Graeco-Roman Slave Markets: Fact or Fiction? (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Graeco-Roman Slave Markets: Fact or Fiction? Keith Bradley Monika Trümper. Graeco-Roman Slave Markets: Fact or Fiction? Oxford/Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2009. Pp. xii + 148. US $ 45.00 ISBN 978-0-9774094-8-8 (cloth). The emergence of a fragmentary bill of sale in London recording, in about the year AD 100, the transfer of Fortunata, a Gallic slave-girl (puella), by a [End Page 185] certain Albicianus to a man named Vegetus, impresses upon its reader the enormities of the slave system in Roman antiquity, and also its anomalies: Fortunata’s purchaser was also a slave but a slave of elevated status: he belonged to the emperor. How a girl “by nationality a Diablintian” (natione Diablintem) came to be transported across the Channel is unknown—perhaps Albicianus was a slave-trader—but Fortunata changed hands for 600 denarii. 1 The words that accompany her name in the document, “or by whatever name she is known” (sive quo alio nomine est), are entirely conventional, and illustrate how Rome took the slavery system’s legalistic forms to newly annexed territories and promoted in so doing a perception that the slave was a piece of property devoid of human personality, confirming if confirmation were needed, that in taking for granted the commodification of human beings slavery was by definition a cruel and coercive institution. No apology can alter that fact. In towns and cities throughout Rome’s empire there may well have been times when large numbers of slave-sales took place together, batches of enslaved prisoners-of-war for example who (or which) had to be distributed from points of captivity to regions where their labour and services were required. In some centres archaeological remains have been identified as the remnants of buildings that could have served as sites for such large-scale trading purposes, examples of the stataria and venalicia that are known from historical, especially inscriptional, sources. These are the buildings Monika Trümper studies in a new monograph. There are eight of them, dating from the second century bc to perhaps the turn of the second century ad: the so-called Agora of the Italians in Delos, the so-called Serapeum in Ephesus, the so-called Prytaneion in Magnesia on Maeander … the Building of Eumachia in Pompeii, the so-called Basilica in Herculaneum, the porticoed structure in Ostia into which the Tempio Rotondo was inserted, the Crypta Balbi in Rome, and the Chalcidicum of Leptis Magna (32). Elements within these structures have been interpreted as ways of regulating access to and keeping under control potentially dangerous commodities, with in some instances modes of double circulation of traffic set in place for reasons of security. Platforms, on which slaves could have been placed for inspection prior to sale, and devices for supplying water for purposes of personal hygiene and food preparation have also been recognized. But were these buildings exclusively purpose-built structures for buying and selling slaves? This is the question. Consensus has been [End Page 186] elusive in the past, and given the chronological duration and geographical extent of Roman slave-owning, it could be said at once that if specially built slave-markets were a common feature of Roman urban life more examples might have been expected to have emerged in the archaeological record. Trümper’s aim is to prove once and for all that they were not, that without evidence naming them as stataria or venalicia the eight buildings at issue cannot on archaeological grounds alone be claimed as such, and that to do so depends on unjustifiable a priori assumptions. She has seen the sites for herself, she has studied the remains of some and the plans of others, and she has examined the design and character of buildings in Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and the United States that were indisputably slave-markets in later history as a comparative control on them. She duly rebuts the opinions of those who have called the buildings slave-markets, and concludes, compellingly, that the notion of the purpose-built slave-market is an “archaeological fiction” (75). She proposes instead that the buildings concerned were intended for other, variously religious or secular, purposes, stating...