PFP296 | Sean Gabb, Roman Law and Contractual Slavery (PFS 2025)

Property and Freedom Podcast, Episode 296.

This talk is from the recently-concluded 19th annual PFS 2025 Annual Meeting (Sep. 18–23, 2025, Bodrum, Turkey).

Sean Gabb (England): Roman Law and Contractual Slavery [Sebastian Wang, “Roman Slavery: Horror and Paradox – Sean Gabb in Bodrum,” Libertarian Alliance [UK] Blog (Sep. 20, 2025)] Transcript and shownotes below.

Other talks appear on the Property and Freedom Podcast. Other videos may also be found at the PFS 2025 Youtube Playlist.

Grok shownotes

Show Notes: “Ancient Slavery: A Very Peculiar Institution”

Speaker: Unnamed (invited by Hans and Gulchin)

Source: YouTube lecture (Nov 2025 transcript)

TL;DR

Ancient slavery was overwhelmingly brutal—most died young under the lash—but a significant minority repurposed the institution for social mobility: voluntary enslavement, manumission after 7 years, and instant Roman citizenship upon freedom. Evidence: thousands of 2nd–3rd century AD gravestones of ex-slaves who married their former owners or rose to elite status.

Key Sections & Takeaways

1. Intro & Framing [0:01]
   • Thanks to hosts; title borrows from Jefferson’s “peculiar institution.”
   • History = “nightmare” (Jefferson) or “catalog of vices” (Voltaire).
2. Modern Lens [1:13]
   • Since 1970s, slavery overshadows classical studies; some can’t enjoy Livy, Tacitus, or Roman architecture.
3. Default Experience [2:12]
   • Most slaves: chain-gang labor in fields/quarries → death by late 20s/early 30s.
4. Universal but Uncomfortable [3:20]
   • Slavery existed in every pre-modern society.
   • Greeks & Romans knew it was “unnatural” yet justified it (“some are born for slavery”).
5. Horror Highlights [4:51]
   • Vedius Pollio (1st c. BC): fed slaves to lampreys; Augustus intervened.
   • Galen (2nd c. AD): boasted never striking slaves with his hand—used rods/whips instead.
   • Brothels, gladiators, casual violence.
6. Counter-Image [8:50]
   • Alma-Tadema painting: boredom & despair more typical than melodrama.
7. Manumission as Control [9:56]
   • Household slaves: promise freedom after 5–10 yrs → incentive for obedience.
   • Roman twist: freed slave of a citizen → full citizen (minus Senate/office unless dispensation). Children 100 % free-born citizens.
8. Social Mobility Evidence [12:39]
   • Horace’s father: ex-slave.
   • Multiple emperors had slave grandfathers.
9. Gravestone Gallery (British Museum & others) [13:23]
   • Dasumius (2nd c.): freed & married his slave; heartbroken when she died first.
   • Pattern: hundreds–thousands of stones across Mediterranean:
     • Master frees female slave → marriage.
     • Often the master himself was ex-slave.
     • Even humble sailors & priests did it.
10. Where Did Peace-Time Greek Slaves Come From? [19:42]
    • War captives explain 2nd–1st c. BC glut (Carthage 60 k, Marius 140 k, Pompey+Caesar >1 M).
    • But 2nd–3rd c. AD Greek ex-slaves = no wars in Greece.
    • Answer: contractual/voluntary slavery.
11. Contractual Slavery = Ancient Student Loan [20:44]
    • Certain lucrative jobs (vilicus, dispensator, accountant) legally restricted to slaves.
    • Free poor sold themselves → master paid training/transport → 7-yr service → freedom + citizenship.
    • Roman jurists confirm legality; concern was only fraud/coercion.
12. Citizenship Hack [28:18]
    • Pre-212 AD, citizenship rare.
    • Sell yourself to a citizen → instant manumission → citizen.
    • Cicero called it “disreputable” but common.
13. Star Example: Antonius Felix [26:11]
    • Greek slave → freed by Claudius → knight, senator, procurator of Judea, married Herod’s granddaughter.
    • Family still elite 300 yrs later.
14. Conclusion [29:42]
    • Don’t blanket-judge the past.
    • Slavery horrific for 90 %+, but a subset turned it into a ladder:  “Voluntary enslavement = vehicle of social advancement.” 
    • Like winning the lottery for Felix.

Slides / Visuals Mentioned

• 19th-c. French slave-market paintings (sensational).
• Alma-Tadema: mundane despair.
• British Museum gravestones (Dasumius + others).
• Statistics: war-captive numbers.
• Roman slave-market scene (voluntary bidders).
• Acts of the Apostles illustration (Paul before Felix).

Speaker offers slides via email.

Further Reading

• Galen, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul
• Roman law digests on self-sale into slavery
• British Museum / Louvre epitaph collections
• Moses Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1970s pivot)

Final Quote

“The past is a strange place and the more you look at it the stranger it is.”

Grok/youtube transcript

Introduction and Thanks

[0:01]

Good morning everybody and it’s good to look around the room and see so many old friends and new friends as well. But I’d like to begin by thanking Hans and Gulchin for their great goodness in having invited me back here again and again. Do we have a little feedback from the microphone? No. All well, very well.

Title and Historical Views on Slavery

[0:25]

Today I’d like to talk about ancient slavery and I’ve called it a very peculiar institution. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that history is a nightmare from which we are continually trying to wake up, or Voltaire who said that history is nothing more than a catalog of the vices, follies and crimes of mankind. There is some truth in those sayings. And if you look at the institution of ancient slavery, you do seem to see a very good example of those observations.

Modern Perspectives on Ancient Slavery

[1:13]

We’ve always known about ancient slavery. Of course, for the past several hundred years, we have always deplored it. Since the 1970s, however, ancient slavery has moved to something like one of the center points of classical studies. So much so that I have spoken to people who’ve told me, “I cannot appreciate ancient literature anymore.” Because whenever I read Livy or Tacitus or Polybius or Herodotus, all I can think of is the slaves who made the lives of those writers comfortable, who made it possible for them to write their works. And I’ve seen people tell me that they’re unable to appreciate ancient architecture because it was almost universally constructed with slave labor.

The Harsh Reality for Most Slaves

[2:12]

I don’t want to minimize the effects. I don’t want to minimize the nature and extent of ancient slavery, for in the overwhelming majority of cases it was a veil of tears. It was a terrible thing. If you were a slave in the ancient world, the overwhelming likelihood was that you would spend your life under the lash working in a chain gang in a field or in a quarry and you would die in your late 20s or early 30s from overwork and general maltreatment.

Not All Human Behavior Is Cruel

[2:53]

However, having said that, we do need to bear in mind that although human beings can often behave very badly to each other, this is not a universal tendency. And it is possible to see ancient slavery sometimes in a more positive light than shown in that 19th-century French painting of a slave market. Please.

Slavery as a Universal Institution

[3:20]

Now, slavery is or has been or was a universal institution until about 200 years ago. It is very difficult to find a society which did not to some extent rely on the compelled labor of the lower classes. Slavery was a universal institution in ancient civilization. It is very difficult to think of a single civilization which did not rely to some extent on the compelled labor of the lower classes.

Greek and Roman Justifications for Slavery

[3:51]

What makes the institution of slavery among the Greeks and Romans different is that these people had both a highly rational view of life and a certain obligation to justify what they regarded as an unnatural institution. They always did so with a certain discomfort. They recognized that it was unnatural. They recognized that it was a violation of universal rights, but it existed. They couldn’t think of any alternative. And so they tried to justify it on various perhaps spurious grounds that some people were fitted for slavery and some people were not. Please.

Horrific Examples of Slave Treatment

[4:51]

Now the treatment of slaves. It is possible to construct an entire volume showing the gross horrors of ancient slavery. Here is one. Oh, there was Vedius Pollio. He was a very wealthy Roman, a very wealthy Roman aristocrat, and he had a pond filled with flesh-eating fish. Any slave who displeased him got thrown into it and he’d stand watching the slave eaten alive. There is a story that one day Pollio was entertaining the emperor Augustus to dinner when a slave dropped one of his prized glass vessels. Pollio snapped his fingers, said, “Take him to the fish.” The slave grabbed hold of the emperor’s knees and said, “Please, please, sir, not the fish. Just kill me here. Cut my throat, crucify me, but not the fish.” And Augustus turned to Pollio and said, “You’re not serious about this. You’re not going to feed him to your fish, are you?” And Pollio said, “Oh, yes, I am. He’s my property, and I can do with him as I please.” The story then goes off in two directions. According to one, Augustus managed to stop the feeding. According to the other, he couldn’t. And Augustus could only put the word round: anyone who entertains this man to dinner again is not my friend. But although this didn’t happen very often because it is rather inventive to have a pond filled with fish, you could do whatever you wanted to your slaves.

Galen’s Views on Disciplining Slaves

[6:28]

And there is a story from Galen. When I was a young man, I imposed upon myself an injunction which I have observed through my whole life. Namely, never to strike any slave of my household with my hand. And you think, “Oh yes, well, the greatest medical writer of the ancient world.” And the room does contain a number of medical personnel. Of course, you would expect a certain degree of humanity which is lacking among the other upper classes of the age. But you read on, “My father practiced the same restraint. Many were the friends he reproved when they had bruised a tendon while striking their slaves in the teeth. He told them that they deserved to have a stroke and to die in the fit of passion which had come upon them. They could have waited a little while, he said, and used a rod or a whip to inflict as many blows as they wished and to accomplish the act with reflection.” You find that in the collected works of Galen. It is a reflection which I don’t think any of us would like to see our names set to, but well, different times, different morals. Please, please.

Additional Examples of Slave Exploitation

[7:51]

And again, as I said, you can construct a whole volume of horrors. That’s it: enslaved prostitutes in the brothels of Rome and Pompeii and Herculaneum. The gladiators—not always slaves, mind you. Some of them were free, some of them were women. But mostly they appear to have been slaves forced to fight each other, sometimes to death, for the entertainment of the masses. You have the general violence used against slaves. You have the use of human beings as instruments of somebody else’s will for somebody else’s enjoyment and profit. And I’ll repeat that was the overwhelming experience of slavery, but it was not the universal experience of slavery.

A More Typical Experience of Slavery

[8:50]

It is possible if you look around to find a slight offset to the general catalog of horror that was ancient slavery. Can I have another slide please? Thank you. Oh, there’s a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. That is probably more the general experience of slavery than the horrors I’ve shown. Just the straightforward boredom and despair of being somebody else’s property. But let’s move on. I’ll come back to that later on. I’ll come back to that as well. You’ll notice that French painters—you know, the French—in the 19th century, they used Roman slavery as an excuse for showing large amounts of bare flesh. They could always tell people, “It’s not porn, it’s culture.” But that’s the French for you.

Manumission as a Control Mechanism

[9:56]

Slavery. Can we go back a bit? That’s it. There was the possibility—there was always the possibility in any slave society of freedom for slaves: manumission. And indeed, you can look on the possibility of freeing your slaves as an entirely rational means of keeping control. If you have 400 or 5,000 slaves in your household, you really have two ways of keeping control. One is you do it with a threat of violence, and that can work, but you will have to lock your bedroom door at night and sleep with a sword under your pillow, which is not the way that most people have preferred to manage their households. The other way of keeping control is to make it plain to all your slaves: if you serve me well and faithfully for seven years, let’s say, I’ll free you.

Roman Manumission and Citizenship

[11:01]

Manumission of slaves has always been an option. But in the Roman Empire, it was a general custom—not a general custom with your field slaves; they worked under the lash until they died and then they were replaced. But among household slaves, the possibility of freedom was always dangled in front of the slaves. You do my wife’s hair for 5 years, seven years, 10 years. You put up with her whims, smile at her stupid jokes, and if she comes back to me and says, “I have no complaints against this maidservant,” I will free you. It’s quite a way of making sure that you get prompt and willing obedience from your slaves. But one of the differences between Roman slavery and slavery among the Greeks and other peoples is that if you were the slave of a Roman citizen and you were freed, you yourself immediately became a Roman citizen with most of the rights and liberties of a Roman citizen. Oh, if you were a freed slave, you couldn’t join the Senate—not unless the emperor made a dispensation, and the emperor could and often did. You couldn’t stand for office. But you had the rights and liberties of a Roman citizen in most respects. And your children had all the rights and liberties of a Roman citizen.

Social Mobility for Freed Slaves

[12:39]

The father of Horace, the great Roman poet, was a slave. A number of emperors had grandfathers who had been slaves and so it was possible if you were a freed slave to rise very high in Roman society. It was not a meritocracy in the way that we understand meritocracy during the past few hundred years but it was rather more meritocratic than most societies have been. And the fact that you were once a slave or your father or grandfather were slaves did not seem to hold people back in itself.

Gravestone Evidence in Museums

[13:23]

I will make the slides available. If you send me an email, I’ll send you the slides and you can look at them yourself. It’s a shame because when I was in the British Museum a few weeks ago giving some lectures, I did go about taking photographs and there is a large number of gravestones in the British Museum and if you go to any museum—any of the great museums—you will see similar gravestones. You’ll see similar inscriptions. Ah, there we go. Can we go back a bit to the Dasumius inscription? That’s it.

Dasumius Inscription: Master Marries Freed Slave

[13:56]

This is the Dasumius inscription in the British Museum put up in the second century by a man called Dasumius. He put it up to his wife who had predeceased him. And what you see on that inscription is that she had been his slave. She had been his slave and he had taken a fancy to her. Now you may think of Roman slavery as this: Oh, she or he looks rather pretty. You take your clothes off. You help me out of my clothes. And then you do the wicked act and it’s back to scrubbing the floors for the slave. And that may have been the case very often, but also very often a master would fall in love with his slave. He would then free her and marry her. And here is a gravestone from the second century in which Dasumius explains that he had freed this woman. He’d married her and now he is heartbroken because he’d always assumed that he would die first. Unfortunately, she died first. And what makes it rather sad is that the space that was left for him is blank. And you can speculate on the reasons.

Prevalence of Master-Slave Marriages

[15:26]

And you can say, well, yes, of course, the Roman Empire was a large place. It existed for a long time. Of course, these strange things do happen. But do you believe that this was a very common institution? And my answer is yes, it was. Can we have another look? Another one. There we are. There’s another one. Another man who’s freed his slave woman and married her. And he himself had been a slave. And I’ll come back to that. It may be that Dasumius, who put up the previous gravestone, was a freed slave. Next one. Next one. There is another one: a slave who’s been freed and he’s freed his own slave and married her. And again, there is another one. Oh, can— Yes, this is an important one. This is a man from the upper classes. Quite an important priest. Fell in love with his slave woman, freed her and married her. Okay.

Humble Sailor’s Gravestone

[16:39]

There’s a fairly humble sailor’s gravestone from again the 2nd century. He was an Egyptian who had been a sailor at the naval base in Misenum in central Italy. Again, he’d fallen in love with a slave woman, freed her and married her, and she had put up the gravestone. Next. So this is just a random trawl of the British Museum which is one of the great—it’s one of the great museums of the world. But if you go to the Metropolitan Museum, if you go to the Vatican, the Capitoline Museums in Rome, if you go to the Louvre in Paris, you’ll see the same. You’ll see gravestones which record one of two things, sometimes both of two things: that a master has freed his slave woman and married her. And quite often the master had himself been a slave and then he had possessed slaves of his own and married one. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of these gravestones dug up from all over the Mediterranean world.

Sources of Slaves Beyond War

[17:50]

Now, that shows you a different side to slavery. Again, you mustn’t assume that it was general. Most slaves, I’ll repeat, lived and worked under the lash until they stopped living. But there is an important subset of these slaves who did not die in slavery. And a further question arises. Many of the gravestones that we’ve dug up from all over the Mediterranean world were put up by or to freedmen. They were freed slaves who had done well enough to afford a grave, to afford a funeral with a gravestone. And one question is: where did these slaves come from? The general belief is that Roman slavery overwhelmingly was put together from prisoners of war. And yes, there is a great deal of evidence for that. And the slaves who are working in the fields and the quarries, they were mostly prisoners of war.

Statistics on War Captives as Slaves

[19:03]

And there’s some statistics on that slide. Scipio Aemilianus when he finished off Carthage in 146 BC flooded the market with 60,000 Carthaginian slaves. Marius in about 100 BC when he saw the first Germanic invasions: he took 140,000 prisoners who ended up in the slave markets. Pompey and Caesar together enslaved more than a million Asiatics and Gauls. And there were times when slaves were very cheap and when slaves were freely available. They were in abundant supply.

Mystery of Later Greek Slaves

[19:42]

But many of the slaves, many of the former slaves whose gravestones we now—you can now see in museums—these were Greeks. And they’re from the second and third centuries AD. That is several hundred years after there had been any wars fought by Rome in Greece or the East. There were no Roman campaigns in Greece in 100 AD or in 200 AD. Where did all of these Greek slaves come from? Sometimes they may have been imprisoned for debt. Sometimes they may have been enslaved for debt or for something else. But the very large number of Greek former slaves from the more peaceful days of the Roman Empire, they could not possibly have been prisoners of war. And there’s a limit to the number of people who can have been enslaved for debt. So where did they come from? And here can we move on please?

Contractual Slavery for Social Mobility

[20:44]

Here we come to the idea of contractual slavery. There is limited evidence but then our evidence from the ancient world is limited. There is limited evidence that selling yourself into slavery was an instrument of social mobility. There were many occupations in the ancient world which were only open to slaves. If for example you wanted to be a vilicus, the head of a large household, or a dispensator, or if you wanted to be one of the head accountants in a wealthy household, those positions were closed to free people. They had to be undertaken by slaves for various customary and legal reasons. And so if you wanted to be eligible for a number of rather well-paid, rather generally rewarding occupations, you had to be a slave. And it does seem to be the case that many people sold themselves into slavery for the purposes of social advancement.

Slavery as Ancient Equivalent of Education Financing

[22:09]

Indeed, I could go a little further. Nowadays, if you are poor and young and bright and you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or something like that, there are scholarships. There are student loans. There are all sorts of provisions for bright young people from the poorer classes to rise. None of this existed in the ancient world. There was no means of borrowing to invest in your own human capital. There were no apprenticeships. It does look as if the institution of slavery was twisted and repurposed in those cases to do the work that nowadays is done by scholarships, by student loans, and by apprenticeships. And so what you could do is you could sell yourself into slavery to a master who would then oversee your training. You would repay your master’s investment in you by working as his slave for a certain length of time. Seven years appears to have been the customary time. And then you’d be freed. And although you wouldn’t just walk away from your master, you would remain tied to him through the bonds of patron and client, but you would now be a free and independent Roman citizen, and you could get on with your life, and when you died, you could afford one of the gravestones that we’ve seen in the British Museum.

Legal Evidence for Voluntary Enslavement

[23:58]

And so it does look as though contractual slavery existed and that it was not simply an eccentricity but it performed a vital economic function. If you can move on. If you could move on. Move on. Ah, I don’t seem to have the—I don’t seem to have the references from the Roman lawyers on this, but you’ll find all through the various commentaries on Roman law produced by lawyers the observation that it is possible for free people to sell themselves into slavery. The main concern of the authorities was that the contracts were freely entered into and that they were not fraudulent or coerced. You could sell yourself into slavery in the Roman world.

Slave Markets and Voluntary Sales

[25:02]

Indeed, although a slide I haven’t shown you is a rather—again a rather risqué French painting with lots of bare flesh in it—I have—there is a slide on there showing a Roman slave market. It doesn’t look as though Roman slave markets were entirely places to which people were dragged and sold under threat of the lash. It does seem that sometimes people would voluntarily stand on the block and say, “I want to sell myself into slavery so that I can become a hairdresser and be set up a business in Alexandria or Rome or Carthage. Who will undertake the expenses of transporting me to these rather lush cities and the expense of training me?” And it does look as though a bidding process went on and that the winner would get a slave for a contracted length of time, a contracted length of service.

Example of Antonius Felix

[26:11]

Oh, and there’s a—there’s a nice picture. Acts of the Apostles. When Paul got himself into trouble in Jerusalem and went off to Caesarea, he stood trial before Felix. Now Felix, the procurator of Judea, had been one of the slaves of the emperor Claudius. He was freed. He became an important member of the government of the emperor Claudius and he continued to do well under the reign of Nero and he was given a dispensation. He was allowed to become a knight. He was allowed to become a senator and he was eventually sent out as procurator of Judea. That is a very senior governing position in the Roman Empire. He was rather corrupt, but then who wasn’t? And he is the man who tried St. Paul. Indeed, he married into the family of King Herod. So here is a Greek slave who went from slavery right up to the top and his family is still evidenced in Rome 300 years later. So it was a very successful family. How did Felix become a slave in the first century AD when the Greek world was in total and long-term peace? A good question. Had he sold himself into slavery so that he could get a head start in life? Very difficult to say because we don’t have enough evidence. But we do have enough evidence to say that this does seem to have happened in a certain number of cases and it may have been much more general.

Gaining Citizenship Through Brief Enslavement

[28:18]

And the last thing I would say is that—again it’s—we know that it happened but it’s hard to put your finger on exact cases. Remember if you are the slave of a Roman citizen and you are freed, you become a Roman citizen. Now, until the edict of 212, when every free inhabitant of the empire was given Roman citizenship, getting Roman citizenship was rather difficult. It was a rather random process. And so if you were a provincial in Syria, in Egypt, in Gaul, in Spain, wherever, and you wanted Roman citizenship which carried a number of very important privileges, how could you get it? You couldn’t apply for it. You might be able to bribe it out of somebody, but there was a much easier way to get it, and that is to sell yourself into slavery to a Roman citizen who would immediately free you, thereby making you a Roman citizen. There are some surviving writings by Roman lawyers who say this is a most disreputable practice and Cicero sneers at it but it happened. How often it happened we can’t say.

Conclusion: Nuanced View of Ancient Slavery

[29:42]

So what would I say as a conclusion? It is this: that when you make judgments about the past, it’s probably best not to make them blanket judgments. I’m not defending ancient slavery. I’m not saying that it was a just institution. I would never minimize the horrors of ancient slavery. I’ll say for the fourth time, if you were to be a Roman slave, the overwhelming likelihood is that you would work under the lash until you died in your late 20s or early 30s. Beside that, however, you must accept that there is something about human nature that is able to turn the most awful institutions into instruments of self-advancement and that the institution may serve an important economic function. It is possible for the worst institutions to be repurposed into something that is useful and something that is seen as advantageous to the people who are within those institutions. And whenever you think of ancient slavery, you should bear in mind that there was an important subset of the population of the Roman Empire for whom voluntary enslavement was a vehicle of social advancement. In the case of Felix, who ended as procurator of Judea, it was like winning the lottery. He went from being a nobody in some provincial Greek town to procurator of Judea to membership of the Senate and to the establishment of a family which was still wealthy and important and respected 300 years after his death. So the past—the past is a strange place and the more you look at it the stranger it is. I don’t think there’s anything very libertarian about that but that is what I have to say this morning. So thank you very much everybody. [Applause]

[32:11]

 

 

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