Preliminary Programme

Women in ancient Rome owned, managed, and enslaved people. Neither ancient sources nor modern scholarship deny this fact. And yet, no sustained investigation into the gendered nature of slaving practices in ancient Rome exists. While scholarship on women in ancient Rome has largely stayed away from investigating women’s participation in the oppression of others, scholars of Roman slavery tend to imagine a male slave owner. At the same time, at the intersection of gender and slavery a whole host of research questions present themselves. To what extent was female slave ownership a unique bundle of rights? In what ways did social discourses shape the slaving strategies that women might pursue? How did gender norms and expectations influence the social power that women could claim vis-à-vis the people they enslaved? And just what specific challenges did female slaveowners face because of Roman sexual regimes? These questions lie at the core of our DFG-funded research project, which undertakes the first sustained investigation of women as slave owners in Roman society.

In our paper we will present the initial results of this project’s intersectional inquiry. More particularly, we will focus on the ways in which women were able to partake in the dual strategies of fear (violence) and hope (manumission), which, as the existing scholarship insists, lay at the core of the control strategies of (male) Roman slave owners. By drawing on literary, juridical, and epigraphical sources we will outline the gendered nature of women’s contribution to the maintenance of the Roman slave system between 200 BCE and 200 CE. This contribution, we contend, was both less and more than what their male slaveowners could accomplish. Women’s bodies, their ability to nurse, offered them unique possibilities while the legal and social norms very likely contributed to the (slightly) reduced effectiveness with which they might have been able to manipulate the lever of hope. By contrast, fear and the violence used to instill it seem to have been available to women in the same almost unrestrained fashion as they were to men. (Show less)

Manumission has long been one of the most obscure and contested aspects of slave systems, both ancient and modern, because quantitative data are both very limited and highly disparate in nature, posing great problems for interpretation and comparison. Hence there remains wide disagreement among specialists about the scale of manumission within particular slave systems and the degree of variation between them.

This paper presents a new approach to studying manumission based on methods that demographers use to model other ‘vital’ (life-cycle) events, such as marriage or mortality, i.e. modelling them as if they were random processes whose structure can be described by a mathematical distribution with a few key parameters.

The paper will present the approach, show how it can cut through some conceptual confusion in current discussion of the scale of manumission and present some preliminary results of empirical analysis of manumission regimes in the Roman world and the modern Americas. (Show less)

Existing studies of the ancient Greek slave trade have explored thoroughly the trafficking of slaves to Aegean Greece from the Black Sea (e.g., Finley 1962; Crawford 1977; Braund & Tsetskhladze 1989; Hind 1994; Gavriljuk 203; Avram 2007; Parmenter 2020; Lewis 2022) and Thrace (Velkov 1964; 1967; Alexianu 2008). Studies of slaves trafficked from the Near East are less common, and have mainly focused on Anatolia (Lewis 2011; 2016). A glaring omission is any specialised investigation of the trade in slaves from Syria. This is surprising given the prominence of Syrians in practically all dossiers of epigraphical evidence that provide details on the ethnicity of slaves in Greek communities. Syrians do not dominate the Classical Athenian evidence, but are nonetheless very common. But they constitute the largest single ethnic group attested in the Delphic manumissions, and also in the contemporary West-Lokrian manumissions. The epigraphy of Hellenistic Rhodes shows Syrians as one of the major ethnic groups among those suspected of holding slave status. Syrians appear to be the only slaves with possible ethnic identifiers in the Hellenistic Boeotian consecration inscriptions. Several slaves who appear to have been exported from Syrian (and more broadly, Levantine) ports and cities appear in the sepulchral inscription SEG XXIII 381 from Rheneia; and almost all slaves of known origins attested in Ptolemaic papyri came from (or through) Syria. If this numerical prominence in our various dossiers of evidence reflects the numerical prominence of Syrian slaves in the populations of the Classical and Hellenistic city-states, then we must be looking at the regular, relatively high-volume export of Syrians to Greek communities over the longue durée. This throws up a range of questions: how many people are we talking about? What processes within Syria can account for this phenomenon? (Millar 1987). What routes by land and sea were taken by these individuals, and can we reconstruct their experiences to any degree? This paper will sketch the scope of this topic and propose some tentative answers to all of these questions. (Show less)