4. The Slave Economy
The underlying motor force of history is the development of the productive forces, or to put it another way, the development of humankind’s power over nature. In the last analysis, the viability of a given socio-economic system will be determined by its ability to provide people with food, clothing and shelter. It is obvious that in order to think beautiful thoughts, invent clever machines, develop new religions and philosophies, one first has to eat.
Long before Marx, the great Aristotle wrote that philosophy began “when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied.”[1] And Hegel pointed out that:
The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action – the efficient agents in this scene of activity.[2]
Marx and Engels explained at great length that the connection between the economic base of a given society and the immense superstructure of the state, laws, religious beliefs, philosophical tendencies and schools of art, literature and music is not a direct and mechanical one, but an extremely complex and contradictory dialectical relation. However, in the last analysis, the causes of all great historical transformations must be traced back to changes in the mode of production, which give rise to profound modifications in society.
On one occasion the English socialist Ernest Belfort Bax challenged Engels to deduce the appearance of the Gnostic religious sect in the second century from the economic conditions in Rome at the time. The question showed a complete lack of understanding of historical materialism on Bax’s part, but Engels was patient and answered that one could not do such a thing, but suggested that “by tracing the matter further back you might arrive at some economic explanation of what he granted was an interesting side problem in history.”[3]
It is impossible to understand the fall of the Roman Republic unless we take the trouble to “trace the matter back” to its origins, which are the direct result of a change in the mode of production, which in turn produced profound changes in the relations between the classes in Roman society, the nature of the state and the army. The decisive change in this case was the rise of slavery, which led to the liquidation of the class of free peasants that was the backbone of the Republic and its army. All subsequent developments are contingent on this fact.
Each stage in the development of human society is marked by a certain development of the productive forces, and a higher development of labour productivity. This is the secret wellspring of all progress. Greece and Rome produced marvels of art, science, law, philosophy and literature. Yet all these intellectual marvels were based, in the last analysis, on the labour of the slaves. Subsequently, slavery entered into decline and was replaced by feudalism, where the exploitation of labour assumed a different form. Finally, we arrive at the capitalist mode of production, which remains dominant, although its contradictions are now clear to all.
To us, slavery appears as something morally repugnant. But then we are left with a paradox. If we ask the question: where did all our modern science and technology, art and philosophy come from, we are forced to answer: Greece and Rome (we leave aside the important contributions later made by the Arabs, who preserved and developed the ideas of antiquity and transmitted them to us). That is to say, the achievements of those civilisations were the products of slavery.
The transition of the Roman economy from one based on free peasant labour to one dominated by slavery undoubtedly raised the productive powers of society, and was accompanied by a notable advance of art, literature and culture. Before the Punic Wars, the Romans were not at all interested in the fine arts. Learning was not highly regarded, and the top statesmen devoted most of their energies to agriculture. This was very different to Athens.
Among the Romans, fine talk was regarded with suspicion. They tended to speak in practical terms of what they had to do, preferring substance to style. Fine writing was no better regarded: the literature of the early Republic was confined to purely factual annals. But the latter phase of the Republic was characterised by the rise of new literary trends and philosophical schools: poets like Catullus and Lucretius became fashionable. This reflected a change in the lifestyle and outlook of the ruling class.
Despite all the barbarous and bloody features that naturally arouse indignation and disgust, each stage of social development marks an advance on the road to the final emancipation of the human race, which can only be achieved on the basis of the fullest development of the productive forces and of human culture. It was in that sense that Hegel wrote that it is not so much from slavery as through slavery that humankind reaches emancipation.
The rise of slavery
With the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, Rome controlled the whole of North Africa, Greece, Southern Gaul and Spain. Wealth was pouring in from all sides. But it was ultimately these conquests that undermined the foundations of the Republic.
Before the Punic Wars started, a new oligarchy was formed when the tribunes went over to the side of the Senate. The wealthy plebeians gradually fused with the old aristocracy to form a powerful nobility of big property owners. The first two Punic Wars greatly strengthened the hold of this oligarchy on Roman society. This was the social and political reflection of a fundamental change in the mode of production, from an economy based on free labour and small peasant agriculture to an economy based on slave labour and big landed estates (latifundia).
Until the Punic Wars, slavery was not the decisive mode of production. True, there were probably always some slaves in Rome, and the phenomenon of debt slavery was present from the earliest recorded times. But in the beginning the number of slaves working in the fields was far less than that of the free peasants, and the lot of slaves was not as bad as in later times. The slave worked alongside his master and was almost like a member of the family. Slaves could be freed through manumission and this was a fairly common occurrence. In The Foundations of Christianity, Karl Kautsky writes:
From the material point of view the situation of these slaves was not too hard to start with; they sometimes found themselves well enough off. As members of a prosperous household, often serving convenience or luxury, they were not taxed unduly. When they did productive work, it was often – in the case of the wealthy peasants – in common with the master; and always only for the consumption of the family itself, and that consumption had its limits. The position of the slaves was determined by the character of the master and the prosperity of the families they belonged to. It was in their own interest to increase that prosperity, for they increased their own prosperity in the process. Moreover the daily association of the slave with his master brought them closer together as human beings and, when the slave was clever, made him indispensable and even a full-fledged friend. There are many examples, in the ancient poets, of the liberties slaves took with their masters and with what intimacy the two were often connected. It was not rare for a slave to be rewarded for faithful service by being freed with a substantial gift; others saved enough to purchase their freedom. Many preferred slavery to freedom; they would rather live as members of a rich family than lead a needy and uncertain existence all by themselves.[4]
The rise of the big estates changed all that. The mode of production was transformed. The rising population of the towns meant an increased demand for bread and an increased market for other agricultural products. On the other hand, the destruction of Carthage meant that Italy was now the main producer of wine and olive oil. The small peasant subsistence agriculture was now rapidly displaced by large-scale intensive agriculture, producing not for the use of the landowner and his household but for a large market using new techniques: crop rotation, the use of manure and new deep-cutting ploughs and the selection of seeds.
In southern Italy there were big ranches for the raising of cattle and sheep. In turn there were new industries for the working of wool and leather and the production of meat and cheese. Only the biggest estates could do this, since they alone had access to both the upper and lower pastures required for seasonal migration. Naturally, they were worked by slave labour.
The use of large-scale slave labour probably began in the mines. Victory in the Punic Wars meant that Rome now had possession of the valuable silver mines in Spain that had previously been exploited by the Carthaginians. Since the Romans had a huge supply of extremely cheap slaves, who could literally be worked to death, these mines could show a very decent profit for a relatively small outlay. The Spanish silver mines became among the most productive of antiquity, as ancient authors confirm. Diodorus writes:
In the beginning, ordinary private citizens were occupied in the mining and got great riches, because the silver ore did not lie deep and was present in great quantity. Later, when the Romans became masters of Iberia [Spain], a crowd of Italians appeared at the mines, who won great riches through their greed. For they bought a throng of slaves and handed them over to the overseer of the mines. […] Those slaves that have to work in these mines bring incredible incomes to their masters: but many of them, who toil underground in the pits day and night, die of the overwork. For they have no rest or pause, but are driven by the blows of their overseers to endure the hardest exertions and work themselves to death. A few, that have enough strength and patience to endure it, only prolong their misery, which is so great it makes death preferable to life.[5]
By degrees the free peasants found themselves displaced by slave labour, as Mommsen explains:
The burdensome and partly unfortunate wars, and the exorbitant taxes and taskworks to which these gave rise, filled the measure of calamity, so as either to deprive the possessor directly of his farm and to make him the bondsman if not the slave of his creditor-lord, or to reduce him through encumbrances practically to the condition of a temporary lessee to his creditor. The capitalists, to whom a new field was here opened of lucrative speculation unattended by trouble or risk, sometimes augmented in this way their landed property; sometimes they left to the farmer, whose person and estate the law of debt placed in their hands, nominal proprietorship and actual possession. The latter course was probably the most common as well as the most pernicious; for while utter ruin might thereby be averted from the individual, this precarious position of the farmer, dependent at all times on the mercy of his creditor – a position in which he knew nothing of property but its burdens – threatened to demoralise and politically to annihilate the whole farmer-class.[6]
A fundamental change was taking place in Italy itself. The huge influx of slaves meant that slave labour was now extremely cheap. There was no way the free Italian peasantry could compete with it. Italy was now full of big landed estates worked by slave labour, as described by Mommsen:
The human labour of the field was regularly performed by slaves. At the head of the body of slaves on the estates (familia rustica) stood the steward (vilicus, from villa), who received and expended, bought and sold, went to obtain the instructions of the landlord, and in his absence issued orders and administered punishment.[7]
Incidentally, as can be seen from the above quotation, our word ‘family’ comes from the word for a collection of slaves. He continues:
The whole system was pervaded by the utter unscrupulousness characteristic of the power of capital. Slaves and cattle were placed on the same level; a good watchdog, it is said in a Roman writer on agriculture, must not be on too friendly terms with his “fellow slaves”. The slave and the ox were fed properly so long as they could work, because it would not have been good economy to let them starve; and they were sold like a worn-out ploughshare when they became unable to work, because in like manner it would not have been good economy to retain them longer.[8]
Expropriation of the peasantry
The basic branch of production of the Roman Republic was agriculture. In spite of the high level of urbanisation in Roman society, 70 per cent of the population of Roman Italy lived in the countryside.[9] Other parts of the economy, such as mining, crafts and trading, were dependent on this.
The small peasants produced mainly for self-consumption. Only the surplus, if there was any, could be sold. Production for exchange was not developed until after the Punic Wars. All this changed with the rise of the big estates (latifundia) and the large-scale use of slave labour. Gradually the old order was subverted by slave labour that ruined the free Roman peasantry.
A vast gulf opened up between the wealthy elite and the mass of poor Romans, not to speak of the slaves. The great landowners continued to buy up the small landholdings, and where the peasants proved obstinate, simply seized their land without even the pretence of a sale.
According to Mommsen, there was not a single free farmer left in Etruria by the year 134 BC.[10] The following extract from ‘The Complaint of the Poor Man against the Rich Man’, ascribed to the Roman rhetorician, Quintilian (c. 35 – c. 100 AD), describes the spread of the latifundia in the complaint of an impoverished peasant:
I was not always the neighbour of a rich man. Round about there was many a farm with owners alike in wealth, tilling their modest lands in neighbourly harmony. How different is it now! The land that once fed all these citizens is now a single huge plantation, belonging to a single rich man. His estate has extended its boundaries on every side; the peasant houses it has swallowed up have been razed to the ground, and the shrines of their fathers destroyed. The old owners have said farewell to their tutelary gods and gone far away with their wives and children. Monotony reigns over the wide plain. Everywhere riches close me in, as if with a wall; here there is a garden of the rich man’s, there his fields, here his vineyard, there his woods and stacks of grain. I too would gladly have departed, but I could not find a spot of land where I would not have a rich man for my neighbour. Where does one not come up against the rich man’s private property? They are not content any longer to extend their domains so far that they are bounded by natural boundaries, rivers and mountains, like whole countries. They lay hold even of the furthest mountain wildernesses and forests. And nowhere does this grasping find an end and a limit until the rich man comes up against another rich man. And this too shows the contempt the rich have for us poor, that they do not even take the trouble to deny it when they have used violence on us.[11]
There are certain parallels between the transformation of the mode of production in the Roman Republic after the Punic Wars and the rise of capitalism in Europe, in particular with the ‘enclosure’ of common lands and the clearing of the peasants from their former homes, which took place continuously from the sixteenth century. Indeed, the word ‘capitalism’ is sometimes used when speaking of this phase of Roman development. But, though there are certain analogies, the comparison is not exact.
It is true that an extensive market developed throughout the Mediterranean during the period of Rome’s expansion. Commodities, including not only luxuries but staples such as grain and olive oil, were traded widely through Italy and the Mediterranean world, and with this growing trade came the development of merchant capital, that is the buying and selling of products as commodities for the realisation of what Marx calls exchange-value.
Further, the development of merchant capital began to react in turn on production itself. Agricultural manuals, written at the time by great landowners, repeatedly state that the landowners’ aim should be to maximise profitability by producing as much and as great a variety of goods as possible. In his famous De agricultura, Cato the Elder states explicitly: “The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.”[12]
The development of commerce and commodity production in any form stimulates the circulation and concentration of money. On this basis, usury, the lending of money at interest, can thrive. And it thrived to a never-before-seen extent under the Roman Republic.
Often, the great slave owners would also be the biggest usurers, on account of their accumulation of money through trade and naked plunder. In addition to squeezing the small producers dry, rich Romans would lend money to merchant fleets in return for interest. In essence this was the investment of a quantity of value in the form of a sum of money, in the expectation of receiving a greater sum of money at a later date: usurers’ capital.
The picture that emerges from all of these elements is of the formation not only of a class of dispossessed proletarians but also the concentration of both land and money in the hands of a class of great estate holders, producing for the market. Marx even went so far as to say that the latifundia were devoted to the production of surplus-value. But in spite of all this, Marx rejected the notion of ‘Roman capitalism’, because the capitalist mode of production, that is the manufacture of commodities by free wage labour, never developed to a significant extent, in stark contrast to Europe in the Middle Ages.
Marx took up the comparison between ancient Rome and capitalist development in Europe on several occasions throughout his published and unpublished works. In one letter, he explicitly warned against equating any and all expropriation of the peasantry by big landed property with the development of the “capitalist economic order”, taking up the Roman example as a case in point:
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former ‘poor whites’ in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery.[13]
Marx comments in Capital that wherever they develop, merchant and usurer’s capital have a “more or less dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organisation”, but “whither this process of dissolution will lead, in other words, what new mode of production will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production itself.”[14]
A key difference between the Europe of the first century BC and the sixteenth century AD was the level of development of crafts and industry. Urban craft production was extremely underdeveloped in Rome, even in comparison to other ancient societies.
Slave labour tended to drive out free labour, destroying not only the class of free peasants but also preventing the development of handicrafts, which were undermined by the industries run by gangs of slaves in the cities and on the latifundia. Kautsky develops the same point:
If the slaves were cheap, their industrial products would be cheap too. They required no outlay of money. The farm, the latifundium provided the workers’ foodstuffs and raw materials, and in most cases their tools too. And since the slaves had to be kept anyway during the time they were not needed in the fields, all the industrial products they produced over and above the needs of their own enterprise were a surplus that yielded a profit even at low prices.
In the face of this slave-labour competition it is no wonder that strong free crafts could not develop. The craftsmen in the ancient world, and particularly so in the Roman world, remained poor devils, working alone for the most part without assistants, and as a rule working up material supplied to them, either in the house of the client or at home. There was no question of a strong group of craftsmen such as grew up in the Middle Ages. The guilds remained weak and the craftsmen were always dependent on their clients, usually the bigger landowners, and very often led a parasitic existence on the verge of sinking into the lumpenproletariat as the landowner’s dependents.[15]
The changes in the mode of production in the Roman Republic after the Punic Wars required greater and greater use of slave labour. This forced Rome into war after war as it sought to replenish its supply of slaves. This abundant supply of cheap labour explains why there was no incentive to invest in labour-saving technology. It also explains the brutal treatment of the slaves and the subsequent mass revolts that broke out.
Contradictions of a slave economy
In this period we see a considerable strengthening of the ruling oligarchy, which increased its grip on society and the state. Together with the old aristocratic families we see the rise of a new class of rich merchants and usurers. But in the last analysis, all the wealth of these layers was derived from the products of agriculture. Since land was the main source of all wealth, everybody strove to get land, and to add to the land they already possessed. But in order for it to be profitable, someone had to work the land. This was provided by slave labour.
The Carthaginians had developed slavery on a large scale, and the Romans learned it from them. When they seized the provinces owned by Carthage in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain and North Africa, they also took over the large-scale farms they found there, and developed and extended them further.
In the slack times between harvesting and spring ploughing, the slaves were put to work weaving, tanning and leather working, making wagons and ploughs, and pottery making of all sorts. But they produced not only for the individual farm, but also for sale, marking the development of commodity production. The only cost to the slave-owner was the price of purchasing the slave in the first place, and the minimal costs of keeping him or her alive afterwards. Kautsky writes:
There could be no question at that time of any technical superiority of large-scale agriculture; on the contrary, slave labour was less productive than the labour of the free peasants. But the slave, whose labour power did not have to be spared and who could be sweated to death without a second thought, produced a greater surplus over the cost of his subsistence than the peasant, who at that time knew nothing of the blessings of overwork and was used to a high standard of living. There was the further advantage that in such a commonwealth the peasant was constantly being taken from the plough to defend his country, while the slave was exempt from military service. Thus the sphere of economic influence of such large and warlike cities saw the rise of large-scale agricultural production with slaves.[16]
The wars that provided cheap slaves ruined the Roman free peasants, who were the backbone of the army. The ruined peasant was forced to resort to banditry or else join the army of unemployed lumpenproletarians in Rome or other cities. This social disintegration led to an unprecedented wave of crime and banditry, which furnished a new source of slaves in the form of convicted criminals. Prisons were unknown, and criminals were either crucified or sentenced to forced labour.
Although slavery enormously raised the productive powers of society, it contained a contradiction. It signified an increase in the productivity of labour in the aggregate, but the labour productivity per unit of an individual slave was far lower than that of a free peasant.
The labour of an individual slave has a low level of productivity because it is forced labour. Slave labour only becomes profitable when it is employed on a vast scale. What is important is the aggregate of production, where individual slaves are literally worked to death and quickly replaced by others. Thus, the conditions of the slaves worsened continually. The big estates or latifundia were worked by gangs of slaves during the day, branded with a hot iron and shackled together in gangs. They were locked up at night in common, frequently subterranean labourers’ prisons. Cato used to say: “A slave must either work or sleep.”
Just as the nomenclature of ‘capitalist’ is not really adequate to describe the functions of the Roman slave owners, so the word ‘proletariat’ is misleading when applied to the dispossessed peasants forced to flee to the cities. There is a fundamental difference between the modern proletariat and that of the ancient world.
The modern working class is the only really productive class (together with the peasantry, insofar as it still exists), but the Roman proletariat did not work – it had an entirely unproductive and parasitical character. The modern proletariat feeds society, whereas the Roman proletariat was fed by society – that is to say, by the slaves, who were the real productive class.
The basis of modern capitalism is the accumulation of capital for the purpose of re-investment in the means of production. Such a conception would have been totally incomprehensible to a Roman slave-owner. The existence of a mass of cheap slave labour made such an idea unnecessary.
Slavery also inhibited the development of industry and technology. The modern capitalist invests a large part of his profit for improving technology in order to get an advantage over his competitors. The case with the Roman slave-owner was very different. For the reasons already stated, only the crudest tools could be put into the hands of the slaves on the large estates. The mule was developed in the slave states of the Southern USA because the slaves could not be trusted with a horse, which was too delicate to survive in their hands. Only the crudest, most resistant implements and tools could be entrusted to the slaves. Marx had pointed this out. He says the following of “production by slave power”:
This is one of the circumstances that makes production by slave labour such a costly process. The labourer here is, to use a striking expression of the ancients, distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale [instrument with a voice], from an animal as instrumentum semi-vocale, and from an implement as instrumentum mutum. But he himself takes care to let both beast and implement feel that he is none of them, but is a man. He convinces himself with immense satisfaction, that he is a different being, by treating the one unmercifully and damaging the other con amore [with love]. Hence the principle, universally applied in this method of production, only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness. In the slave-states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the date of the Civil War, ploughs constructed on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a hog or a mole, instead of making furrows, were alone to be found. […] In his Sea Board Slave States, Olmsted tell us: “I am here shown tools that no man in his senses, with us, would allow a labourer, for whom he was paying wages, to be encumbered with; and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would judge, would make work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordinarily used with us. And I am assured that, in the careless and clumsy way they must be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less crude could not be furnished them with good economy, and that such tools as we constantly give our labourers and find our profit in giving them, would not last out a day in a Virginia cornfield – much lighter and more free from stones though it be than ours. So, too, when I ask why mules are so universally substituted for horses on the farm, the first reason given, and confessedly the most conclusive one, is that horses cannot bear the treatment that they always must get from Negroes; horses are always soon foundered or crippled by them, while mules will bear cudgelling, or lose a meal or two now and then, and not be materially injured, and they do not take cold or get sick, if neglected or overworked. But I do not need to go further than to the window of the room in which I am writing, to see at almost any time, treatment of cattle that would ensure the immediate discharge of the driver by almost any farmer owning them in the North.”[17]
One of the most striking contradictions of the ancient world is that, having laid down what Marx called the historical preconditions for capitalist production, having seemingly reached the threshold of capitalism, it always drew back from the edge and failed to develop a genuine capitalist economy. Take just one example: the Greek engineer, Hero of Alexandria, invented a steam engine that worked in the first century AD. But they regarded it as a mere curiosity – a toy. Its productive potential never occurred to them. Why should it?
Thus, for the whole period of the slave economy, no great advances were made in technology and productivity remained on a low level. This in turn greatly limited the scope for the reinvestment of the profits made by the slave owners. The ancient market remained relatively limited by the fact that the great majority of the ancient world continued to produce for their own consumption on their own lands.
Beyond the acquisition of land and usury, the slave owners, like the feudal lords who succeeded them, were not in the least interested in accumulating for investment. The purpose of accumulation was for their personal enjoyment and consumption on a most lavish scale. This explains the extravagantly luxurious lifestyle of the wealthy Romans, their sumptuous banquets and so on.
The description of the extraordinary banquets, parties and orgies that have come down to us, the consumption of such things as stuffed lark’s tongues and pearls dissolved in wine, are the end result of the labour of the slaves, along with extravagant games and festivals, silk dresses, colossal public buildings and – last but not least – the free handout of grain to the unemployed mob in Rome.
Since the slave owner had no use for productive investment in labour-saving machinery, he could use his entire surplus (apart from the fixed costs and replacements of tools, cattle and slaves) for his personal consumption. There was some investment in trade and usury, but in the end, this too could not be applied in any other way than in consumption.
In some trades the number of free workers might increase in absolute terms, because of the increasing demand for luxuries, like paintings, statues and objects of art, as well as silk clothes, expensive perfumes and ointments etc. But all this luxury was squeezed from the blood, sweat and tears of an army of slaves:
The modern capitalist is marked by the drive to heap up capital; the noble Romans of the Empire, the time at which Christianity arose, were marked by love of pleasure. The modern capitalists have accumulated capital to an extent that dwarfs the riches of the richest ancient Romans. The Croesus of all of these was said to be Nero’s freedman Narcissus, with a fortune of some 20 million dollars. What is that compared to the billions of a Rockefeller? But the expenditures of the American billionaires, no matter how reckless they are, are not to be compared with those of their Roman predecessors who served dishes of nightingales’ tongues and dissolved precious pearls in vinegar.[18]
These wealthy parasites lived for pleasure, since there was nothing else they could do with the surplus extracted from the slaves. The extravagances of the ruling class were deplored by conservatives like Cato the Elder (234-149 BC), who also denounced the debilitating effects of Greek culture on the Roman mind.
“We know,” says Pliny in the thirty-third book of his Natural History, “that Spartacus (the leader of a slave uprising) did not allow gold or silver in his camp. How our runaway slaves tower above us in largeness of spirit!”[19]
Slavery – The motor-force of Roman expansionism
A new contradiction arose out of the constant demand for more slaves to make up the shortfall, as large numbers of slaves were worked to death. As slavery can only be profitably employed on a massive scale, and since slaves do not reproduce in sufficient numbers, a constant renewal of slave labour can only be achieved through war or other violent means. Therefore, new wars were constantly needed to replenish the supply of cheap slaves.
The owners of large estates were always naturally in favour of war, as the most effective way to get cheap slaves, and of seizing new territories. This gave a powerful impetus to Roman expansionism. After the Punic Wars, the wars waged by Rome often assumed the character of large-scale slave hunts. A steady flow of cheap slaves played a fundamental role in stimulating the slave economy. War was therefore a necessary element in the Roman slave economy.
All the wars of the period ended in the capture of a vast number of prisoners, which swelled the army of slaves working in the mines and big estates on Roman territory. To cite just one example, in the Romans’ third war against Macedonia, in 169 BC seventy cities in Epirus alone were sacked and 150,000 of their inhabitants sold as slaves.
Appian tells us that on one occasion in Pontus prisoners of war were sold at four drachmas (less than a dollar) apiece. When Tiberius Gracchus raided Sardinia, he took as many as 80,000 captives to be dragged to the slave market at Rome, where the expression “as cheap as a Sardinian” became a proverb.
By the end of the Republic, slaves were present at all levels of social life. They were put to work on the construction of public buildings, aqueducts and roads. They also worked as carpenters and blacksmiths who repaired the farm tools and carts. Others looked after the cattle, sheep and pigs.
The wool from the sheep was spun and made into items which were used by the Roman army and navy. Roman farm products such as wine, oil, tools and meat were exported to other countries. The slaves kept accounts, cooked the master’s feast and read him Greek poetry (which they sometimes composed) after it. Finally, they fought and died in the arena.
Slave revolts
Slavery in general is not possible without a reign of terror. The conditions of the slaves on the big estates worsened continually in the later Republic. The slave had no rights and had to accept whatever conditions the master offered. They could be forced to work, kept in barracks and fed only as much as was needed to keep them alive.
Whereas a free wage-worker (in theory at least) can choose his employer, and withdraw his labour to get higher wages or better conditions, this is impossible for a slave. The only alternative was to escape, but a slave who escaped from his master or refused to work would be put to death.
The only real restraint on ill-treatment or neglect was similar to that involved in looking after a horse or an ox. If a slave died it was a dead loss to the owner, who would have to pay out money for a replacement.
If there was a scarcity of slaves, this might be an argument for treating them well. However, in a period when Roman armies were conquering the world, slaves were cheap and there was no reason to treat the slaves in anything approaching a humane manner. In an age of unending wars and civil wars, the price of slaves fell continuously, as captives flooded the market.
There was a Roman proverb: “so many slaves – so many enemies”. That is why Plato, Aristotle and the Carthaginian, Mago, warned masters against bringing together slaves of the same nationality, lest they should combine and stage conspiracies against their masters.
The slave-owners were always anxious about the possibility of a slave uprising. The free Romans lived permanently like a man sitting on a volcano, waiting for it to erupt. Therefore, any expression of insubordination was punished with extreme cruelty. This explains why even petty offences could be met with arbitrary and sadistic punishments.
Since, in the eyes of the law, slaves were private property, the master’s power over the slave (dominica potestas) was absolute. He was allowed to torture, degrade, beat without cause, and even kill a slave when he was old or sick. A slave could not legally hold property, make contracts, or marry, and could testify in court only under torture.
If a slave tried to run away, he could expect to be whipped, burned with iron, or even killed. Many cases of extreme cruelty have been recorded. When a slave of Vedius Pollio broke a crystal dish, he had him thrown into a pool of lampreys to be eaten alive by the fish.
For neglect of duty or petty misconduct slaves were often punished by flogging. In more serious cases, slaves were sold to be gladiators. Since nothing was so much dreaded throughout all Italy as an uprising of the slaves, any attempt on a master’s life or taking part in an insurrection was punishable with death for the criminal and his family in a most agonising form – crucifixion.
Indeed, after the defeat of Spartacus’ uprising, Pompey erected 6,000 crosses along the Appian Way to Rome, on each of which a survivor of the final battle was nailed. In fact, the word crux (cross) was used among slaves as a curse.
In spite of all these repressive measures – indeed one could say because of them – there were several large-scale slave revolts, of which the uprising led by Spartacus is the best known. But there were several other cases.
The first recorded slave revolt took place in 135-132 BC, in Sicily. The origins of this uprising can be traced to the great changes of property ensuing upon the final expulsion of the Carthaginians, about the middle of the Second Punic War. An army of speculators from Italy rushed into the island and, to the general distress of the Sicilians, bought up large tracts of land at a low price, or became the occupiers of estates which had belonged to Sicilians who had supported Carthage and had been forfeited to Rome after the execution or flight of their owners.
The Sicilians of the Roman party, by contrast, became rich out of the distress of their countrymen. After the ravages of war, Italy was in need of grain. The abundance of cheap slaves which came from the war could be used to produce it and take advantage of the sure market.
Sicily was therefore flooded with slaves, employed to grow grain for the great landowners to export to Rome. The slaves were so ill-fed by their masters that they began to take to robbing the poorer Sicilians; and the masters were glad that their slaves should be maintained at the expense of others. After seventy or eighty years, these pressures broke out in the First Servile War.
Roman sources give us some idea of the kind of treatment that provoked this uprising, which was accompanied by the most horrible atrocities. The ancient historian Diodorus Siculus specifically named Damophilus, together with his wife, as one of the cruellest:
Purchasing a large number of slaves, he treated them outrageously, marking with branding irons the bodies of men who in their own countries had been free, but who through capture in war had come to know the fate of a slave. Some of these he put in fetters and thrust into slave pens; others he designated to act as his herdsmen, but neglected to provide them with suitable clothing or food. […]
His wife Metallis, who delighted no less in these arrogant punishments, treated her maidservants cruelly, as well as any other slaves who fell into her clutches. And because of the despiteful punishments received from them both, the slaves were filled with rage against their masters, and conceiving that they could encounter nothing worse than their present misfortunes began to form conspiracies to revolt and to murder their masters.[20]
Tormented beyond endurance, the slaves took their revenge. Damophilus and Metallis were both murdered. But their daughter, who had treated the slaves kindly, was spared, and this detail was noted by the Roman historian as proof that the slaves were not naturally bloodthirsty, but only desired to avenge themselves for the unspeakable torments inflicted on them.
When the slave army captured the town of Enna we are told that they killed ‘many’. In general, the Roman historians stress the injuries the slaves inflicted on the free citizens. But we must be on our guard here, since it was in the interests of these historians to blacken the name of the slaves as much as possible in order to justify the bloody reprisals they later inflicted on the defeated rebels.
We know almost nothing of the leader of this revolt, except that he was a freeborn slave named Eunus, and seems to have been born in Syria. Styling himself ‘King Antiochus’, Eunus was reputed to be a magician, evidently because the Romans were embarrassed that a mere slave or freedman could defy their power, and therefore attributed magical powers to him (similar nonsense was written about Spartacus). He led the slaves of the eastern part of Sicily. The same historian informs us:
In three days Eunus had armed, as best he could, more than 6,000 men, besides others in his train who had only axes and hatchets, or slings, or sickles, or fire-hardened stakes, or even kitchen spits; and he went about ravaging the countryside. Then, since he kept recruiting untold numbers of slaves, he ventured even to do battle with Roman generals, and on joining combat repeatedly overcame them with his superior numbers, for he now had more than 10,000 soldiers.[21]
At the same time, in the western part of the island, a slave manager or vilicus named Cleon, himself a slave (also, naturally, accredited with religious and mystical powers) gathered together a slave army.
It is interesting that Cleon was a manager or overseer of slaves, that is to say, a man who was recognised by his master as having sufficient intelligence and strength of character to be put in charge of other slaves. History knows many similar examples of this kind of thing. It is known, for example, that most army mutinies were organised and led by sergeants or other non-commissioned officers. Such men tend also to be the natural leaders of the working class.
Diodorus continues:
Meanwhile a man named Cleon, a Cilician, began a revolt of still other slaves. And though there were high hopes everywhere that the revolutionary groups would come into conflict one with the other, and that the rebels, by destroying themselves, would free Sicily of strife, contrary to expectations the two groups joined forces, Cleon having subordinated himself to Eunus at his mere command, and discharging, as it were, the function of a general serving a king; his particular band numbered 5,000 men.[22]
The Roman sources are reluctantly obliged to pay tribute to the bravery of the rebel slaves:
Soon after, engaging in battle with a general arrived from Rome, Lucius Hypsaeus, who had 8,000 Sicilian troops, the rebels were victorious, since they now numbered 20,000. Before long their band reached a total of 200,000 [possibly this figure included women and children – AW], and in numerous battles with the Romans they acquitted themselves well, and failed but seldom.[23]
Significantly, news of the rebellion in Sicily sparked off uprisings of the slaves elsewhere – even in Rome:
As word of this was bruited about, a revolt of 150 slaves, banded together, flared up in Rome, of more than a thousand in Attica, and of yet others in Delos and many other places. But thanks to the speed with which forces were brought up and to the severity of their punitive measures, the magistrates of these communities at once disposed of the rebels and brought to their senses any who were wavering on the verge of revolt. In Sicily, however, the trouble grew. Cities were captured with all their inhabitants, and many armies were cut to pieces by the rebels, until Rupilius, the Roman commander, recovered Tauromenium for the Romans by placing it under strict siege and confining the rebels under conditions of unspeakable duress and famine: conditions such that, beginning by eating the children, they progressed to the women, and did not altogether abstain even from eating one another.[24]
The Roman Senate was obliged to dispatch the Roman army to end the slave war. The Roman accounts that have come down to us describe Eunus as more cunning than able; but it should be remembered that these reports were written by his enemies who would not wish to depict him in a favourable light.
His lieutenant, Cleon, was given the credit for the many victories he won over the Roman forces; but this may just be spite on the part of the latter. This rebel chief must have been a man of considerable ability to have maintained his position so long, and to have commanded the services of those said to have been his superiors. Cleon fell in battle, and Eunus was made prisoner, but died before he could be brought to punishment.
This was the first of a series of three slave revolts in the Roman Republic. A second lasted from 104 until 100 BC. The leader of this slave revolt, named Salvius, led the slaves in the east of Sicily, while Athenion led the western slaves. It took Rome four years to suppress the revolt.
The Roman consul, Manius Aquillius, quelled the revolt only after great effort. In addition to these slave uprisings, and the great, last and most famous uprising led by Spartacus, the war against Aristonicus and his ‘Heliopolites’ in Asia Minor was also in reality a war of the landowners against insurgent slaves.
In some cases the free labourers made common cause with the slaves. In fact, at one point, the whole island of Sicily fell into the hands of the slaves. According to even the most moderate estimates, the active slave army amounted to at least 70,000 men capable of bearing arms.[25]
The only way of assuring the total submission of the slaves after such revolts was by applying the most ruthless and brutal methods. Thus, in every case, the revolt ended with a massacre of the slaves. In the capital of Sicily, 150 slaves were executed, in Minturnae 450, and in Sinuessa, as many as 4,000. After the suppression of the revolt in Sicily the consul Publius Rupilius ordered that every rebel slave who was captured be crucified – some 20,000 in all.
From its humble origins Roman society had been completely transformed in its economic and social relations, but the republic remained in the hands of an exclusive aristocratic club. The political superstructure no longer corresponded to the economic base. This contradiction had to be resolved, and it was resolved through the most savage class struggle.
Endnotes
[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Vol. 1, p. 13.
[2] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 20.
[3] Bax, ‘Meetings with Engels’, Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, p. 306.
[4] Kautsky, The Foundations of Christianity, p. 29.
[5] Diodorus Siculus, Book 5, Chapters 36-38, quoted ibid., p. 33.
[6] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 1, p. 349.
[7] Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 434.
[8] Ibid., p. 437.
[9] Hunt, Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery, p. 50.
[10] Mommsen, Roman History, Vol. 3, p. 108.
[11] Quoted in Kautsky, The Foundations of Christianity, p. 39.
[12] Cato, On Agriculture, p. 9.
[13] Marx, ‘Letter to the Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky’, 1877, Marx and Engels Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895, pp. 354-5, emphasis in original.
[14] Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, MECW, Vol. 37, p. 330.
[15] Kautsky, The Foundations of Christianity, pp. 35-6.
[16] Ibid., p. 34.
[17] Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, MECW, Vol. 35, p. 207, note.
[18] Kautsky, The Foundations of Christianity, pp. 41-2.
[19] Pliny, Natural History, Book 33, quoted ibid., p. 46.
[20] Diodorus Siculus, Books 34/35, In Twelve Volumes, Vol. 12, pp. 79-81.
[21] Ibid., p. 65.
[22] Ibid., pp. 65-7.
[23] Ibid., p. 67.
[24] Ibid., pp. 67-9.
[25] Mommsen, History of Rome, Vol. 3, p. 104.