The Roman way of thinking was also fundamentally conservative in that they though everything had been better in the olden times.
Those times were extremely progressive. And many of the social accomplishments, like the right to ignore your parents religion, equality between men and women ... were fought over and achieved in those times (well, before those times, really, but that wasn't how Cicero saw things).
I would also like to point out that Roman slavery was not at all the same as Islamic slavery (which is what we think of when saying "slavery", and even then you could rightly argue that "most" islamic slavery was different. Islamic slavery after economic collapse is the model we think of as slavery. Not pleasant). Slaves, in the Roman republic, or the Roman empire, mostly went home in the evening (and all -save slaves of the justice system- had the choice to go home). They enjoyed health care. They lived in apartment blocks (yes, really), which may or may not have had plumbing (granted, plumbing was for the very rich slaves).
Incidentally there were very rich slaves, a fact even true in Islamic times. You see, most jobs aside from market trader/"CEO" were slave jobs. Doctor ? Most likely a slave. Architect ? Slave. Factory "manager" ? Slave. Very high government administrators, like the director of the Colliseum ? Slave.
Slavery did not mean you were poor, or that you were imprisoned. Not at all. With the exception of "justice" slaves (ie. convicted -rightly or otherwise- criminals). Those were the people working in the mines and on the galleys.
And in ancient Rome, as I pointed out, you could pay for more services than you can today. I don't even necessarily mean that in a bad way. Sure, you could pay for sex acts, but equally you could pay to have fine metalwork done (in fact, doctors did that quite often). Women slaves were married, and generally not to their "owners", and had high functions themselves (negotiations for building things, for instance, were often carried out by women).
I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".
Nope. Only if so specified in the contract (of course, some slaves were explicitly hired for sexual services, just like today some people are hired for sexual services, from porn production to "hospitality services"). Also I do believe that rape was never covered, although sexual services might indeed be the expected "work" that the slave was contracted for, certainly.
Again, this is not really different for today. Would you say a porn actor/actress is "raped" ? Because in some ways you could say that their boss has them raped. How about people hired into brothels (and paid), who don't even know who they agree to have sex with when hired ?
> kids could be sold at will by the owner
Nope. Although there is some confusion. Kids were generally expected to help with their parents until a certain age, at which age they were free men/women. At that point, they could enter into a slavery contract (paid, was one of the conditions).
Generally there were various protections in slave contracts, against, for instance, large differences in job function. If an owner violated those, a slave could have the contract reviewed and gain his/her freedom.
It's not that different from the position of employee today. You can be "sold" in the sense that anyone can buy their way into becoming your boss (assuming your current boss agrees on the price, just like back then), and you cannot just immediately leave for just that.
> Slaves did not have any kind of legal rights.
Yes they did. The fundamental right any slave had was to ask for a review of their status, and whether the contract was upheld. Any and all slaves, even convicted slaves, had that right. There were various other rights that most slaves had, and generally the contracts specified extra rights. And, as I said, most slaves, especially in Rome, were not "fulltime" slaves. On remote farms, it was of customary for slaves to stay on the owner's property, for obvious reasons.
> some was able to save up buy their freedom if the owner allowed it
Roman slaves were always freed after a given amount of time. Granted, the state kept extending that time, but it was limited even at the very end (I believe to 10y for private owners, 20y for the state).
Even state slaves had "side jobs". For instance, most gladiators had a funny side income, and the state actually allowed and helped them with that. They would perform sexual services for any woman willing to pay for those (and apparently they commanded a very high price) on their off days. (note there were female gladiators too, even though not many, and yes they did the same. I believe one of the texts even points out that most of their customers were also female, and yes, any gladiator could refuse to do this, even though that was not a good way to make yourself popular).
Gladiator contracts are some of the known contracts, for instance. There were provisions that if you were killed (few non-convicted gladiators were, incidentally) the state would provide for your family or parents. You were allowed to have the above-mentioned side job, and you agreed to allow the Praetorian guard and 2 other military organizations to hire you if they wanted to, but you were allowed to limit your work there to, I believe 2 years or so (again, it is written that this is how they recruited officers, so essentially no-one ever left, though quite a few were killed along with the person they were protecting. BTW quite a few means a few dozen over 3 centuries).
> killed in gruesome ways like with crucifixion
Nope, although the state famously did that en masse to slaves (and some free men and women) in Spartacus' slave revolt, and on a smaller scale after that. I'm not saying that was OK, but I do hope you see that those were the state exercising punitive legal action on criminals, and not owners just doing that to their slaves for fun (like actually happened in the Ottoman empire, for example, killing/hunting slaves for fun)
> I wouldn't call this "extremely progressive".
Extremely progressive relates to what personal (non-criminal even) actions would get you banned out of polite society, or worse. In that regard, Rome was extremely progressive.
Senators in Rome were famous for just how far they went with this. Apparently in the Senate throwing a birthday party for someone else, and inviting 250+ prostitutes was, aside from the shear number of prostitutes, not a rare occurrence in the last years of the republic. Likewise having male-male, or female-female relationships, even with prostitutes was likely to improve rather than detract from your social status.
I understand that that doesn't mean doing this was free.
Let's say Trump, or Obama, or Clinton if you like, did the same. Let's say they all get together (spouses and children included), hire every prostitute on the west coast, and make a night of it, including gay and lesbian relations with prostitutes and guests, then brag about it in congress. Do you think society would understand ? Even the French, who seem to tolerate the president having a mistress, would kick out any politician, or anyone else, for that.
That's what I mean by progressive.
Just see Wikipedia for a start: Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Slaves did not usually have contracts. It was possible to sell yourself or your kids into slavery, but slaves were usually taken from conquered peoples and sold on the market. They had no say in what they would be used for. They were not automatically freed, and children of slaves became slaves. I don't know if owners would kill their slaves for fun - they were expensive property after all - but under Antonius Pius it became illegal to kill slaves without "just cause". Which means until then it was fully legal to kill your slaves for fun.
As the wikipedia page explains in the early republic and before the last days of the republic most slaves were conquered slaves. However that supply dried up quite a while before the first emperor.
After that, most slaves in Rome were people that had sold themselves into slavery (or were sold by their parents) and by the time Rome was a real republic this had term limits, as well as rights, starting with the basic right to challenge their status in court. Over time, more rights were granted. Read on in the wikipedia article, it does talk about this.
> Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves.
(this is not talking about the right to challenge their status, this is about filing complaints, eventually even against "cruel treatment" and so on)
From that same page, the "conclusion" if you will, the standing slaves had by the end of the empire.
> Several emperors began to grant more rights to slaves as the empire grew. Claudius announced that if a slave was abandoned by his master, he became free. Nero granted slaves the right to complain against their masters in a court. And under Antoninus Pius, a master who killed a slave without just cause could be tried for homicide.[71] Legal protection of slaves continued to grow as the empire expanded. It became common throughout the mid to late 2nd century CE to allow slaves to complain of cruel or unfair treatment by their owners.[72]
I am not saying Roman society was just by modern standards, it was not. I would mention though, especially in the east, but also in the west, it was far better than what was to follow. And, as the wikipedia article mentions, in Rome at least (and presumably in most large Roman cities) it was a better fate to be a slave than to be a free urban poor. To be a (voluntary - not a convicted) "public" slave came with pretty good social standing.
The section about Asclepius mentions a few of the horrible things Rome did to slaves, especially earlier in the republic.
Come on, stop bullshitting.
That is spectacularly dishonest comparison.
Also, the crime of those crucified slaves was not wanting to he slaves anymore.
And no, my emplyer can not sell me. I can leave my employer whenever I decides to.
It's interesting, you guys having this discussion because it's one of the perennial topics in world history. Has humanity been on a trend towards more individual liberty and compassion over time? Does "the moral arch of the universe bend towards justice"? Or do these ideas come and go, at different times in different places with an occasional combined trend? Is it all just a boisterous sea tide, rising and falling with eddies with eddies, spirals of change atop larger spirals?
This is the day you're waiting for, i.e. 'when it's ok to do that'?
Yes, it is.
“Slave” was a broad and diverse category in Rome, so let’s examine some of what you ignored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short.
Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law[2] unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced.
Sometimes slaves stood on revolving stands, and around each slave for sale hung a type of plaque describing his or her origin, health, character, intelligence, education, and other information pertinent to purchasers. Prices varied with age and quality, with the most valuable slaves fetching high prices. Because the Romans wanted to know exactly what they were buying, slaves were presented naked.
Slaves numbering in the tens of thousands were condemned to work in the mines or quarries, where conditions were notoriously brutal.[57] Damnati in metallum ("those condemned to the mine") were convicts who lost their freedom as citizens (libertas), forfeited their property (bona) to the state, and became servi poenae, slaves as a legal penalty. Their status under the law was different from that of other slaves; they could not buy their freedom, be sold, or be set free. They were expected to live and die in the mines.[60] Imperial slaves and freedmen (the familia Caesaris) worked in mine administration and management.
Of course it’s not just slaves who could have it rough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias
The laws of the Twelve Tables required the pater familias to ensure that "obviously deformed" infants were put to death.
The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas. The pater familias had the power to approve or reject marriages of his sons and daughters; however, an edict of Emperor Augustus provided that the pater familias could not withhold that permission lightly.
Adult filii remained under the authority of their pater and could not themselves acquire the rights of a pater familias while he lived. Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.
Children "emancipated" by a pater familias were effectively disinherited.
Soooo progressive...
From no existing government, to aristocratic, military government, to trade gaining power, to some sort of consensus government, eventually leading to democracy, to trade decline, to oppressive government, to self-destructing government.
Likewise and somewhat independent, society evolves from extreme liberal (like in some Greek city states, or the Roman empire, where you could rent a room in temple with a big bath where you could have sex. In the room above, a bull would be slaughtered so a stream of blood would drip down on your bodies. Note: this was marketed to women, not men, and came with an optional male partner, I think even the Kardashians would consider that going more than a bit too far), to absurdly conservative (pretty much all of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, for example), back to liberal, back to extreme conservatism.
And the amazing thing is that everyone, all these movements, from the puritans to today's women empowerment warriors, from the Roman Empire to Washington to Lichtenstein's government, see themselves as the first ones ever to do X, constantly, all the time, when in reality it seems to be a cycle that rotates around in about 1.5 to 2 centuries or so. And one the one hand that's true : there's something unique about almost everything, every movement. But 99% of what such movements stand for are duplicates of their former selves. It's just that the people in them are not at all aware of any of it.
Say, society moving away from the Church was of course, according to those who did it, the first time ever this happened (not what had happened ~80 times before, almost always in times of large economic expansion). They were smarter than everyone and "reason" was going to save the world (mostly because it had a few successes). If you go back to the time of the French revolution, of course, you'd see that the same happened, and then ... the great economy faltered ... and despite all the reason in the world (note: governments "based on reason" can easily match governments based on faith in cruelty and pettiness. In fact I would say that despite the general feeling the reason "based" governments are the worse ones. And yes, by that I mean that in times of economic desperation they're worse, far worse in fact, than things like the inquisition).
But no, the generations of the 1990s and 2000s are utterly convinced they are the first ones to ever see "the church for what it is", and that they'll just make the economy perfect and everyone happy and all will be well, because science and reason will save us all.
And when listening to grandpa you realize that the 1920s were just like that ... and the 1960s. And the 1930s and 1970s-80s ? Oh well. But those were smaller cycles, sooner or later a big shift will hit us again. It's been a while.
Coming up next: nope ... science and reason do not in fact guarantee a nice economy, do not in fact save us all. There was a nice economy, for reasons independent of religion, tolerance and this period will end, just like all other periods before it and people will flee back to faith, extreme conservatism, just like they've done so many times before.