Slavery In the Ancient World

Ancient peoples of many different civilizations practiced some form of slavery, and in many areas—such as Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, India, and China—it was an established institution. The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato regarded mastery over the weak by the strong as natural and inevitable. Slaves made up a significant part of the population of Athens in the fourth century B.C. and were an integral element of social and economic life. The military society of Sparta could not have existed without its slave laborers, the helots.

Ancient Rome during the period of the Republic began,the practice of using large slave gangs to work huge plantations. Such work, however, was not the lot of most Roman slaves. Some toiled alongside their farmer masters. Others worked as minor city officials, private tutors, servants, factory laborers, and gladiators. Slaves performed nearly all the duties at the courts of the Roman emperors. By the reign of the emperor Trajan (98–117 A. D.), one out of three persons in Rome was a slave. Roman law precisely defined the status of a slave and was the basis for later slave codes.