Stop Saying Roman Slavery Wasn't That Bad
Good history matters when we talk about the Bible and slavery.
I turned in my thesis a couple weeks ago! I only have one more class, an intensive in June, before I graduate with my MA in New Testament!
I wrote my thesis on the intersection of slavery, status, and sexual ethics in 1 Corinthians. My central question is “How would enslaved Corinthian women, who didn’t have the legal right to defend the boundaries of their own bodies, have heard Paul’s sexual ethics teachings?”
Today, I’d like to give some context for the Bible and slavery by talking about what first-century Roman slavery—in the time of Jesus and Paul—actually looked like. I am absolutely begging you not to repeat the common talking point that “it wasn’t that bad.”
Roman Slavery in the Real World
If you open most evangelical commentaries on 1 Corinthians (or, really, any of the letters that deal with slavery), you’ll find some variation on the idea that first-century Roman slavery wasn’t that bad.1 Maybe it wasn’t ideal, but it was definitely a kinder, gentler institution than the word slavery suggests. Surely it was different in every way from slavery in the United States … right?
Narrator: “It was not a kinder, gentler institution.”
That’s not to say there were no differences between Roman and American slavery.2 But those differences should not be used to distract from the fact that, as a rule, Roman slavery was an incredibly brutal institution.
I want to introduce you to a little girl named Prima. When we meet her, Prima is three years old; her baby brother, Secundus, has just begun to walk. Picture them. Hold them in your mind’s eye.
The story I’m about to tell you is a reconstruction, rooted in scholarship on first-century slavery. The names and stories of most slaves have been lost to us because no one cared enough to preserve them. But I don’t want to leave you with a cold, bare recounting of abstracted history. As Candida Moss observes, “Abstractions can be useful, but they are also shorn of humanity.”3 So, to humanize our subjects, to help us see them, I’ll interweave the historical record with brief sketches of one representative family.
Sexual Abuse
Prima knows that she has to keep Secundus from getting into too much trouble while her mama is working. And it feels like Mama is always working. If she and Secundus make too much ruckus, Despoina—the lady of the house—will storm into the room and beat them.4 Prima is scared of Despoina.
Despoina’s husband, Despotes, isn’t mean like Despoina. Well, not most of the time, anyway. Sometimes he brings Prima sweet treats and caresses her hair. Mama says that Prima looks just like him. But Prima doesn’t like how he touches her when Despoina leaves the house.
Time passes. Prima is six, Secundus four. Prima is starting to think that Secundus looks a lot like Despotes. And now she knows what that means. She knows what Despotes likes to do to Mama in his bed, and that’s where babies come from. Mama’s belly is growing again with another baby, and that’s made Despoina even meaner. Prima wonders if her belly will start growing soon, too, like Mama’s.
Sexual abuse was ubiquitous. The sexual use of enslaved women, girls, and boys wasn’t just tolerated—it was encouraged!5 One Roman writer observed that a man showed respect for his wife by visiting his appetites for “debauchery” on enslaved women.6 Impregnating enslaved women financially benefited the householder—any child of an enslaved woman was enslaved by default, regardless of the identity of the father. Lactating women worked as wet nurses, either within the household or for hire. Sexual abuse started horrifyingly young.7 Rabbis wrote that a girl freed by age three could marry as a virgin once she was grown, because they believed her hymen would close back up again. But if she were still enslaved at age four, she was labeled a nonvirgin.8
The enslaved possessed no parental rights over their children—enslaved men were not even acknowledged as the fathers of their biological children.9 Slaves could do nothing to protect their children from physical or sexual abuse. (Imagine the sense of powerlessness and rage!) They could not legally marry.10 They could engage in informal quasi-marriages if the enslaver permitted it, but a “married” slave woman was still her enslaver’s sexual property—and often his sexual plaything.11
Exposure and Prostitution
Just when Prima thought Mama’s childbirth was over, it begins again. There are two babies—first a girl, then a boy. Prima helps wash the babies and wrap them up in blankets.
Despotes names the boy Tertius. He doesn’t even look at the girl before he tells Prima to get rid of her.
With wooden steps, Prima carries her sister into the chilly winter air, onto the bustling street. When the baby gurgles, she can’t bring herself to look down at her.
When she reaches the old pool, the place where people go to look for abandoned babies, she tucks the blanket tightly around her sister, then sets the wailing bundle down several paces from the filthy water. She tries to tear herself away. But she can’t leave. Not yet. So she crouches in the shadows to watch and wait.
She doesn’t have to wait long. A woman gathers up the crying baby, shushing her softly. Prima allows herself a flash of hope. Perhaps the woman is barren, and her sister will be raised in freedom. As the woman walks away, Prima steals after her, hanging back just far enough that she won’t be spotted.
Prima follows them until they disappear through a doorway, and her hope fades. Her baby sister has been claimed by a brothel-keeper.
Many—I would argue most—prostitutes were enslaved.12 When a Roman paterfamilias decided he wanted to get rid of a child born in his house—whether the child of his wife or his slave—he could command the child be abandoned shortly after birth. Brothel-keepers “rescued” many of these abandoned babies and raised them as enslaved prostitutes, first pimping them out as young children.13 Though it would be anachronistic to apply such terminology to the legal slave and sex trades of the first century, today we would call most Roman prostitutes victims of sex trafficking.
Physical Abuse and Violence
Time passes. Prima is nineteen, pregnant with her second child, running errands in the market. She feels sick to her stomach. Six months ago, Despotes, deeply in debt, sold Tertius to a rich man who thought him pretty. And now, the rumor on the street is that Tertius’s new master might be disloyal to the emperor.
Prima chokes back her growing sense of fear. Tertius is his master’s favorite—his master always keeps him close. And that means that Tertius knows almost everything that goes on in that house. If the authorities force Tertius to testify … she doesn’t want to think about it. They’ll torture him. Because they don’t trust any slave to tell the truth.
Someone shoves her from behind, and a gruff male voice says, “Get out of my way!”
She staggers forward, losing her grip on her basket, and half the food she’s just purchased goes flying. Whirling around, she dips her head and murmurs an apology to the free man she’s just inconvenienced. Then she drops to her knees, scrambling to pick up the bruised fruit and dirty bread. When she stands, she lets out a heavy sigh. Despoina will surely beat and berate her for the condition of the food.
In public, the enslaved had no recourse against verbal or casual physical abuse, such as a slap, from anyone.14 If a slave was sexually assaulted or badly beaten by a third party, their enslaver could legally prosecute the perpetrator, but only for civil damages—the case was treated as a sort of property vandalism.15 When authorities called upon a slave to testify in a legal matter, they presumed her to be a chronic liar, and her testimony was always taken under torture.16
The enslaved, as a rule, were vulnerable to every bodily violation imaginable: “summary execution, flogging, chaining, imprisonment, and torture.”17 Sandra Joshel writes, “Whipping or beating slaves was so much a matter of common sense that it is a joke in comedy, a line in poetry, a scene in novels, or a phrase in philosophical tracts.”18 Crucifixion was closely associated with slavery; Cicero called the cross a punishment appropriate to slaves alone,19 and Roman law called for the mass crucifixion of all of a household’s enslaved workers if any slave murdered the head of the household.20 Tacitus reports a particular case that provoked some horror, even among the Romans, because it involved a large household of 400 slaves, including many women and young children. All were crucified.21
The logic of the law is undeniable. Roman law was designed to protect first the social order and then the well-being and honor of citizens,22 especially the paterfamilias (the male head of household). So, imagine that you’ve been enslaved in a Roman household. You know that your friends and family—your four-year-old child!—will be crucified if you kill your enslaver. You probably won’t harm him, no matter what degradations he subjects you to. And you’ll likely fight tooth-and-nail to save him if another slave attacks him.
Manumission—For Some
Time passes. Prima is thirty-two. Despoina’s death has given her some peace around the house, and Despotes has just made an announcement: he wants to manumit Secundus. It’s almost enough to distract her from the grief she feels over Mama and Tertius. At least Mama’s illness took her quickly.
Despotes moves slowly these days, and a racking cough has come on him, so fierce he gasps for breath. She helps Despotes to bed and brings him water, murmuring that she hopes he’ll sleep well. She can feign affection for him easily enough. She’s had years of practice.
She lies down on the floor near her three living children. Her oldest reminds her of Tertius. She wishes she knew if her brother was dead yet. She hopes he is. When Tertius fell out of his master’s favor, he fell hard. He was sold, then sold again. Last she heard, he’d been sent to do farm work on a rural estate. And once a slave went there, he never came back.
Despotes’ cough turns worse, and soon he is dead. And in his will, Prima receives an unexpected gift: freedom. Perhaps she should have expected it—he’d dangled the hope of manumission over the years, in exchange for faithful service. But somehow she hadn’t expected that he’d really do it. Or that she would live to see it. She’d thought she would die a slave.
Now, she’s a freedwoman, and the air smells a little sweeter. But she will remain where she is, nonetheless, serving Despotes’ heir. Her children are still slaves. And where else could she go? How would she support herself?
Enslaved men in urban centers were often manumitted (freed) around the age of thirty. Women could also be manumitted young, but more often received freedom later, after their childbearing years.23 However, we should not take this to mean that most slaves were eventually manumitted. The majority died in slavery.24 Also, freedpersons—the technical term for ex-slaves—remained in the orbit of their former enslaver and often stayed in the household. Freedpersons retained a lifelong obligation to their former enslaver—they were to respect the enslaver and perform a reasonable amount of unpaid labor for him every year.25 (If they failed to fulfill these obligations, they could be re-enslaved!) Some freedpersons became Roman citizens, but they remained second-class citizens for the rest of their lives.
What About the Bible?
“So, why does the New Testament tolerate such a terrible institution?” you might ask.
I’ll dig into questions about the Bible and slavery over the next few months. (Not next week, though. We’re going to take a breather and enjoy some lighter, happier material next week.) For now, it will suffice to say that the Bible, properly understood, is fundamentally anti-slavery. Paul certainly seems to take a dim view of the institution. But we should not (and cannot) “rescue” the Bible from itself by repeating bad history about first-century slavery. (As if the Bible needs our help!) Bad history is no foundation for good theology.
If we believe the Bible is true, then we know that the God who heard the cries of the Israelites in Egypt heard the cries of first-century slaves. The God who saw Hagar and her tears in the desert sees the tears of the oppressed in every time and place.
The first step is acknowledging the brutality of Roman slavery. Tell your pastor. Tell your small group. Push back on claims that it was a kinder, gentler institution. Let’s replace bad history with the truth, as accurately as we can state it, so that we have a better foundation on which to interpret the Bible’s slavery passages.
As an illustration, I’ll pick on a commentator for whom I have the utmost respect. Gordon Fee claims that slavery “provided generally well for up to one-third of the population in a city like Corinth.” And Fee was an excellent scholar! Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 319.
Two differences stand out as genuinely important. First, Roman slavery was not racial in the same way as transatlantic slavery, although racial/ethnic differences did come into play. Second, Roman slavery offered many more opportunities for manumission for urban slaves, especially men. (However, most enslaved workers were not manumitted, and rural slaves were often worked to death in bleak conditions.) Roman freedpersons generally had better opportunities than free Black people in the American South, although they remained tied to their former enslaver until the enslaver’s death.
Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible, (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2024), 5.
In plays, Greek-speaking slaves often use despota (masculine) or despoina (feminine) to address their enslavers. In the service of readability, I have altered the form of despota to despotes, to reduce name confusion. Greek nerds, just go with it.
Enslaved adult men were, legally, vulnerable to sexual abuse as well, but that seems to have been less common.
Plutarch, Conjugalia Praecepta, 16.
Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 45.
This evidence comes to us from the rabbinic period, but I have not seen any evidence that these norms changed between these statements and the first century. See Lynn H. Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 275.
Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 25.
Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians, 261.
Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 27-28.
The word prostitute sounds outdated, perhaps even offensive, to the modern ear. Yet, I know of no word better-suited to this context. Sex worker is overbroad and surely cannot be used of the enslaved. And the alternatives are deeply derogatory.
Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 54-55.
Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 12-14.
Matthew J. Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23-24. See also Nghiem L. Nguyen, “Roman Rape: An Overview of Roman Rape Laws from the Republican Period to Justinian’s Reign.” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 13.1 (2006), 83-89.
Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 51.
Sandra R. Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 34.
Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World, 122.
Cicero, Verr., 2.5.169.
Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 73.
Tacitus, Annals, 14.42-45.
I might add that the law was especially designed to protect the interests of the highest-status and most-powerful citizens, at the expense of everyone else.
Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman, 193-194n54.
Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 94.
Perry, Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman, 71-79.
Great article. I appreciate how you viscerally show the full horror of Roman slavery without sugarcoating. God speaks to a broken world, and we should not minimize how broken the world is.
Have you read Fairchild's new book on Paul as formerly enslaved? I'm glad you read Glancy; she's at the top of the heap on this topic. When I wrote my extensive sketch of slavery to open the Philemon commentary, I found her and Bradley to be most helpful. Plus the Routledge anthology of ancient slavery. Your Substack reminds me of Peter Oakes' fine sketches in his book on archaeology and Rome. Very well done.