(2) Dionysius also states that Romulus gave Roman fathers the right to sell their own children into slavery. If they were not sold, these early slaves would be employed primarily in domestic work or labor side by side with their master in the fields. Some were given Roman citizenship by him, while others were put to death or enslaved. He and his followers became involved in skirmishes with neighboring peoples, including the Latins and the Etruscans, capturing many of them. (1) It is traditionally accepted that Romulus founded the community in 753 BC and was its first king. Dionysius gives information, which suggests that from its very foundation, there were slaves in Rome. He wrote a history of Rome from its humble beginnings through to the First Punic War. Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek rhetorician and historian who lived and taught in Rome in late 1st Century BC. For almost two hundred and fifty years it was ruled by a monarchy and its first king was the legendary Romulus. These qualities gave Rome a core of stability and self-sufficiency that preserved its society and helps to explain its continuity and expansion. Rome began as a small agricultural community about fifteen miles off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, and its earliest inhabitants advocated hard work, determination, and devotion to duty. How did a culture which began as a small farming community on the banks of the Tiber River come to have the numbers of slaves that they did in seemingly such a short period of time? What conditions in their society gave them the opportunities and power to acquire large numbers of slaves? And what were the effects of large-scale slavery on the people of Rome: both rich and poor? What types of work were slaves used for and were there economic repercussions for the people of Rome and Italy? Can it be said that the introduction of slaves into Roman society was interwoven with the building of an empire, and in many ways helped to precipitate it? Many other peripheral issues will undoubtedly find their way into the following analysis, helping to clarify the realities of slavery in the world of the Ancient Romans. Even the highly admired and influential civilization of the Ancient Romans did not escape the practise, which eventually came to play an integral role in how their society was run. Since the dawn of civilization there were always those who exercised control and power over other people in other words, in some form or another slavery has been a condition of our history. ![]() This course builds on this new scholarly energy to look at the root-and-branch way in which slavery shaped the ancient Greek and Roman world.Roman Slavery: Social, Cultural, Political, and Demographic Consequences - slaves, war, farmers, Punic Wars, latifundia, Cicero Roman Slavery: Social, Cultural, Political, and Demographic Consequences by Moya K. Slavery has attracted continuous scholarly attention for the past two generations, but discussion has been particularly lively in the past decade with the appearance of several works surveying the whole field (Bradley and Cartledge 2011, Hunt 2018, Vlassopoulos 2020, Hodkinson, Kleijwegt and Vlassopoulos ( online and forthcoming) ), and with a renewed interest in comparative history. ![]() The distinctive choices made in one Greek society or at one time emerge most clearly when compared with each other and with the choices made in one or other part of the Roman world at one or another time, and vice versa. Indeed, slavery offers us one of the best lenses through which to do comparative history both within the Greek and Roman worlds and between them. Slavery profoundly affected social, political, economic and cultural relations, but it did not determine them. But if slavery is something that unites Greece and Rome in opposition to us, slavery in the ancient world was not a single thing.
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