At this time of year the Romans, too, enjoyed a celebration, called the Saturnalia. It was a time of licence, the one day when slaves were free to eat, drink and be merry, and be served by their owners. One wonders what part such role-reversal played in Vedius Pollio’s villa on the Bay of Naples with its pond full of man-eating lampreys. 

Once when the emperor Augustus was visiting, a slave dropped an expensive crystal glass, and Pollio ordered him to be thrown into the pond. Pollio dismissed the slave’s appeal to Augustus, at which the emperor asked Pollio to bring out all his other fine glass for him to use – and smashed the lot.

A pity Pollio did not get the treatment he ordered for the slave, but a slave was legally an item of property. One could buy and sell and throw away goods. Why not humans?

Slavery has taken many forms, yet it is the American version of it that tends to dominate our thinking over that practised in Latin America, the Barbary slave trade, and even modern slavery. Here is the Roman version.

While in parts of the USA, slavery was reserved for black people, the Romans were not racist. Their slaves came from all over the empire, mostly through war and piracy; but also, in a world of great poverty, sometimes through choice, since most slaves lived in their owner’s home, with board, lodging and medical attention provided. (We even hear of Romans who preferred slavery to freedom.) Slave women bore babies who were highly valued because slavery would be normal to them. Slaves could also be publicly owned: 700 serviced Rome’s water supply.

It is important to stress here that slaves were bought for a specific purpose, filling precisely the same range of jobs as free Romans could. They were an investment: expensive to buy – an educated one very expensive – and to maintain. It was in the owner’s interests to look after them, and this included teaching them. (In the USA, instructing slaves how to read and write was often forbidden.)

But slaves could never feel themselves part of a special social grouping or class. There were no reserved slave occupations. Further, in public, they looked like everyone else, regularly working unnoticed among the free urban population. (In the USA, they worked on the plantation – as, in fact, many Roman slaves also did.) The philosopher Seneca tells of a proposal once made in the Senate that slaves should be made easily recognisable by having to wear distinctive clothing. But ‘it then became apparent what a dangerous threat we would face if our slaves began to realise how few we were’. (In big cities, slaves may have made up around 20 per cent of the population, approximately 10 per cent elsewhere.)

Their chances of an endurable life depended on their owner. It would certainly be a death sentence if they worked the gold and silver mines in southern Spain. Diodorus said of that fate: ‘They die in large numbers because of the exceptional hardships they endure. They get no relief or pause from their efforts but, lashed by their overseers into enduring the dreadfulness of their misfortune, they surrender their lives in this wretched manner.’

Some owners inveighed against harsh treatment. Seneca argued that slaves should be treated ‘as persons somewhat below ourselves in station, who have been placed under our protection rather than assigned to us as servants. Who does not hate Vedius Pollio more even than his own slaves did? Cruel masters are pointed at with disgust in all parts of the city and are hated and despised.’

One way for slaves to keep any sense of self-worth was to try to stay on top: time-wasting, pilfering, lying, doing jobs badly or not at all. Roman literature is full of examples of such low-level resistance (so too in the USA). Running away was a desperate measure, unlikely to succeed. We do hear of slave revolts – famously, Spartacus (who failed) – but they were very rare.

There was, however, a major incentive for co-operative behaviour: the (distant) prospect of freedom. Freed, a slave became a Roman citizen – the first thing he did was to buy slaves for himself – but with restricted political rights. His descendants, by contrast, would be full citizens. (Once emancipated, ex-slaves in the USA lived segregated under many highly restrictive laws, e.g. no consorting with whites, charges of vagrancy if unemployed, no political rights. Some laws lasted till 1972. None of that, let alone the KKK, for Romans.)

But in one remarkable way, some Roman slaves could act almost as free men. Because the elite were not allowed to engage in sordid business – their job was to nurture their vast estates – the law was tweaked to allow slaves to become business tycoons on behalf of their masters. Strictly speaking, this should have been illegal but, as the jurist Ulpian said, the law ‘closed its eyes’ to the situation. The result was that slaves were able to engage in commercial enterprises from mercantile and marine business to financial transactions, tax-collecting, banking and real estate; women too could operate as doctors, accountants and traders. The walls of Pompeii testify to one Faustilla, who advanced loans secured on property, with high interest rates.

Pliny the Elder reports that one ex-slave owned 4,116 slaves, 3,600 pairs of oxen, 257,000 other animals and 60 million sesterces in cash (a soldier’s annual pay was around 900). No surprise, then, that we hear of free men volunteering to become temporary slaves to the rich. Some freed slaves even became advisers to the imperial court and honoured for their activities by the Senate  – which disgusted Pliny the Younger.

All that, thankfully, was then. While there was no consolation to those working underground in the mines, or in the villas of Vedius Pollio, we may still feel that the Romans, in a world which took slavery completely for granted, handled it far more intelligently than the Americans.