Themes for my blog come into view in many ways. I guess this post could well be the first which was inspired by a review of a recent publication. At Forum Historiae Iuris a review appeared of a volume with articles edited by Martin Schermaier, The position of Ronan slaves. Social realities and legal differences (Berlin-Boston, 2023). The volume appeared in open access in the series Dependency and Slavery Studies of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). Soon I saw this book series is just one of the regular publications issued by the BCDSS, and it is equally clear this research center puts great value on outreach and education. Perhaps the online flagship of its outreach is the presentation amounting to a subsite on The World of Roman Bonn. Dependencies and Opportunities 2000 years ago. In this post I will look both at a central element of Roman society closely linked with Roman law, and on Roman life in Bonn as a town with an army camp along the limes, the Rhine frontier of the Roman empire.
Roman slavery in law and real life
Roman slave law is for scholars of Roman law rather peculiar. It is one of the few subjects for which the most important monograph did not appear in German, Italian or French, but in English, W.W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery. The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge, 1908; reprint, 1970; online, Hathi Trust Digital Library). Schermaier reminds us in his volume The position of Roman slaves right at the start about this classic work, and he points you also to the multivolume Corpus der römischen Rechtsquellen zur antiken Sklaverei (CRRS), part of the project Forschungen zur antikene Sklaverei at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz. A glance at this incomplete corpus learns you immediately many themes need their own full treatment. The project website in Mainz tells you about its activities and brings you to it own Bibliographie zur Antiken Sklaverei Online (BASO) with currently some 4,000 titles; note also the links to related projects.
Schermaier opens the volume after his brief introduction with the chapter ‘Without rights? Social theories meet Roman legal texts’ (pp. 1-24). He does nothing less than question almost all your conceptions and prejudices about slavery past and present, pointing not only to the fallacies of ideological interpretations, but also to the weaknesses of sweeping views and statements about slaves in Roman law. Slaves were often described as things, res, but following Gaius in his Institutes (Inst. 1.8-9) slaves were also clearly seen as persons. Schermaier rightly dismisses the unreflected use of modern (legal) concepts, and he warns you there is no such things as the Roman slave law, nor did Roman lawyers state any kind of general view on slaves. If you doubt this, you should look at Buckland who listed in 1908 effortlessly at the beginning of his book four examples of slaves who had no owner (p. 2).
Persons were objects of Roman law. Schermaier urges us to acknowledge the sometimes very differente nature of Roman law itself. According to him our modern views of the Roman concept dominium and property are simply not adequate to understand Roman law. In my view this chapter should become compulsory reading for anyone studying Roman law and Roman slavery. His second contribution, ‘Neither fish nor fowl: Some grey areas of Roman slave law’ (pp. 238-267) is as instructive, with a series of cases making you think again about what Roman lawyers were doing. He admits it is possible by careful reading to learn about differences in the posititon and treatment of slaves.
In this volume Thomas Finkenauer writes about the position of filii naturales, the illegitimate children of a slave owner. Pierangelo Buongiorno looks at questions surrounding the position of imperial freedmen and slaves. Richard Gamauf focuses on the role and significance of peculium as a form of property held by slaves. A second article by Gamauf concerning the famous image of the dispensator – a cashier, administrator or (financial) manager – in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis discusses the possibilities to extract legal and social information from a literary text known for its exaggerations. Inheritance law and the position of slaves is the theme in the contribution of Wolfram Buchwitz. Aglaia McClintock studies the meaning of servi poenae, the punishment of becoming a slave, and Jakob Fortunat Stagl looks at the role of a slave owner as the one bringing the favor libertatis by being able to free a slave. This is a rich and rewarding volume, not just for the subject of slaves in Roman alw, but for Roman law in general.
Research in Bonn on dependencies and slavery
Until now the volume edited by Schermaier is the only one focusing on law in classical Antiquity. However, in some volumes articles do deal with ancient law and slavery. In 2024 a study by Magnus Coffin, Selbstversklavung im klassischen römischen Rechts will appear in the series Dependencies and Slavery Studies, and next year a volume edited by Martin Bentz and Patrick Zeidler will be published on Dependency and social inequality in pre-Roman Italy.
The Bonn Center for Dependenciy and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) is a large research institution with five research areas, seven research groups and twenty-four principal investigators, most of them from the Universität Bonn. Guest researchers come from many countries. The BCDSS has a MA and PhD program and offers a number of fellowships. A most important asset for the center is the presence of the Library of Ancient Slavery of the Mainz academy project on slavery. The BCDSS created also its own overview of slavery digital humanities. Among upcoming events organized by the BCDSS is a three-day event on The Iconography of Dependency, Social Inequality and ‘Otherness’ (July 11-13, 2024).
Apart from the book series mentioned here the BCDSS issues publications in several forms. Of course scholars connected to the BCDSS publish articles in learned journals, but they sometimes edit special issues of journals and thematic volumes, too. The center regularly figures with articles in the interdisciplinary journal Sehepunkte. The range of publications is wide, from handbooks on the global history of slavery to an edition by Winfried Schmitz of all fragments of the laws of Draco and Solon, and also a volume about the beginning in the sixteenth century of ecclesiastical registers for births, marriages and burials. The center at Bonn is co-founder of the open access journal Revista Latinoamericana de Trabajo y Trabajadores (REVLATT). Since 2020 the center publlishes twice every year its magazine DEPENDENT, both in print and online.
Martin Schermaier (Bonn) is associated as a principal investigator with research group C of the BCDSS for institutions, norms and practices. I was genuinely surprised to see his main BDCSS research focus are asymmetrical dependencies in late-medieval and Early Modern Europe (1350-1750). However, by now it should be clear the BCDSS stands indeed for diversity in its research approaches.
Slaves in the Roman town Bonna
The section Outreach of the BCDSS website contains more than just the magazine and a blog. Lectures are organized, as are evenings around books and films. Videos and recordings are also present, and the center organizes exhibitions. The upcoming science festival in Bonn on July 7, 2024, is graced by an exhibition organized by the BCDSS and two other organizations on the memory of slaves as shown on inscriptions entitled Breaking Historical Silences / Das Schweigen der Geschichte durchbrechen, incidentally the first part with German texts I encountered here. The concise virtual exhibition created by Giulia Cappucci, a PhD student, succeeds with just four inscriptions – taken from the Epigraphic Database Rome and the Musei Vaticani – to introduce you to this resource genre and its potential use for studying ancient slaves and slavery.
It is time to visit Bonn in the Roman period! The virtual exhibition on inscriptions about slaves wets the appetite for the much larger online exhibition The World of Roman Bonn. Tacitus mentioned Bonna in the fourth chapter of his Historiae. Between 30 and 40 CE the town became home to a Roman legion. A detailed map of Roman fortifications forming the German limes helps you to understand the importance of Bonn. Legions were located along the Rhine upstream, starting with Nijmegen and Xanten, followed by Neuss, Bonn, Mainz and Strasbourg. Some objects from Xanten figured at an exhibition on crime and Roman law held in Nijmegen, discussed here in 2014. The exhibition duly notes that before 9 CE two legions were stationed at Cologne.
The World of Roman Bonn opens with an overview of Bonn’s Roman history, including a useful timeline of the various army camps and nearby villages. Bonn was alo in some periods home to auxiliary troops. The main legionary camp was one of the largest camps in the whole Roman empire, and it is particularly well preserved in the quarter Bonn-Castell. A map shows you various clickable locations in and around Bonn where (reconstructions of) buildings and inscriptions can be seen, with even an open air model of the main Roman camp.
The most inetersting part for my purpose here is the section on social relations. Alas in the paragraph on slaves and freemen I came across statements about slaves that thanks to Schermaier’s volume sound too general for me. “Roman law also prevented slaves from having ancestry and families”. Things get ugly with the very sentence before this quote, stating without any reference that slaves were seen as a instrumentum vocale, resting probably solely on the authority of a passage in Varro’s De re rustica (De agri cultura, 1.17.2), in fact the only known occurence of this phrase. For good reasons the saying “A single source is no source” is almost proverbial… The exhibition text implicitly suggests this is Roman law. Schermaier actually discusses the legal use of the word instrumentum for slaves in some detail. He refers to a statement by Ulpian that the wife and children of a slave could be belong to an instrumentum in an inheritance (D. 33.7.12.2 and 33.7.12.7, cited at p. 253, following here Finkenauer, p. 53-55). In the very first volume of the book series Dependency and Slavery Studies, the volume Slavery and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies, Jeannine Bischoff and Stephan Conermann (eds) (Berlin-Boston, 2022; online), Schermaier contributed a study about the changing nature of the Roman word familia.
Surely Roman slaves could endure harsh and inhuman treatment, Roman law could be inhuman, too, but this is not the complete image. Putting an image of a Roman slave collar from the fourth century in this paragraph is chilling, but without discussing whether this was much used, it is only suggestive. Luckily, the discussion of the epitaphs found in Bonn, ome of them mentioing freedmen and slaves, is more to the point. The paragraph ends with the conclusion: “Within a frame of exploitation, violence and desire for redemption, slaves’ lives appear more nuanced [highlighted in the exhibition text, OV] in the light of the material artifacts they left”. At the very least some overhaul and rephrasing of this awkward paragraph, the weakest of the virtual exhibition, is in my view necessary, preferably with assistance from legal historians or from the volume on the position of slaves, not to mention adding relevant information about the collar.
The section with inscriptions gives you the texts and translations of five inscriptions, with links to the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg bringing you in most cases several images and references to relevant literature and further online epigraphic databases. On a separate page you can find more about Roman sites in and around Bonn. In particular the story of the beautiful mosaic found in 1904, destroyed into fragments by an air attack at Bonn hitting the (Rheinisches) Landesmuseum in 1944, and only now in the final phase of reconstruction, makes you aware how fragile history and historical artifacts are. The Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR) brings you more at Archäologie im Rheinland. The Deutsches Archäologisches Institut has created the book series Corpus der römischen Funden im europäischen Barbaricum. Deutschland
My irritation with the unlucky or even outright deficient and misleading information about the position of slaves in the virtual exhibition The World of Roman Bonn is driven by the fact this is out of tune with the avowed and clear aims of the BCDSS and with its recent publications. You cannot study Roman society without dealing with Roman law as a pivotal element of society, nor can you omit archaeological results and inscriptions from the study of Roman law. It looks unfortunately here how one sees and mentions Roman law without realizing you have to come to terms with it by actively questioning legal matters as you would with anyhting else. There is a legal elephant in Roman Bonn, too, and you had better give it its due!
Some musings
One of the goals of the BCDSS is exposing the limits of the dominant approach for studying slavery created by the focus on Early Modern transatlantic slavery and slave trade. and creating instead adequate paradigms for viewing slavery and forms of dependency in toher periods and settings. Roman law may be the mother of modern private law, but its otherness should be stressed equally. Studying Roman slavery – and slavery in other periods as well – can benefit decisively from combining Roman legal sources, literary texts and archaeological findings, provided scholars versed in these fields join their efforts to study and understand this vast subject. With Amanuensis you have many Roman legal texts within easy reach, albeit without annotation, and lately even the Heumann-Seckel dictionary has been added to them.
To make the circle of this post complete, I noticed yet another recent online publication by Martin Schermaier at Forum Historiae Iuris. On May 22, 2024 appeared an article giving a massive review – the PDF runs to 39 pages! – of the Handbuch des römischen Privatrechts edited by Ulrike Babusiaux, Christian Baldus, Wolfgang Ernst and others (2 vol., Tübingen, 2023). Schermaier questions the aims of this vast handbook with 3,707 pages. He has great admiration for some parts, but he misses subjects and themes, too, for example the institution of the colonate. Some parts seem to him more essaylike, others form a monograph of its own. His remark this handbook can have the side-effect of putting earlier literature and perspectives out of view keeps sounding in my head. It matters truly how we present the results of research on subjects in legal history. Reading here about Roman slaves may serve as a reminder how careful we need to be, how much we need the right questions and detailed answers, admitting when necessary we have only access to an uneven range of sources and source genres which pose clear limits to our shared historical understanding. Legal history deserves such efforts!
Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog 