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The extent to which slaves were used as a labour force in farming is disputed. It is certain that rural slavery was very common in Athens, and that ancient Greece did not have the immense slave populations found on the Roman latifundia. Corinthian black-figure terra-cotta votive tablet of slaves working in a mine, dated to the late seventh ...
In 748, Venetian slave traders were noted to buy slaves in Rome. [7] Trade in Christian slaves from Western Europe was however deeply disliked by the Catholic church and was stopped early on. In 840, Venice signed a pact with other Italian cities to return fugitive slaves, and to not seize Christians to be sold as slaves. [8]
"Slaves are either born or made" (servi aut nascuntur aut fiunt): [166] in the ancient Roman world, people might become enslaved as a result of warfare, piracy and kidnapping, or child abandonment—the fear of falling into slavery, expressed frequently in Roman literature, was not just rhetorical exaggeration. [167]
Slavery was the direct result of poverty. People also sold themselves into slavery because they were poor peasants and needed food and shelter. Slaves only attempted escape when their treatment was unusually harsh. For many, being a slave in Egypt made them better off than a freeman elsewhere. [13]
Romans practised slavery extensively, but slaves in Ancient Rome were part of various different ethnic groups and were not enslaved because of their ethnic affiliation. [109] According to the English historian Emma Dench , it was "notoriously difficult to detect slaves by their appearance" in Ancient Rome. [ 105 ]
In the Mediterranean region, individuals became enslaved through war and conquest, piracy, and frontier raiding. Additionally, some courts would sentence people to slavery, and even some people sold themselves or their children into slavery due to extreme poverty. [152] The incentive for slavery in the Mediterranean was the greed of the slavers.
Freedmen in ancient Rome existed as a distinct social class (liberti or libertini), with former slaves granted freedom and rights through the legal process of manumission. The Roman practice of slavery utilized slaves for both production and domestic labour, overseen by their wealthy masters. Urban and domestic slaves especially could achieve ...
Slaves outside of Sparta almost never revolted because they were made up of too many nationalities and were too scattered to organize. However, unlike later Western culture, the ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race. [85] Most families owned slaves as household servants and laborers, and even poor families might have owned a few slaves.