Slavery and Rome's First Servile War

With the growing supply of slaves, on some days in Rome thousands of men, women and children might be put on the market. They would be forced to stand naked with a placard around their neck to advertise their qualities, and their flesh was inspected and felt. For a pretty boy or girl a Roman might have to pay more, but a Sardinian, Gaul or Spaniard cost very little -- far less than it cost to breed a slave.

Plantation owners placed male slaves in barracks or housed them in underground dungeons, leaving them separated from their families, which they might never see again. Plantation slaves worked in gangs ordered about by men with lashes. They were chained at night so they could not run away. They could be killed by their master without the master suffering any form of punishment, but, if a slave killed a master, a number of them could be held accountable and any of them put to death.

To appear affluent, a Roman family had to have at least ten slaves, and such families had slaves for just about every task. And the power that a master and his family had over their domestic slaves encouraged some slaves to wheedle their way into favor through flattery or sexual favors.

Most Romans saw slavery as a natural part of life, a result of their being favored by the gods and defeat and slavery the fate of inferior peoples. For some Romans, slavery was a source of ego enhancement. Looking at a creature more wretched than they bolstered their pride, and many Romans made slaves the objects of their ridicule.

Runaway slaves were hunted down, and if caught they might be executed. Runaway slaves roamed the countryside, surviving by banditry and making travel dangerous. Slaves sometimes revolted in groups, one of the larger of such revolts coming in 196 BCE, a revolt that ended with the Romans executing seven thousand of them.

A generation later the Romans crushed another rebellion, involving around four thousand slaves. In 135 BCE, about four hundred slaves in Sicily revolted after being encouraged to do so by a slave-priest from Syria named Eunus, who had announced favor from the gods. Historians call this the First Servile War. The slaves massacred most of their masters, sparing only a few who had been most humane to them. This uprising encouraged other slaves in Sicily, and as many as sixty thousand joined the revolt and seized a number of Sicilian towns, and they defeated the first of the armies that Rome sent against them.

Slave unrest spread to the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea. There, in Pergamum, slave unrest was accompanied by a wider social unrest. The king, Attalus III, near death and childless willed his little empire to Rome, perhaps believing that only Rome would be able to maintain law and order there. And when Attalus died in 133, Rome accepted Pergamum as its inheritance. Before Rome established its rule there, someone claimed the throne as the legitimate successor to Attalus. This was Aristonicus, who took the name Eumenes III. He appealed to slaves and serfs in a common cause against Roman authority. Eumenes III warred against Rome's allies in Asia Minor -- the rulers of Pontus, neighboring Bithynia and Paphlagonia, and Cappadocia -- and he easily defeated them.

In Sicily, after three years of struggle, the Romans finally broke the back of the slave uprising there, leaving only mopping up operations to carry out. And Roman legions went to Asia Minor where they defeated Eumenes and isolated him in a region in Caria. Eumenes surrendered, and, in the year 129, the Romans took him and the treasure of Pergamum's ruling family to Rome, where Eumenes III was paraded through the streets, thrown into prison and executed by strangulation.

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