Bonjour and welcome back to my world history course! Last time we covered warfare in the eastern Mediterranean, specifically the wars between Greece and Persia. Today we’ll head to the western Mediterranean and cover the grand-daddy of all these ancient civilizations: Rome! I’ve said it often: world history is a huge topic. The Roman empire spanned a thousand years, so there’s enough material to spend a whole semester on this topic alone. As is my wont, I will just give you a general primer on Roman history to set the stage, and then zero in on an issue I find interesting, which today will be... slavery. Let’s start with the origins of Rome: according to Roman mythology, the city was founded in 753 BC. You probably have heard the story: it involved twin babies, Remus and Romulus, who were nursed by a she-wolf and then had a falling out. I have some doubts whether a she-wolf would nurse human babies, but that’s the story that Romans liked to tell: the scene became a symbol of their city, and can still be found on football jerseys all the way to the present time. As historians, we like to tell other stories, which are less pretty but more accurate. Archeologists have found remnants of a village going back to the 8th c., which roughly matches the legend. There are reasons why the city was founded there: it’s alongside a river, as always. The Tiber river is not very big, but at this point there was a ford, a place to cross the river, so it was a natural spot for merchants to converge. There are also seven hills in the area, which provided early Romans with spots they could fortify. The main item of trade in the area was salt: a key staple in ancient times, because it was used to preserve food before the invention of canning and freezing. Salt was so commonplace that it was often used as currency: soldiers were paid with a salarium (a bunch of salt), which has given us the word “salary,” a wage! Initially, Rome was ruled by kings, so this period is known as the monarchy. The monarchical period is shrouded in mystery because it goes so far back. What we do know is that in 509 BC the Romans overthrew the kings and set up a Republic, a government without kings, which lasted until 31 BC. The Republic is a much better known period because this is when Rome conquered most of its neighbors. Initially Rome was no more than a small town and the region around it, the Latium. There were more advanced civilizations elsewhere in Italy, such as the Etruscans to the North. Further north in France, the Gauls were so powerful that they once raided Rome. The people of Rome weren’t particularly civilized: in fact, they had a reputation for being rough and violent. A famous war began when they began to abduct and rape the women of their neighbors, the Sabines. And the Romans were pretty proud of that! They saw themselves as a warlike people, rough, cruel even, but practical, loyal to the state, and courageous. And if that meant abusing their neighbors, so be it. Another anecdote that says much about the Roman mindset involved Cincinnatus. He was a Roman farmer who lived at a time when Rome was threatened by a local rival. In times of peril like this, Rome would set aside its Republican form of government and appoint a dictator: a man who had absolute powers for 6 months, long enough to solve the military crisis. Well, Cincinnatus left his farm, took over the army, and defeated the enemy in just two weeks. Then, rather than rule as a dictator for a few more months, he resigned his command and went back to his farm. Romans like to tell this tale because it showcased the moral virtues they liked: here was a simple man, willing to put the needs of the state above his own. He was later an inspiration for George Washington, who also resigned his command after the American Revolution and refused to be a king. Cincinnati Ohio is named after him. By the 300s, Rome was in control of most of Italy. Their main rival by that point was a city we’ve mentioned before: Carthage. As you may remember, Carthage had begun as a Phoenician settlement in Tunisia. We don’t know that much about Carthage, in large part (spoiler alert!) because history is written by the winners and the Romans were the winners. We know them mostly through outside sources that are quite biased. Apparently, the Carthaginians worshiped a god called Baal who occasionally demanded child sacrifices, which the Romans found cruel... though Romans were known to kill their own kids and practice human sacrifice on occasion. The Carthaginians also crucified generals who had disgraced themselves in battle. THAT was cruel today said the Romans... who then proceeded to borrow this torture and use it against slaves and rebels. What we do know is that the Carthaginians were rich. Carthage was home to two bustling ports, one for warships and one for merchant ships. Their money allowed them to hire mercenaries for their army, which the Romans also found ridiculous: Roman citizens were expected to fight their own wars. Whatever the Carthaginians did, it worked: by the 300s, Carthage was a notable power that controlled much of north Africa, as well as the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. That put them on a direct collision course with Rome. Rome and Carthage fought three wars together, known as the Punic wars. The first Punic war was fought around 250 BC over the island of Sicily, which stood at the juncture of the two growing empires. Just one problem: the war was fought over an island and the Romans had no navy! But they figured: “we’re practical people, we’re good engineers, how hard can it be?” So they built a navy from scratch, faced the experienced Carthaginian sailors... and lost! So they built another navy. And lost again. And on and on: we often remember Romans as great soldiers, but their history was littered with a litany of defeats. What they had was tenacity: they kept going on and on, and the one battle that they won was the last battle of the war. The Romans eventually designed a corvus, which was a giant hook attached to their trireme: instead of fighting a standard sea battle, they would use the corvus to hook the enemy trireme, and then their legionaries could board the enemy ship, transforming the naval battle into a land battle, for which the Romans were better suited. The Romans gained ascendancy at sea, blockaded the coast of Carthage, and forced their enemy to sue for peace. That’s how the first Punic war ended with a Roman victory. They got Sicily and later Sardinia as a result. To make things worse, Carthage was broke after the war and could not pay its mercenaries, so it faced a major mercenary uprising on its own soil. Carthage eventually recovered economically when it took over Spain, where it exploited large silver mines, which financed a new army. With Carthage on the rise again, a second punic war began. That’s the most famous of the 3 because it involved Hannibal, usually cited as one of the 3 great military leaders of ancient times, alongside Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Rather than wait for the Romans to attack, Hannibal went on the offensive and walked all the way from Spain through Southern France, and then Italy itself: famously, he crossed the Alps with an army of elephants. The Romans faced Hannibal many times on the battlefield... and lost just as many times, especially at a great battle called Cannae. But you know one thing about Romans: they never quit! One of their generals, Fabius, decided to avoid major battles with Hannibal and instead kept running away from him. That kind of slow, indecisive strategy has been called “Fabian” ever since. There was even a group of moderate socialists in early 20th c. Britain who called themselves Fabians in his honor. Fabius bought enough time for the Romans to send yet another army, this time straight to Carthage itself. This forced Carthage to sue for peace, even though Hannibal himself had not been defeated in Italy. The third Punic War was fought around 150 BC. Carthage had yet again recovered economically, so a Roman senator, Cato, was afraid that they could be a threat again. Anytime Cato would do a speech in the Senate, on whatever the topic (taxes, education, sewage, whatever), he would end by saying “delenda est carthago”: by the way, Carthage must be destroyed. His fellow senators eventually agreed, to shut him if nothing else, and Rome attacked Carthage. This last Punic war was a more one-sided affair. It ended with a Roman takeover that was brutal, even by their standards. They killed most of the population of Carthage and enslaved the rest. They razed the city to the ground, and then sowed salt into the surrounding fields to make them sterile. And then they left. I remember visiting Tunisia as a child: I was already a history buff, so I was very excited to visit the ruins of the great city of Carthage... only to realize that only a few stones remained from that period. That’s when I remembered: oh yeah, the Romans won. By the 1st c. BC, Rome had defeated every potential rival: not just Carthage but Greece and Gaul (France) as well. Victory brought its share of troubles. Rome was no longer a monarchy, it was a republic, but it was not an egalitarian democracy either. Average Roman citizens (the plebeians) could vote, but the system was designed so that the rich folk (the patricians) exercised most of the power. So it was more of an oligarchy. Inequality only worsened after the many wars of conquest: a general like Julius Caesar came back from Gaul with an immense fortune in slaves and loot. Meanwhile, his soldiers got a pittance and struggled to readjust to civilian life. In fact, there were now so many slaves that free Romans struggled to find a job: how could they compete against people who were paid nothing? This led to endless popular turmoil, while ambitious generals like Caesar fought each other in a series of civil wars. I won’t go into the details: I’ll just refer you to the HBO series Rome, which did a masterful job recreating the politics of late Republican Rome. By the way, I also recommend the book SPQR, by Mary Beard, which is really insightful when it comes to the political culture of Rome. The man who emerged victorious from this power struggle was a relative of Caesar, Octavian, also known as Augustus. By 31 BC, he ditched most of the old Republican practices and became, for all intents and purposes, Emperor of Rome. This began the last period of Roman history, which lasted until 476 AD. The first two centuries of the Christian era were the apex of the Roman empire. They had defeated all their enemies, so aside from occasional revolts like the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, the empire was at peace. It was called the pax romana. From Britain and the Danube in the North, to the edge of Persia in the East, to the Sahara desert in the south, to the Atlantic in the West, an empire of 100 million people lived in peace for centuries, which was highly unusual in world history. This allowed Octavian and his successors to focus on architecture rather than war—and the Romans were great engineers, not just great soldiers. They may not have invented philosophy: but they invented mortar. They brought water from far away, using massive aqueducts like the one of Pont du Gard in southern France, to make sure that cities had plenty of water. Then they built public baths, like the massive baths of Caracalla in Rome. They built temples to the gods, like the Pantheon in Rome. They built giant stadiums for chariot races, like the Circus Maximus in Rome that could accommodate 300,000 spectators. They also built theaters to stage plays, and great arenas like the Coliseum in Rome to stage gladiator fights. I’ve focused on the buildings in Rome, but if you travel around the Mediterranean, you’ll find plenty of Roman monuments built in towns in Morocco, Libya, Germany, France, or Turkey. All these were connected by an immense network of roads, some of which are still in use day. I could go on and on. Many of the languages of Europe, like French, are romance languages derived from Latin. Many legal codes, like here in Louisiana, are based on the Napoleonic code, which itself was based on the Roman legal code. The largest religion in the world, Christianity, emerged in the Roman empire. To quote the old Monty Python joke: what did the Romans ever do to us? Nothing, except clean water, roads, education, law and order, and peace. But I don’t want to idealize Rome too much: this empire came into being through war, remained in existence through targeted acts of terror, and based its economy on enslaved labor. So let’s shift to slavery for the rest of the lecture. When Americans think of slavery, they think of cotton pickers in Alabama and Louisiana around 1850. Roman slavery shared some similarities... but also major differences. For one thing, most Roman slaves were not black; and many were not employed in the fields. How did you become a slave, exactly? There were a lot of ways. Natural reproduction was one: under Roman law, slavery was matrilineal: children of female slaves were enslaved themselves. Theoretically, the slave population could have become self-sustaining in time, except it wasn’t. Life expectancy was already low for Romans, but especially so for slaves. Enslaved women could never produce enough children to maintain the slave population. A common way to expand the slave population in the late Republic was war. As Romans conquered Carthage, or Gaul, or Britain, they captured countless POWs and enslaved them. Even during the Pax Romana, there were skirmishes along the border with Scotland and Germany that brought a trickle of enslaved captives. Romans also purchased slaves from the realms of the empire, or from pirates. A free person could also become a slave by legal means. One could be enslaved as punishment for a crime and sent to a galley, or a mine. Also, under Roman law, a father had extensive rights over his family... including the right to sell his own child as a slave if times got tough and he could not feed all his offspring. Romans were also known to abandon their infants at birth in a crude form of birth control—especially if that child was female. Here’s a letter from a husband to his wife dated 1 BC: "If you do give birth, if it is male, let it live, if it is female, cast it out." Slave traders could then rescue these infants who had been left to die of exposure, and then sell them as slaves. In other words, there were many ways on could become a slave. There were many ways that slaves could be employed as well. Some slaves could be employed on large farms, just like in the antebellum south. There was no national debt or stock market per se, so the easiest way for a rich man to invest his money was to buy land and slaves, and then profit off the crops. These large farms were called latifundia. But slaves were employed in a bewildering number of ways. They rowed on the triremes of the navy. They mined salt and gold. They built monuments. They served as cooks and maids in every rich household. Some even held high-level positions like tutor, accountant, foreman, or engineer. Roman law condoned slavery. The law contained some provisions for the well-being of the slaves or even their manumission, which means their freedom. Freed slaves would wear a special hat called a liberty cap to tell them apart: this has remained a symbol of freedom ever since. Notice how people in the French Revolution wore a liberty cap when they got rid of their king; you’ll also find that symbol in the iconography of 18th c. Haiti and the US. But Roman law could also be quite cruel to slaves, inflicting the old Carthaginian torture of crucifixion for those who dared to escape. I study slavery in a different context, Haiti, and what I’ve found is that the reality of slavery is often more twisted that what the law says. So you have to dig deeper than just the letter of the law. According to a story told by Tacitus, one 1st c. Roman senator was once killed by his own slave. Apparently, both the master and the slave loved the same enslaved boy, so this was a crime a passion. As you can expect, the murderer was crucified... but also all 400 slaves in the household! Their crime, if you can call it this way, was not to have done enough to protect their master. This story really shows how slavery involved many forms of exploitation, including sexual, and how it relied on widespread terror to endure. Let’s zero in even further on one particular group of slaves: the gladiators. You’ve all heard of gladiators, I’m sure: they were the subject of a popular movie with Russell Crowe. What you may not know is that gladiators were slaves, too. So, where did the Romans get the sick idea of getting slaves to fight each other to the death? The practice began as a religious ceremony, a munus. Sometime in the 3rd c. BC, a Roman aristocrat forced three pairs of slaves to fight right in the middle of a cemetery as a way to honor his father... as if this human sacrifice could help his dad enjoy eternal life. The practice spread and got so popular that crowds flocked to cemeteries. So the bouts had to be moved to custom-made arenas such as the Coliseum. But even there, the fights were technically religious. So they began with a ceremony to honor the god of the dead. For this reason, Christians could not attend the gladiator games, not because they were gruesome, but because they were pagan rituals. Obviously, the practice also spread because it was popular. The goal of the games was to entertain. But there was also a strong political undertone. As I mentioned before, in the late republican era, Roman was wracked by civil wars because there were so many unemployed people. So the state responded by distributing free bread to the poor to feed them... and then staging entertainment to keep them busy. It was called “panem et circenses,” bread and games. Keep the populace fat and entertained so that it doesn’t complain. Or, as we’d say today, give’m Doritos and Football. That’ll shut’m up. Authorities also saw the games as a kind of political theater: bringing POWs to Rome and forcing them to fight for the pleasure of the crowd was a way to reenact past battles and show the triumph of Rome. The gruesome spectacle also sent a message to others: Romans were the kind of people who brought their kids to the coliseum to watch people die. Don’t mess with us, was the message. Most gladiators began as criminals and POWs, but some men were so desperate in Rome, and the aura of the gladiators was so great, that some free men voluntarily enslaved themselves to be gladiators. Sure, you had to fight several times a year and risk being killed... but life was tough anyway, and as a gladiator the women loved you! There were even two emperors, Caligula and Commodus, who went into the arena to fight as gladiators—though one assumes that the bouts were rigged. Organizing games was a complex and expensive affair. Slaves had to be bought and then trained. This was the job of entrepreneurs called lanistas, who owned schools in Capua and elsewhere, where they would train the gladiators. They would then sell or rent their talent to anyone wanting to pay for a show. The lanistas essentially had a private army of their own, so these schools were eventually taken over by the state under the Empire for security reasons. Romans put a lot of thought into selecting the armament of gladiators. Too little armor and the outcome would be a brief bloodbath. Too much and the fight would go one forever, So gladiators wore 3 types of armors to allow for interesting matchups. The thracians, often recruited among Jews and Greeks, fought with a short dagger: they had little armor, but they were swift. The retiarii, often of African origin, fought with a trident and a net, like a fisherman. The murmillos, often from Germany or Gaul, fought with a sword and shield. They were better protected but slower. The winner would receive prize money, and possibly freedom. The loser might be spared or finished off depending on the whims of the populace. The Romans devised variations on the same theme, always with the goal of getting rid of criminals and POWs in an entertaining fashion. They brought exotic animals from all over, including bears, elephants, and rhinos, and staged extensive hunts called venatios. Or they used those wild animals to devour victims: ad bestias, it was called. This was a humiliating way to die, often inflicted on Christians during the era of persecutions. In rare cases, engineers would flood the entire area with water and stage a mock naval battle where hundreds of slaves reenacted the battle of Salamis or Actium. These naumachias, as they were called, were rare and expensive to stage. As a historian, my job is to retrace the past in a neutral fashion, without passing moral judgment. It can be hard sometimes: the idea of tying someone to a pole and then unleashing lions is obviously abhorrent. But then we’re not completely past that stage. We still like to reenact civil war battles, albeit without bloodshed. We like to stage symbolic wars between countries, though we call that the Olympics. And people do enjoy watching grown men maul and even kill each other, whether it's in American Football or ultimate fighting championships. So maybe we’re not that innocent after all. Let’s get back to slavery. If Romans treated slaves so poorly, how could the slaves fight back then? The proper form of resistance is a question that slaves have faced since times immemorial. Running away was always an option, especially if you lived far away from Rome. Suicide was another: it might seem self-defeating, but as a slave your body belongs to someone else, so suicide is like sabotage, destroying your master’s property. There are several stories of gladiators who strangled each other right before a fight in order to deny the crowd the pleasure of watching them die. Revolt was the most extreme form of resistance, and also the rarest. We know of 3 large revolts, one around 130 BC, one around 100 BC, and one around 70 BC. Notice how they all took place in the late Republican era, when there was a huge influx of slaves into the empires. They also took place 30 years apart, as if each new generation of slaves had to be taught a lesson. They took place in southern Italy and Sicily, where many rich Romans had acquired large absentee estates, the latifundia, so absentee capitalism may also have been a causal factor. The most famous of these revolts was the third one: the Spartacus slave revolt in 73 to 71 BC. We know little about Spartacus. He was just a slave, and history is written by winners. But he was apparently a prisoner of war of Greek ancestry who ended up in a gladiator training school in Capua. One day, he and 70 other gladiators seized kitchen utensils and revolted. They fled to mount Vesuvius, the big volcano near Naples. There, they began to attract more and more followers until Spartacus was at the head of a group of several dozen thousand runaway slaves. The Romans sent some forces against Spartacus, but they were defeated one after the other, in part because Romans looked down upon slaves and didn’t take the necessary precautions. But as you know, the Romans didn’t quit and kept sending more armies. Spartacus tried to leave the Italian peninsula by going north through the Alps, and then hiring pirate ships to escape south, but his hoped came to naught. He was trapped. The Romans eventually appointed the richest man in Rome, Crassus, to finish off Spartacus. Crassus began by decimating his own troops: when Roman generals thought that their men had been guilty of cowardice, they would select one out of ten at random (that’s what decimation means) and kill them in view of the others. Quite cruel, but apparently it boosted the army’s willingness to fight. Trapped in Italy, Spartacus decided to fight one big battle against Crassus... which, unfortunately, he lost. Spartacus apparently died in that battle, but 6,000 of his followers were taken alive and crucified one by one, all the way from the battle site to the gates of Rome, as a grim warning against other slaves. So Spartacus was defeated for good—in fact, that was the last major slave revolt in Roman history. But he achieved more fame in death than Crassus ever did. He became a hero to many. I study the Haitian Revolution in the 18th c., and many leaders of that slave revolt dreamed of becoming the black Spartacus in his honor. Spartacus was also the personal hero of Karl Marx, the communist philosopher, because he was a worker who had stood up against the rich. One group of German communists called themselves the Spartakists. Spartacus was also the personal hero of the actor Kirk Douglas, who was Jewish, and associated Spartacus with the Jews’ own struggle against bondage. Kirk Douglas starred in the 1950s epic Spartacus, which I highly recommend you watch. And then, if you search through the dark corner of the internet, you may encounter a gay magazine called Spartacus: apparently there is something attractive about muscular, half-clad young men! In other words: so little is know about Spartacus that everyone has been able to project their own fantasies onto his life. He’s like a Rorschach test. Well, that’s it for today... and for this section! Next time we’ll start a whole new section on ancient religions. Don’t worry: if you really love Roman history, I’ll get back to Rome when we deal with early Christianity... and then again at the beginning of the following section, which will cover the Middle Ages. Goodbye and au revoir!