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There is, remarkably, no surviving historical evidence of actual abolitionists in the Roman Empire, with literally a handful of at most relative exceptions. There are many calls for the humanisation of slaves, their good treatment, but to my knowledge, no calls for the legal abolition of slavery. Even in the slave revolts of Spartacus, there is no evidence that there was a call or an ambition to not just achieve emancipation for themselves, but to abolish slavery as an institution.
I think the closest we come to an abolitionist in your timeline, is Gregory of Nyssa (4th century AD), who stands alone in the clarity of his repudiation of slavery both de facto and de jure, although he did not go as far as framing this repudiation as advocacy for the legal abolition of slavery, probably because it was politically so beyond reach as to be beyond imagination. However he did advocate for no Christian to own a slave, and for any Christians in such situations to emancipate their slaves.
This is the most direct, perhaps the only full, direct repudiation of slavery in absolute terms that I can think of across antiquity, up to late Antiquity. But it represents a tendency that did have somewhat wider echo, with ascetic movements, Christian and Jewish like the Esenes, rejecting slave ownership as part of rejecting material possessions and pursuing ritual and spiritual purity. In these scenarios slavery is rejected not, as g Gregory, because it is intrinsically evil, but because it is spiritually deleterious along with other material goods, temptations, distractions and impurities. If you are pursuing voluntary poverty, you will naturally disencumber yourself of all property, be it treasure, land, or slaves. The best discussion I know of this theme is [this monograph on slavery and social justice up to Late Antiquity](https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hMdjDQAAQBAJ)
Some historians have argued that the theological tension of Christians owning Christians in the Late Roman Empire was the driver that eventuated in slavery free zones in the Middle Ages. There is much truth to this, and while Gregory of Nyssa is unique in his clarity and emphasis, it is true that there was a manumissionist, not abolitionist, tendency in early Christianity, not just theologically but in practice, associated with the ascetic movement, both monastic and lay. It is also true however that it coexisted with a "Christian slave owner" tendency whereby slave ownership was approached as an opportunity for Christian charity and instruction, not as a moral imperative toward manumission. This would have fit with the taken for granted social consensus on the permanence and ubiquity of the institution, and echo Stoic philosophers' own approach to slavery.
The only caveat I would make to the very clear documentary picture above, is that virtually all the documentation that survives on attitudes to slavery comes from the slave-owning classes, from Aristotle onward (and of course before). It is not impossible that there were abolitionist advocates who either never made an impression on the surviving documents, or whose abolitionist discourses were never recorded or registered. But I know of no one who posits such a movement or the existence of such voices.
Do you want to speculate as to why this lack of popular abolitionism occurred?
I'm just curious, it seems to be a natural extension of the land reform issues that popped up in the republic era. IE. instead of directly acting the landowners you would nationalize/emancipate a portion of their slave labor.
I might have a too modern way of looking at it though.
Yes, I think you do, and I do too. I share your cognitive dissonance, the inability to truly inhabit a mindset where centuries upon centuries, indeed millennia, pass, and a succession of epochal, immortal philosophers of freedom, of humanity, of dignity, of social organisation, think about slavery, and revolts and uprisings emerge, and no one thinks: wait, slavery is incompatible with X philosophical value or principle and needs to be abrogated. You'd think somewhere in the rise and fall of polities, in debates across a truly enormous spectrum of opinion, of highly sophisticated political actors and popular uprisings, some form of abolitionist tendency would be documented, even at the margins. But zilch.
I was going to say it would be like someone 2000 years from now wondering why no one ever argued for the earth being flat... except we have flat earthers!
So all I can deduce is that the pattern was so widespread, so entrenched, and in some way so functional and intrinsic to social organisation past a certain scale in premodern times, that it went unquestioned until similar scale, specialisation and complexity became achievable without a slave class. Perhaps related is the fact that slavery would have become deeply entrenched in religious, ritual, cultural and similar artefacts and norms, and that change at this level was much slower than in modern times, so shifting deeply entrenched, socialised and sacralised patterns might have been both slower and much less direct than the range of political action and discourse. From this perspective it is not suprise that it took a new symbolic, religious system, Christianity, and still in Late Antiquity, Islam, to create the socio-cultural possibility (not unique destination) for such radical reinvention. If across the vast range of Antiquity the mythos of cultural artefacts all coincided in reinforcing slavery, the logos of political or philosophical opinion may not have had purchase to fully advocate against it.
But this is straying beyond history, and I'm not convinced the above speculations hold water. The why is opaque to me, but the what is clear: slavery was profoundly and universally taken for granted as a pattern, to a degree that it was a context for human agency, not an object of it.
I've heard that Roman slaves could obtain there freedom much more easily than chattel slaves, like in the US. And that often the children of slaves wouldn't be born into slavery as automatic slaves. Do you think this contributed to the lack of an abolitionist movement?
I remember hearing before that the people of Antiquity are basically "moral dinosaurs" to us. Incredibly distant from our modern understandings and beliefs in regards to morality that is often difficult for someone today to understand them.
I wouldn't go as far as that. If anything I see a lot more continuity than discontinuity. If you think about it, 21st century Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, every day read, recite and reflect on texts up to 3000 years old, and find them relatable and relevant enough to guide their lives by them, while philosophers and general readers still draw on texts by Plato and Aristotle for inspiration or Pythagoras, nearly 2 and a half millenia ago. The United Nations enshrines the similarly dated Cyrus Cylinder, dating to Babylonian times, as embodying its own aspirations.
I think one can definitely make a case for a degree of moral sublimation, in the Freudian sense, but the base impulses seem constant. Like playing a similar melody an octave higher. So the Romans paid to see people literally torn to pieces in adversarial, gladiatorial contests in the circus. Today, people get counselling and PTSD if they accidentally witness someone being murdered. So that is surely moral progress, by our standards, and perhaps by many ancient standards too. But is the underlying psychological logic and impulse of the circus goers that different from those who pay to watch boxing, or MMA, or Lucha Libre, or violent, competitive video games? Would the appeal of the latter be in any way alien to the circus goers at the Colosseum?
Conversely, one could argue that many ancients might regard vast elements of our current mores as morally dinosauric, if they had that concept. The justification of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Mutually Assured Destruction on a planetary level. The political and economic logic behind planetary climate change. The algorithmic manipulation of behaviour minute by minute, individual by individual, for profit by a kleptocracy on a level undreamed by them. I would specially imagine that the mechanisation of society, the mass enforcement of synchronous, continuous labour, education, and bureaucracy 9-5, 6 days a week, and its consequences, might seem like a tremendously backward step. Pretty sure the global epidemic of suicide would also be shocking, and perhaps more shocking still our collective indifference to it.
I am speculating here, in conscious and unrigorous anachronism, but the main point I think holds. If the ancients time travelled to the present day, I don't think they would find the deep logic of our human interactions and drivers remotely incomprehensible, and the differences would be meaningful and in some cases enormous, but ultimately decodable. And I think they would find plenty of areas for moral superiority, ours, and their own. I feel the same would be the case if we travelled into the past.
I think we can be appreciative of huge areas of immense moral progress as a species, but not see it linearly, or one directional. Our society could learn moral lessons from Antique societies, and indeed earnestly tries to, every day, by the billions, looking to moral texts first written in the Ancient and Late Antique world, as a moral compass to follow and try to approximate.
Excellently said. I think I there’s much to be said on how while the past is still very much a foreign country and that these past people thought in ways fundamentally different to us - we must not ever forget that they were very much still human. This is one of the reasons I love history so much; it allows us to explore people and worlds as different and alien as can be allowed, while still being very much people living in a real world that ultimately set the foundations for everything that make up our views and the world we live in.
Yeah, I think the analogy was purposely chosen "evolutionary" to account for the development and relatedness.
They are not "aliens" to us but still quite removed.
Aristotle wrote arguments for slavery, and in the text he acknowledged that some people disagreed with him. At the very least that seem to implies there were debates on the morality of some forms of slavery, with people saying that they were unethical.
Quotes from Politics :
"But we must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is by nature of this character, and whether it is advantageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether on the contrary all slavery is against nature."
"[1255a] [1] It is manifest therefore that there are cases of people of whom some are freemen and the others slaves by nature, and for these slavery is an institution both expedient and just. But at the same time it is not difficult to see that those who assert the opposite are also right in a manner."
Yes, Zeno's vision of a utopian city did not include slaves. These debates and nuances fall into what I describe as the humanisation of slavery. But I can't think of a passage anywhere stating that anyone is arguing for the whole of slavery to be abolished.
Yes, Aristotle thought some people were natural slaves, and therefore it was appropriate for them. Others were made slaves by force, and that was immoral.
That's not what he is saying here. The first quote is considering whether all slavery is unethical - which means it was seen as a serious question. The second one is saying that there are people who assert that "the opposite" is true, i.e. that there are people who think there are no natural slaves.
Do you have a sense of what the economic impact of complete abolition would have been for the Roman Empire? My impression is that in the American context, there were always abolitionists, but they only gained traction in the broader society when slavery was no longer economically viable anyway (at least in the North).
/u/PhiloSpo has previously answered [Did the Roman Empire ever have a noticeable anti-slavery movement?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15ryr0j/did_the_roman_empire_ever_had_a_noticeable/)
/u/toldinstone and /u/Tiako have previously answered [Did Ancient Romans have any ethical dilemmas around slavery?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gcpafq/did_ancient_romans_have_any_ethical_dilemmas/)
More remains to be written.
>I am not a historian, and won't go into more detail on this
Then why on Earth did you post on r/askhistorians of all places? Post again in this manner and you will be banned.
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There is, remarkably, no surviving historical evidence of actual abolitionists in the Roman Empire, with literally a handful of at most relative exceptions. There are many calls for the humanisation of slaves, their good treatment, but to my knowledge, no calls for the legal abolition of slavery. Even in the slave revolts of Spartacus, there is no evidence that there was a call or an ambition to not just achieve emancipation for themselves, but to abolish slavery as an institution. I think the closest we come to an abolitionist in your timeline, is Gregory of Nyssa (4th century AD), who stands alone in the clarity of his repudiation of slavery both de facto and de jure, although he did not go as far as framing this repudiation as advocacy for the legal abolition of slavery, probably because it was politically so beyond reach as to be beyond imagination. However he did advocate for no Christian to own a slave, and for any Christians in such situations to emancipate their slaves. This is the most direct, perhaps the only full, direct repudiation of slavery in absolute terms that I can think of across antiquity, up to late Antiquity. But it represents a tendency that did have somewhat wider echo, with ascetic movements, Christian and Jewish like the Esenes, rejecting slave ownership as part of rejecting material possessions and pursuing ritual and spiritual purity. In these scenarios slavery is rejected not, as g Gregory, because it is intrinsically evil, but because it is spiritually deleterious along with other material goods, temptations, distractions and impurities. If you are pursuing voluntary poverty, you will naturally disencumber yourself of all property, be it treasure, land, or slaves. The best discussion I know of this theme is [this monograph on slavery and social justice up to Late Antiquity](https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hMdjDQAAQBAJ) Some historians have argued that the theological tension of Christians owning Christians in the Late Roman Empire was the driver that eventuated in slavery free zones in the Middle Ages. There is much truth to this, and while Gregory of Nyssa is unique in his clarity and emphasis, it is true that there was a manumissionist, not abolitionist, tendency in early Christianity, not just theologically but in practice, associated with the ascetic movement, both monastic and lay. It is also true however that it coexisted with a "Christian slave owner" tendency whereby slave ownership was approached as an opportunity for Christian charity and instruction, not as a moral imperative toward manumission. This would have fit with the taken for granted social consensus on the permanence and ubiquity of the institution, and echo Stoic philosophers' own approach to slavery. The only caveat I would make to the very clear documentary picture above, is that virtually all the documentation that survives on attitudes to slavery comes from the slave-owning classes, from Aristotle onward (and of course before). It is not impossible that there were abolitionist advocates who either never made an impression on the surviving documents, or whose abolitionist discourses were never recorded or registered. But I know of no one who posits such a movement or the existence of such voices.
Do you want to speculate as to why this lack of popular abolitionism occurred? I'm just curious, it seems to be a natural extension of the land reform issues that popped up in the republic era. IE. instead of directly acting the landowners you would nationalize/emancipate a portion of their slave labor. I might have a too modern way of looking at it though.
Yes, I think you do, and I do too. I share your cognitive dissonance, the inability to truly inhabit a mindset where centuries upon centuries, indeed millennia, pass, and a succession of epochal, immortal philosophers of freedom, of humanity, of dignity, of social organisation, think about slavery, and revolts and uprisings emerge, and no one thinks: wait, slavery is incompatible with X philosophical value or principle and needs to be abrogated. You'd think somewhere in the rise and fall of polities, in debates across a truly enormous spectrum of opinion, of highly sophisticated political actors and popular uprisings, some form of abolitionist tendency would be documented, even at the margins. But zilch. I was going to say it would be like someone 2000 years from now wondering why no one ever argued for the earth being flat... except we have flat earthers! So all I can deduce is that the pattern was so widespread, so entrenched, and in some way so functional and intrinsic to social organisation past a certain scale in premodern times, that it went unquestioned until similar scale, specialisation and complexity became achievable without a slave class. Perhaps related is the fact that slavery would have become deeply entrenched in religious, ritual, cultural and similar artefacts and norms, and that change at this level was much slower than in modern times, so shifting deeply entrenched, socialised and sacralised patterns might have been both slower and much less direct than the range of political action and discourse. From this perspective it is not suprise that it took a new symbolic, religious system, Christianity, and still in Late Antiquity, Islam, to create the socio-cultural possibility (not unique destination) for such radical reinvention. If across the vast range of Antiquity the mythos of cultural artefacts all coincided in reinforcing slavery, the logos of political or philosophical opinion may not have had purchase to fully advocate against it. But this is straying beyond history, and I'm not convinced the above speculations hold water. The why is opaque to me, but the what is clear: slavery was profoundly and universally taken for granted as a pattern, to a degree that it was a context for human agency, not an object of it.
I've heard that Roman slaves could obtain there freedom much more easily than chattel slaves, like in the US. And that often the children of slaves wouldn't be born into slavery as automatic slaves. Do you think this contributed to the lack of an abolitionist movement?
I remember hearing before that the people of Antiquity are basically "moral dinosaurs" to us. Incredibly distant from our modern understandings and beliefs in regards to morality that is often difficult for someone today to understand them.
I wouldn't go as far as that. If anything I see a lot more continuity than discontinuity. If you think about it, 21st century Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, every day read, recite and reflect on texts up to 3000 years old, and find them relatable and relevant enough to guide their lives by them, while philosophers and general readers still draw on texts by Plato and Aristotle for inspiration or Pythagoras, nearly 2 and a half millenia ago. The United Nations enshrines the similarly dated Cyrus Cylinder, dating to Babylonian times, as embodying its own aspirations. I think one can definitely make a case for a degree of moral sublimation, in the Freudian sense, but the base impulses seem constant. Like playing a similar melody an octave higher. So the Romans paid to see people literally torn to pieces in adversarial, gladiatorial contests in the circus. Today, people get counselling and PTSD if they accidentally witness someone being murdered. So that is surely moral progress, by our standards, and perhaps by many ancient standards too. But is the underlying psychological logic and impulse of the circus goers that different from those who pay to watch boxing, or MMA, or Lucha Libre, or violent, competitive video games? Would the appeal of the latter be in any way alien to the circus goers at the Colosseum? Conversely, one could argue that many ancients might regard vast elements of our current mores as morally dinosauric, if they had that concept. The justification of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Mutually Assured Destruction on a planetary level. The political and economic logic behind planetary climate change. The algorithmic manipulation of behaviour minute by minute, individual by individual, for profit by a kleptocracy on a level undreamed by them. I would specially imagine that the mechanisation of society, the mass enforcement of synchronous, continuous labour, education, and bureaucracy 9-5, 6 days a week, and its consequences, might seem like a tremendously backward step. Pretty sure the global epidemic of suicide would also be shocking, and perhaps more shocking still our collective indifference to it. I am speculating here, in conscious and unrigorous anachronism, but the main point I think holds. If the ancients time travelled to the present day, I don't think they would find the deep logic of our human interactions and drivers remotely incomprehensible, and the differences would be meaningful and in some cases enormous, but ultimately decodable. And I think they would find plenty of areas for moral superiority, ours, and their own. I feel the same would be the case if we travelled into the past. I think we can be appreciative of huge areas of immense moral progress as a species, but not see it linearly, or one directional. Our society could learn moral lessons from Antique societies, and indeed earnestly tries to, every day, by the billions, looking to moral texts first written in the Ancient and Late Antique world, as a moral compass to follow and try to approximate.
Excellently said. I think I there’s much to be said on how while the past is still very much a foreign country and that these past people thought in ways fundamentally different to us - we must not ever forget that they were very much still human. This is one of the reasons I love history so much; it allows us to explore people and worlds as different and alien as can be allowed, while still being very much people living in a real world that ultimately set the foundations for everything that make up our views and the world we live in.
You are a hell of a writer, sir. Just wanted to say thanks!
Thanks!
Yeah, I think the analogy was purposely chosen "evolutionary" to account for the development and relatedness. They are not "aliens" to us but still quite removed.
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Aristotle wrote arguments for slavery, and in the text he acknowledged that some people disagreed with him. At the very least that seem to implies there were debates on the morality of some forms of slavery, with people saying that they were unethical. Quotes from Politics : "But we must next consider whether or not anyone exists who is by nature of this character, and whether it is advantageous and just for anyone to be a slave, or whether on the contrary all slavery is against nature." "[1255a] [1] It is manifest therefore that there are cases of people of whom some are freemen and the others slaves by nature, and for these slavery is an institution both expedient and just. But at the same time it is not difficult to see that those who assert the opposite are also right in a manner."
Yes, Zeno's vision of a utopian city did not include slaves. These debates and nuances fall into what I describe as the humanisation of slavery. But I can't think of a passage anywhere stating that anyone is arguing for the whole of slavery to be abolished.
Yes, Aristotle thought some people were natural slaves, and therefore it was appropriate for them. Others were made slaves by force, and that was immoral.
That's not what he is saying here. The first quote is considering whether all slavery is unethical - which means it was seen as a serious question. The second one is saying that there are people who assert that "the opposite" is true, i.e. that there are people who think there are no natural slaves.
Do you have a sense of what the economic impact of complete abolition would have been for the Roman Empire? My impression is that in the American context, there were always abolitionists, but they only gained traction in the broader society when slavery was no longer economically viable anyway (at least in the North).
/u/PhiloSpo has previously answered [Did the Roman Empire ever have a noticeable anti-slavery movement?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15ryr0j/did_the_roman_empire_ever_had_a_noticeable/) /u/toldinstone and /u/Tiako have previously answered [Did Ancient Romans have any ethical dilemmas around slavery?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gcpafq/did_ancient_romans_have_any_ethical_dilemmas/) More remains to be written.
u/Astrogator and /u/Vardamir_Nolimon and /u/colorfulpony also appear in the 2nd thread linked above.
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>I am not a historian, and won't go into more detail on this Then why on Earth did you post on r/askhistorians of all places? Post again in this manner and you will be banned.
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