Writing and talking about Romans again and spending a lot of time thinking about Roman slavery. Mostly for my ‘Friends, Romans and Enslavers’ talk for the Vindolanda Trust that you can watch online on their YouTube channel.

Few people who know anything about history would be surprised to hear that people were enslaved in large numbers in the Roman world. It’s sort of strange then how slavery seems to get hived off into its own section in mainstream books on Romans and often it’s either sensationalised or not really talked about in the stories they tell.

I think this is because Roman slaves are a really uncomfortable topic. Not in the way that modern slavery is, where what happened and was done to and by our great-grandparents reverberates today – Romans are centuries old stuff. Theirs was a different system, not really something to be described as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the racialised enslavement of the modern world but decidedly different in that it wasn’t racial, and for example, those enslaved could enslave others, the idea of freeing slaves was an important part of the system, and the jobs that those enslaved had were different too. So you can make comparisons between ancient and modern but they were different systems of enslavement. Why I think Roman slavery tends to get elided is simpler: it gives us the ick.

We enjoy hearing about the lives of people who we can imagine are in lots of ways like us. For example, finding out that the officers’ wives at Hadrian’s Wall invited each other and their husbands too to their birthday parties is something we can quite happily imagine. The murders in the inn outside Housesteads fort is something a true-crime documentary could feature. The gruesome enemy-heads-on-spikes outside the fort, well yes those were barbaric but not to be found in civilised Roman towns. It’s just easier to imagine the better off people we tend to be more interested in, partly because they have blingier stuff, and we know their names too. Enslavement though was everywhere and so maybe we do need to think about it more when we’re imagining Roman life.

One writer who I think has done this really well recently isn’t actually an archaeologist or historian, but a novelist. James Hynes’ book ‘Sparrow’ is a coming of age story about an enslaved boy working in a brothel. In particular, his narrative doesn’t see a conflict between being engaging, and well researched. For me at least, it really works. It is unremittingly brutal and would make Catullus blush in its descriptions. But it’s brutal for historical accuracy’s sake rather than simply being gratuitous, although there is some line between the two that it sometimes perhaps crosses. Nor does all writing about slavery I think need to lean in quite so hard as he does. But it at least manages to look at what the past was with its eyes open. Sometimes I think we could open ours a bit more too.