Slaves in the reliefs of Rome
The concept of Roman slavery:
Slavery is a human invention and is not found in nature. The man created it in order to fulfill its needs, and thus the servant became a speaking instrument.
Slaves began to appear in Rome since its foundation, where slaves worked in many different jobs as servants, or in fields and mines. The presence of slaves in Rome continued to enter the republican stage. I found many funerary inscriptions showing the work of slaves.
When the Roman expansion movement began in the Republican era, from the unification of the Italian peninsula, and the western and eastern Mediterranean countries, the number of slaves arriving to Rome as a trophy war or sold to the slave traders. From about 200 BC onward, Roman society became a large part of slaves. Rather, their economic and social systems became heavily dependent on their presence in the business, especially forced labor.
Sources of captured captives:
The ancient sources have provided us with the arrival of tens of thousands of captive slaves in every war fought by Rome. For example, the Roman leader Emelius Paulus, the victor in the battle of our hand Pydna over Greece in 168 BC He sent to Rome one hundred and fifty thousand of the Greeks to Rome were sold as slaves and he achieved behind it Huge money. Because of the large number of these slaves, they carried out many revolutions throughout the Roman Republic, the most important of which was the Spartacus revolt in Italy, which is a revolt revolt against the arbitrary policy that Rome violated with the slaves according to the republican law that the slave is not considered a person, but rather a property of his companions, and in this way he can assault him or Injured or killed without legal consequences. Although the revolution of the former slaves ended in failure and the killing of more than five thousand of them, it drew the attention of Roman politicians to this danger, so they began to change their conditions and free the slaves in what they known as the liberti, which began to appear in abundance in the late Republican and early imperial era.
The treatment of the masters of slaves:
The treatment of slaves began to improve somewhat in the imperial era, where they were involved in public life, due to taking the sermon from previous slave revolutions, and therefore the Romans improved the conditions of freed slaves in the first century AD, where they were entrusted with overseeing the Empire's money in the states, Collegian societies also appeared, granting some protection against their cruel masters, and even their desire for their final emancipation increased, until a number of freed slaves became rich and their children became full Roman citizens. The Roman people were very popular with their slaves after their death, as they often recommended the emancipation of all their slaves. Therefore, the first law was issued in the second year BC that specifies the number of emancipation, and it permits freeing half, if their total ranges from three to ten servants. The wealthy who owned hundreds of slaves were prevented from freeing more than five of them.
On the other hand, the presence of slaves in Rome in particular and Italy in general was not based on race, as slaves were located in Rome from all over Europe and the Mediterranean, including Gaul and Greece in particular where the Greek slave was fully preferred in Roman society.
It is worth noting that varying estimates of the spread of slaves within Rome. In the early first century B.C., slaves made up thirty percent of the Italian population. In the end of the same century it increased to thirty-five to forty percent. It is mentioned that one of the rich owned more than five hundred slaves, in addition to that the slaves who were in the service of the emperor amounted to twenty thousand slaves. However, after the emancipation had increased, the presence of slaves in Rome decreased in the imperial age, to reach twenty-five percent of the total population. With the advent of the Christian religion, the movement to free slaves increased and considered it a charity. Therefore, many emancipates converted to Christianity because of the teachings of the Christian religion that demand equal pay and fair treatment between the slave and his master.
Examples of these patterns:
Funerary Inscription for Petronia Hedone
Details of the pattern
This distinguished marble monument contains portrait busts of Petronia Hedone and her son in a niche, below which is a simple dedication written in well-formed Roman capital letters. While she is depicted as an elegant Roman matrons (note her hairdo described as similar Marciano's, the sister of Trajan), her name suggests that she is a freed woman of the Petronius family (see names). It is possible that her son, who wears toga-like clothing but not the bull of the freeborn young male, is also a former slave named Philemon, freed by Lucius Petronius and perhaps his son born in slavery (for another opinion see Klein's article on mothers and sons in I, Claudia II, Companion Bibliography). In addition, she made provision in her family tomb for the freed persons that she herself manumitted, as well as their families. There is no mention of a husband (he may have per-deceased her) or of patrons (from the mid 1st century CE freed person status was increasingly omitted from inscriptions), nor any indication of the source of her money from which she gave herself and her household so grand a funerary monument.