Under Roman law, enslaved people had no personal rights and were regarded as the property of their masters. They could be bought, sold, and mistreated at will and were unable to own property, enter into a contract, or legally marry.
Most of what we know today comes from texts written by masters. These authors had little interest in describing servants’ daily lives and they only present us with polarised depictions of enslaved individuals. They are presented either as stereotypical ‘good slaves’ or, more commonly, as ‘bad’, ‘disloyal’, ‘lazy’ and deceitful people. Despite the text’s elite bias, we get a sense of how differently people could be treated, often based on their occupations and skills.
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Some of the worst working conditions were those in mines or quarries. Enslaved people were forced to work with no respite, in deep, dark and narrow tunnels. The work was both physically demanding and dangerous, with the tunnels risking collapse. Describing the harrowing working conditions in Spanish mines, the historian Diodorus Siculus wrote in 1st century BC:
… the slaves who are engaged in the working of [the mines] produce for their masters’ revenues in sums defying belief, but they themselves wear out their bodies both by day and by night in the diggings under the earth, dying in large numbers because of the exceptional hardships they endure. For no respite or pause is granted them in their labours, but compelled beneath blows of the overseers to endure the severity of their plight, they throw away their lives in this wretched manner […]; indeed death in their eyes is more to be desired than life, because of the magnitude of the hardships they must bear.
– (Diodorus Siculus 5.38.1)
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The enslaved were also employed to work in agricultural settings. In Treatise on agriculture, writer Columella advises owners on how to treat the agricultural enslaved. He recommends a balance in order to achieve the greatest amount of labour while avoiding making living conditions so hard servants might rebel. It’s likely many masters, if not most, ignored Columella’s advice and were far harsher, if not openly abusive. On the other hand, the philosopher Seneca, writing in AD 55-56, recommended a humane treatment of one’s servant on moral grounds.
It is creditable to a man to keep within reasonable bounds in his treatment of his slaves. Even in the case of a human chattel one ought to consider, not how much one can torture him with impunity, but how far such treatment is permitted by natural goodness and justice, which prompts us to act kindly towards even prisoners of war and slaves bought for a price (how much more towards free-born, respectable gentlemen?), and not to treat them with scornful brutality as human chattels, but as persons somewhat below ourselves in station, who have been placed under our protection rather than assigned to us as servants.
– (Seneca, Clem. 1.18.2)
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