Chapter 5 Blog

In this chapter what I thought was interesting was the section about "The Making of Roman Slavery". It said that even poor households usually had at least one or two female slaves, and they had to participate in domestic work and sexual services. Strayer also mentioned that it was a bad thing to become a slave, but a good thing to own one, which sounded so evil. Even though some slaves were released by their owners, they still could not becone citizens nor gain political rights. Strayer said that slavery was a "defining element of Roman society". I found it interesting how the Italian heartland of the Roman empire had about 2 and 3 million slaves, which represented 33-40 percent of the population. Wealthy Romans could own thousands of slaves, which I thought was crazy to read because I could only imagine one person owning hundreds or thousands of slaves to themselves. The crazy part was that it stated that even "modest people" owned at least two to three slaves.

Most of the slaves were prisoners from many wars. The Romans referred to their slaves as "barbarians". They often worked chained together. After reading that, of course it made me pissed because that's just so evil I really get so annoyed whenever I read things like that because I could never fully understand how people could treat another human like an animal... I'm sure animals recieved better treatment anyways! It did say that slave owners did provide the necessities of life to their slaves, and they had a secure life. However, they still were beaten, sexually abused, or possibly could be up for sale to another person to own them. I also read that if a slave killed their owner, the Roman law demanded the lives of all of the victim's slaves.

Overall, it's interesting how some people only think of slavery as in African Americans, when really it goes further back in history, where certain groups recieved the same if not worse treatment.