Slavery In Roman Times Essay

Slavery is an economic or legal system in which the principles of property law are applied on humans allowing them to be classified as property, to be bought and sold, to be owned and cannot withdraw from the arrangement since they belong to someone (America 87). A slave is someone who is owned by another person and is forced to work for that person without pay. This paper shall discuss slavery in the early Roman times and how it relates to slavery in modern times.
Slavery existed since time immemorial especially in the Roman society from early stage of its development. There were several ways one would become a slave in Rome: some people became slaves because they were not able to pay back money they had borrowed, others were taken to slavery by the government because they were not able to pay their taxes and there were also cases of poor people selling their children as slaves to richer neighbors. With the growth of the Roman Empire, the number of slaves grew rapidly. The Roman generals sent home thousands of captured soldiers to be sold as slaves. The demand for slaves in Rome grew during that period and as more men were needed for the army to extend and maintain the empire, there were few …show more content…
In the mind of a slave three questions frequented on whether they would come to terms with the master, whether they would be sold and whether they would be freed. The Romans never denied the slaves their humanity as men despite how they compared them to beasts and spoke them as morally weak human beings; they just wanted them to be socialized as slaves (Robert 101). There is however no non-fiction works that claim to be by slaves about themselves except one piece of fiction by unknown author. It remains strange that fables would seem to evoke the slaves’ situation while the proverbs and other literature never did