Comment by pksebben
15 hours ago
It really comes down to granularity at the end, and whether you attempt to look as closely as possible or you accept a certain lack of fidelity because it makes the abstraction work for you.
In this case, I frequently hear people talk about how "the greeks and romans had slaves! and they were white! See, it's fine!" but that fails to take into account that there's a gigantic difference between slavery-as-a-legal-status like they had (entered into by contract or as legal punishment, exit conditions, no real social meaning), and chattel slavery based on race (the 'fuck you got mine' of ethos). I think the idea is that if you squint real, real hard; you can make it look like "not being racist" and "human rights" are somehow newfangled, 'woke' ideals, which is the kind of hilariously wrong misunderstanding we once saw embodied by cletus the slackjawed yokel.
I can call my ma from up here. Hey, ma! Get off the dang roof!
Slavery as we talk about it has been around since roughly the 1600s, and even then didn't peak until the 1800s. Everything prior to that was a totally different beast. and a quick sidebar - wth is supposed to be wrong with being alert to your surroundings? Do we really value being asleep that much?
I don't see much difference when you consider the condition of farming and mining slaves in Roman society.
Slaves were spoils of war since before the Republic.
Even if a slave had valuable skills, and were treated better, they had no legal recourse against a Roman citizen. Their owner could sell them like chattel, break up families (slave marriage had no legal basis) and kill them outright.
The highly skilled could enter into a kind of indentured servitude. That's a separate category.
You hear romantic stories about household servants gaining high esteem and a few being granted or buying their freedom. These were the exception, against the backdrop of menial labor.