barracks (George, 2011, 388), though this is difficult to prove based on archaeological evidence. Some areas that have been identified as slave quarters have contained i.e. small hearths, niches in which lamps could have been kept, and bed-like constructions (George, 2011, 388), which points to at least some living necessities having been provided for the slaves, though certainly, it seems based on the archaeological evidence, that the bare minimum to sustain life was often available to the slaves. In i.e. Campania, iron stocks to which chains could be connected have been found (George, 2011, 388).
Ergastula – slave prisons – have been descried as partially underground, with high windows to prevent escape and a slave overseer monitoring the slaves (Columella in Thompson, 2003, 243). However, there is insufficient archaeological evidence of these structures. Some interpretations on ergastula have, however, been attempted in i.e. Kent, and additionally, it has been suggested that granaries might have been used as ergastula in the case of slaves in mill work due to their proximity to granaries (Thompson, 2003, 243).
There is evidence of slave families being housed together, found i.e. south of Rome, where a villa contained H-shaped rooms that were used as dining rooms by slave families housed in dormitories around a courtyard (Thompson, 2003, 88), which suggests that slaves have – at least in some cases – been able to start a family and live together. It is worth noting that “the children of slave women retained the status of their mother”, and that natural reproduction was a considerable, and in later times, the primary, means of obtaining slaves (Scheidel, 2012, 93) – this, then, points to no benevolence demonstrated by slave owners but rather to treating slaves as something that could be made to reproduce to produce more labour force, and how slaves were treated as property rather than human.
Thus, slave housing ranges from household to pigsty, and all manner of places in between. Additionally, though this essay does not focus on the manumission of slaves, it is worth noting that after manumission, slaves often stayed working for the family, and were often housed and even buried with other household members (Scheidel, 2012, 101). Certainly, Roman slave housing is a complex and multi-faceted issue, and though archaeological evidence can give us a considerable amount of information, to establish a better-rounded picture of the issue, literary sources should be consulted as well.
Bibliography
Bradley, K. (1994), Slavery and Society at Rome, Cambridge.
Bryant, E. K. (2016), Paul and the Rise of the Slave: Death and Resurrection of the Oppressed in the Epistle to the Romans, Leiden/ Boston.
George, M. (2011), ‘Slavery and Roman material culture’, in K. Bradley and P. Cartledge (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery: The Ancient Mediterranean World, Cambridge, 385-413.
Scheidel, W. (2012), ‘Slavery’, in W. Scheidel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, Cambridge, 89-113.
‘The Projecta Cascet’, British Museum, https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=36296001&objectId=59394&partId=1. Accessed 7 April 2020.
Thompson, F. H. (2003), The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery, London.
Trimble, J. (2016), ‘The Zoninus Collar and the archaeology of Roman slavery’, American Journal of Archaeology 120.3: 447-72.