Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman World
Romulus founded Rome in 753 BCE by opening the gates to enslaved men and making them free citizens. Then on, the story of Rome became ‘the winner gets to take all the losers’ stuff and ‘as many of the losers as they could carry’. Julius Caesar boasted of enslaving one million Gauls. By 146 BCE (victory over Carthage), Romans were ‘so rich they didn’t know what to do with themselves except turn on one another’. Slaves turned on them, too, in three Servile Wars. Chapter 6 is ‘Spartacus time’.
Millions of enslaved people performed the labour that kept their masters in power, and for most of them, we don’t even know their names. To the Domini, slaves were ‘lazy’, ‘treacherous’, had ‘servile natures’ or ‘always lied’ and thus had to be tortured if testifying in court. Southon takes us through the streets of Rome, naming and personifying each baker, fuller, temple worker whose record exists. A slave is being crucified in the square. Sentence after sentence, Southon rehumanises the statistics (‘your child, your mum, your brother’).
I loved the way she uses emotive language and swearwords (even, liberally, the F-word) to denote her outrage. (She calls Octavian a ‘repulsive little warlord’; Cato the Elder is ‘an unbearable pr***’; St. Jerome an ‘arch-Christian weirdo’.) She utterly destroys revisionists who paint ancient Roman slavery as benign and avuncular, stressing that enslavement was ‘a long, brutal process of domination, violence and the stripping of dignity’.
It is rare to read a book of history that is so full of emotion. We relish anecdotes like that of Callistus, who rose to such prominence under the patronage of Caligula that he got his revenge by refusing his former Dominus at the door.
To our shame, there are still 50 million people in slavery today.
