#roman slavery

[mythologypaintings]

Cupid Fleeing from Slavery

Artist: Joseph-Marie Vien (French, 1716–1809)

Date: 1789

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, France

Description

"Cupid Fleeing From Slavery" depicts the Roman god of love, Cupid, escaping from a situation where he is being held captive, often symbolized by chains or bonds, usually with a frantic and energetic movement, signifying his desire for freedom and the inherent power of love to break free from constraints; it's a classic representation of love's rebellious nature and its resistance to being controlled

[greatrunner]

No one should be allowed to publish their "slave fic romance" or "master/slave" (published or fanfiction) until they've been (1) put through the rigors of historical slavery texts and (2) can demonstrate critical thinking and analysis about the severity of slavery and how it still influences our societies today. In particular, how [white] folks have minimized it on various levels.

That shit is not a "kink" or wank material, you closeted white supremacist.

[ancientstuff]

This sounds like it was an absolutely miserable existence.

[anmebur]

[musewrangler]

“General,” he stated, chest heaving in exertion, but a small smile on his lips. “It is good to see you man alive, sir.”

“I would like to say the same of you, Piett, but I can see you are injured. Where…?”

But he’d spotted the arrow lodged in the man’s chest, right near the collarbone where the leather of his cuirass did not cover.

Piett nodded and made no effort to dismount even though his horse had stopped, her head hanging low and her sides heaving.

“Lucky shot,” he managed, listing a little in the saddle. “Not…not life threatening, but inconvenient. I…”

But he really did begin to tip here and Max swore, leaping forward along with Travus to catch him as he slid slowly from the saddle.

And that was blood all down the saddle and the mare’s sweating flank…

“Firmus,” Max breathed, fear freezing his lungs.

[duxfemina]

There's a really good book on Roman Slavery called

Slavery in the Roman World by Sandra R Joshel

To start thinking about Roman slavery is to stare into an infinite abyss of deliberate human suffering. The Roman Empire is considered to be one of the genuine slave states in human history, in that, like the antebellum Southern states of America, it could not exist without slavery. Slavery was the social and economic foundation upon which the entire Roman Empire rested. But while the slave states of Louisiana and Virginia lasted 150 years before abolition, the Roman Empire stood on the backs of unimaginable numbers of enslaved men, women and children for almost a thousand years. A thousand years is thirty-four generations of people enslaved to the Romans. A thousand years before the year I wrote this, King Cnut was glaring down the sea. A thousand years is an immense amount of time. And they didn’t just have domestic slaves, they had vast mines across the Empire for silver, lead, gold, iron and copper. Google the Las Médulas mines in Spain and imagine the sixty thousand enslaved people who worked there twenty-four hours a day to produce the gold the Roman Empire demanded, and then multiply that by hundreds of years and hundreds of sites and all those lives that were sent to toil for nothing and join me staring into this bottomless pit of Roman horror. Then picture the near infinite acres of land owned by the Gaius Caecilius Isidoruses and Melanias of the Roman world, each maintained by chain gangs of hundreds of enslaved people. And on top of that were those enslaved in the house, the cooks and cleaners and washers and dressers, the people enslaved by the state who maintained the aqueducts and laid the roads and built all those temples and fora across the vast Empire and fought fires and carried the emperor in his litter. A general estimate (which means, of course, a total guess but a guess from someone I’d trust in a quantitative situation) is that there were between 4.8 and 8.4 million enslaved people in the Roman Empire at any time, with the city of Rome‘s population including anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent enslaved people. Millions and millions and millions of lives, each a person with a heart full of love and hate and envy and joy and aching knees and sore eyes and dreams and thoughts and desires and hopes, all of whom were owned by another person and subject to the most extraordinary violence every day.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

[communistkenobi]

On the one hand, slavery represented the most radical rural degradation of labour imaginable - the conversion of men themselves into inert means of production by their deprivation of every social right and their legal assimilation to beasts of burden: in Roman theory, the agricultural slave was designated an instrumentum vocale, the speaking tool, one grade away from the livestock that constituted an instrumentum semi-vocale, and two from the implement which was an instrumentum mutum. On the other hand, slavery was simultaneously the most drastic urban commercialization of labour conceivable: the reduction of the total person of the labourer to a standard object of sale and purchase, in metropolitan markets of commodity exchange.

— Perry Anderson (1974), Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, pp. 24-25

I always knew that the Roman Empire probably wasn’t great to live in for a variety of reasons but reading about the obscene amounts of chattel slavery they were doing is really driving home why all the fascist guys on twitter are obsessed with this period of history

[bvckbiter]

fandom talks too little about hylla and reyna. reyna killed her father when she thought he'd killed hylla. hylla dragged them out of puerto rico and found them sanctuary and employment on circe's island AND became one of circe's favorites. then when they got captured by blackbeard hylla also got them out of that situation by out-pirating literal immortal pirates. then in a span of three years, they split up, found their own ways to the amazons and cj, and became the leaders of their respective factions. when hylla's queenship was being threatened by otrera in son, she plotted a counter-coup and defeated an amazon queen who couldn't die two nights in a row in one-on-one combat, THEN led her cavalry to camp jupiter. (ik this woman slept like a corpse for a week afterwards). hylla used reyna as an absolutely ruthless bait-and-switch to capture orion, and all reyna said in response to that was, "bet." reyna carries insurmountable amounts of both guilt and gratitude towards her sister. even though they havent seen each other in a while, hylla still drops everything and does everything in her power to save her baby sister when she knows reyna needs her.

[sforzesco]

Blood in the Arena: the Spectacle of Roman Power, Alison Futrell

[wanderingmind867]

"Oh, please! You're from the Roman Camp, aren't you? Rome was built on slavery. Don't get all high and mighty with me!"

Rick, why do you throw the jabs only at Rome? I'm pretty sure Ancient Greece had slavery too. And I know this is just an example of Phineas being evil, but this is slander against Rome! Treating Rome like it's worse than other cultures! When we all know many civilizations had slavery, not just Rome. So really: Why do you seem to hate Rome, Rick Riordan!?

The only major roman we meet who has no connections to the greeks or any other pantheons is probably Octavian, and you portray him like a monster! Yet when you had Luke doing evil on the Greek side, you tried to paint him as a sympathetic antagonist! Why do you have such a prejudice against the mighty culture of Rome!? Why!?

[anmebur]

[wiirocku]

Romans 8:15 (NASB1995) - For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a Spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!”

[fleurbleedinghearts]

Paris deserves the nuance people give Hades

Especially since there are actually sources where Helen goes willingly …ok, we all know Aphrodite definitely played a part in her feelings

but the point it’s not all Paris’s fault and I’ve seen Zeus get more blame for Hades kidnapping Persephone than Aphrodite or any of the gods get in the Paris situation.

It's always "fuck Paris" "Paris" this "Paris" that, while everyone goes their merry way simping for niecenapper Hades who doesn't have a single historic myth that claims Persephone went willingly.

[p-clodius-pulcher]

Sexual violence and exploitation are inherent to imperialism and any discussion of imperialism that shies away from these subjects is disingenuous and flawed. I know lots of people on this site (myself included) engage with Ancient Rome and its history as a hobby, but that is not an excuse to not be aware or willing to discuss the unsavoury parts of its existence and legacy.

[sforzesco]

CAESAR AUGUSTUS AND MARCUS LICINIUS CRASSUS

this is about the spolia opima that crassus was robbed of lmao. like, yeah okay octavian could've asked him not to claim it, but nevertheless. a kind of theft happened there.

Fact and Fiction: Crassus, Augustus, and the Spolia Opima, Catherine McPherson

[fluentisonus]

getting a number of tags like these on my post and idk. like i want to say that i'm an extremely big fan of the importance of context & setting when it comes to approaching history, it's deeply important to keep in mind at every point. but at the same time i feel really weird about how much people feel the instinctive need to separate roman slavery and e.g. 19th century slavery, & how uncomfortable people seem to be with any comparison or association between the two beyond 'both being slavery'. there were absolutely notable differences (the racial aspect for a major one) but the way people seem to sort of historically quarantine them as things that happened entirely independently of each other & not acknowledge any similar systems or characteristics that might draw parallels between the two is. idk. i think historical comparison can be a very valuable tool & i feel like it's worth examining why people think there's nothing at all roman in 19th c slavery etc etc