Ancient roman slave market free#

This assumption about status is sometimes explicit, as when we speak of the freedom that enslaved people enjoyed before they were captured by the Roman army.

Ancient roman slave market free#

Does Livy mean that the Roman army took 30,000 of the Tarentines' slaves or that they seized 30,000 people (of whatever status) as slaves? 9 It is not that precision is impossible-writing about the spoils taken from the territory around Utica five years later, Livy is explicit that octo milia liberorum servorumque capitum sunt capta ('eight thousand free persons and enslaved persons were taken captive,' 29.29.3)-it is rather that ancient writers rarely chose to be specific.ĭespite the ambiguous evidence, modern historians tend to treat captives as free by default. An example will clarify: according to Livy, the Roman army captured 30,000 servilia capita (enslaved people, 27.16.7) alongside statues, paintings, gold, and silver when sacking Tarentum in 209. Since all captives were eligible-as it were-for enslavement, a 'slave' could be an individual that already possessed slave status or one enslaved via defeat in war. For even when a prisoner is identified as a slave, it is often unclear whether the label refers to their standing before or after capture. Terminology makes it particularly challenging to distinguish captives by status. 7 These tallies, whether of bodies or coin, emphasize captives' sameness, stripping them of their homeland, their family affiliation, and, most importantly for this study, their former legal and social persona in the place from which they were taken. They are frequently recorded in numerical terms alone: either by the total number of people captured (the 150,000 seized in Epirus in 167) or the proceeds of their sale (the 2,533,000 pounds of bronze paraded in a triumph in 293, labelled as aes redactum ex captivis, 'the bronze produced from the captives'). Outside of select members of the ruling elite-treated as objects of pity and fascination in equal measure-defeated persons usually appear in ancient sources as a homogenous mass.

5 Put simply, I am interested in how Roman conquest was experienced differently by the enslaved and the free.Įnslaved captives have received little attention from historians of the Roman Republic. 4 While past work has focused on the treatment of high-status prisoners-the foreign leaders paraded in triumphs and royal children held hostage-I look to the other end of the social spectrum to consider what defeat meant for the most marginalized. 3 Did the depiction of capture in war in this scene ring true for them? More specifically, in their varied experience, did everyone in a community, regardless of legal and social standing, suffer the same consequences in defeat? In this article, I test the historicity of this representation of captivity as an equalizer by exploring the evidence for real-life Tyndaruses, those who already held slave status when they were taken as prisoners of war. Its diverse members might have included people awaiting the return of family and friends taken captive people living side-by-side with captives purchased through the slave market and people that were captives, or former captives, themselves. The audience watching this scene would have had an intimate familiarity with captivity. Defeat in war, this opening scene suggests, was an equal opportunity offender, bringing down the high and low alike. 2 The audience already knows their backstory: the one, Philocrates, had once owned the other, Tyndarus, as his slave, but their hierarchy had been levelled when their city was sacked and they were trafficked, together, on the slave market. 1 In the opening scene, two young men stand on stage, side-by-side, in chains. In the aftermath of the long, bloody second punic war, the latin playwright Plautus staged a particularly topical comedy called Captivi ('the Captives').