Servi Publici: Everybody's Slaves

Project Information

SPES

Grant agreement ID: 704716

DOI

10.3030/704716

Project closed

EC signature date 15 March 2016

Start date 1 October 2016

End date 30 September 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 183 454,80

EU contribution

€ 183 454,80

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SPES (Servi Publici: Everybody's Slaves)

Reporting period: 2016-10-01 to 2018-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The goal of the SPES project was to provide a full-scale reconsideration of the position of public slaves in the Roman economy and society, through a multidisciplinary and comparative study.
In the Roman world, slavery played a fundamental role: slaves performed all kinds of manual labour and domestic services, but some had highly skilled professions. Besides private slaves, owned by private masters, and imperial slaves, who were in the property of the emperors, there were the so-called public slaves (servi publici): they were non-free individuals owned not by a private person, but by a community, such as the Roman people as whole or by the citizen body of a municipality. Public slaves were considered as a state chattel, in much the same way as occurred in the Ancient Greece and in some modern slave-owning societies.

Complying to the objectives presented at the beginning of the project, SPES has come to these conclusions:
- All the available literary, juridical, epigraphic and iconographic sources concerning public slaves and freedmen in the Roman World have now been gathered, organized and interpreted as a whole;
- A new comparative approach has been developed, in order to understand the role of public slaves and freedmen in the organisation of slave labour and the Roman civic life, as well as opportunities for their social advancement;
- For the first time, a theoretical and comparative approach encompassing both public slavery in the Roman period and in some early modern and modern societies has been offered, resulting in a methodologically up-to-date discussion of the nature of the phenomenon.

SPES, thus, has successfully brought together and cross-fertilised two areas that are usually treated in isolation from each other: the study of slavery in the Roman world and in the early Modern age. For the first time, all the available information concerning the Roman public slavery have been effectively stored in only one place, and they are now available for further comparative studies on this topic.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Thanks to the collaboration with Dr Santangelo (supervisor of the SPES project), the examination of preexisting epigraphical catalogues by Halkin and Weiss, and the use of the most important epigraphic databases, such as the Epigraphik-Datenbank Clauss/Slaby (EDCS), the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH), and the Epigraphic Database Roma (EDR), new records have been added to the previously known sources on public slavery – the total of sources being now fixed at 623 (509 epigraphical documents, 90 literary and historical sources, 25 legal texts). Iconographic and archaeological sources have also been searched.
Thanks to the secondment at the Institute of Classical Studies (ICS) of the University of London, supervised by Dr Bodard, the foundation has been laid for the envisaged new online database, freely accessible via the Internet, in which every relevant piece of information for the study of the public slaves and freedmen in Rome and in the municipalities of the Empire will be included. All the data have been gathered and organized in spreadsheets, and the phase of the transition of the data into the online database has been already launched.

In March 2018, from the 22nd to the 24th, an international conference has been organised at Newcastle University, entitled Being Everybody’s Slaves. Public Slavery in the Ancient and Modern World, that has for the first time brought together 15 experts of ancient and modern slavery to discuss central methodological issues and focus on the interpretation of the concept of ‘public’ slavery. There have been 11 speakers and 4 discussants from 14 Academic Institutions, and the event has for the first time offered a comprehensive diachronic assessment of the concept of the ‘public’ slavery (see attached file). Given the wide interest arisen after this conference, and the positive feedback obtained by both the participants and the audience, plans for the publication of the proceedings have been already set up, and an edited volume is planned for 2019.

Other main outcomes of the research have been presented in 8 papers and 1 poster presented at international conferences or research seminars/workshops. 4 articles have been submitted during the period of the SPES project; one monograph and one edited volume on the topic of public slavery are in preparation. All these outcomes set out to locate public slaves and freedmen in a broader social and economic context, explaining the distinctive features of this phenomenon in the Roman world.

Knowledge transfer to undergraduate students has been provided via teaching contributions to two modules in the second year of the Fellowship: CAH2020 ‘Greek and Roman Religions’ for stage 2 undergraduate students, and CAH1013 ‘Road to Empire’, for stage 1 undergraduate students.

Some of the results and the events related to SPES have been published on the Classics and Ancient History blog of Newcastle University.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Before SPES, only three principal studies of public slavery in the Roman world were known: 1) the important book of L. Halkin in 1897, still valuable and yet now obsolete; 2) W. Eder’s 1980 volume, focusing only on public slaves in the city of Rome; 3) the volume by A. Weiss published in 2004, which however takes into account exclusively the public slaves owned by the municipalities.
For the first time after more than 120 years, SPES has gathered all the evidence concerning public slavery both in the city of Rome and the other towns of Roman Italy and the provinces.
So far, public slavery in the Roman World had remained as a whole an understudied topic: SPES has now brought a fresh treatment in light of new epigraphical and archaeological evidence. Moreover, SPES has been based on new and previously not-used methodological strategies, derived from new theoretical and comparative approaches to ancient and modern slavery. The project has resulted, then, in a full-scale reconsideration of the evidence through a broader coverage of the sources and a wide chronological, geographical and typological remit. Moreover, it has been the first time that a comparatively focused approach to public slavery in the Ancient and Modern World has been applied.

Front cover of the international Conference ‘Being Everybody’s Slaves'

Final programme of the international Conference ‘Being Everybody’s Slaves'