Marxism and Roman Slavery PDF

MARXISM AND ROMAN SLAVERY

Author(s): David Konstan

Source: Arethusa, Vol. 8, No. 1, MARXISM AND THE CLASSICS (Spring 1975), pp. 145-169
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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MARXISM AND ROMAN SLAVERY
David Konstan
il here is no established or orthodox Marxist interpretation

cient slavery. What was the prevailing and official Soviet th
slave society is indefensible. The exposition which follows f
accordingly, into two major divisions. In the first, I shall exam
problems involved in the traditional Marxist version of slav
stage in the evolution of social forms. Then, after a brief lo
non-Marxist but nevertheless theoretically systematic interpret
Roman slavery as an analogue of modern industrial capitalism,
suggest the outlines of an alternative and, I think, more so
proach based in part on Marx's recently available manuscript es
and attempt to sketch in the distinctive features of this view.
I. Problems in the traditional theory.
Marxist writers have traditionally understood slavery as a

of exploitation corresponding to a definite economic stage
evolution of human society. Though there exists some variation
canonical number of stages is five.1 The prevalence of this view
be illustrated in the field of oriental studies. E. G. Pulleybl
distinguished historian of China, begins his article on "The
and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China" in this way:
One can scarcely pick up a historical journal from China

nowadays without finding in it some discussion of slavery
in the context of the problem of periodizing Chinese his
tory according to the unilinear scheme of the development
of human history from primitive communism through the
successive stages of slavery, feudalism, capitalism to
socialism which is part of current Marxist orthodoxy.2
In this model slavery, which is everywhere supposed to su
directly upon the primitive commune, is the first antagonistic f
production. Like feudalism and capitalism, it is based upon
property, and is characterized by its specific form of the class st
E. M. ètaerman, for example, in her excellent book, remarks: "F
Marxist historians from the beginning there has never been th
145
Arethusa Vol. 8 (1975) 1.
146 David Konstan
doubt, but that the

ciety was the opposit
for feudalism the ch
while under capitalism
and the capitalist c
the stage of socialism
when it was endorse
However, it is not di
The Origins of the F
still, in the Commun
of Marx and Engels s
Non-Marxist histor
in two ways. First, t
stages, according to
always have preceded feudalism in the history of a given society.
This requirement of the scheme is obviously controversial, and in
order to accommodate the empirical evidence, Marxist scholars have
debated at great length whether or not the empires in ancient China
and India, Egypt and the near east might be characterized as feudal
and, if so, whether in their most remote history a slave stage could
be discerned.5 Pulleyblank's article is an example of a critical con
tribution to this discussion. The more fundamental criticism, however,
has been directed against the very notion of well-defined stages in
the evolution of society and, more specifically, against the category
of slave society as an independent social form. Here again, there are
two lines of argument. On the one hand, it is possible to deny that
slavery was essential to the economy of any society in the ancient
world. An instance of this approach is Chester G. Starr's article
entitled "An Overdose of Slavery." The basic steps in the argument
are these: "In ancient society, taken as a whole," Starr writes,
"slavery was not primarily an agricultural phenomenon." After citing
some evidence to support this proposition, he continues: "Nowhere,
however, in the ancient world is there solid evidence for the common
view that industry and commerce, at least, must have rested primarily
on the backs of slaves." There were, of course, some notable in
stances of the mass organization of slave labor. "Yet in realizing
that slave labor was employed at times on a large scale," Starr argues,
"one must not rush to the generalization that it was basic."6 Starr
concedes that Rome of the late republic was a "partial exception" to
Marxism and Roman Slavery 147
his rule. But this "unusual phenomenon," as S

theless transient and the result of "special
the case of Rome, then, which has always b
example of a slaveholding society, Starr raises
slavery, however extensive, was in fact "basic
Starr restricts his analysis to narrowly qu
tions, and does not further address the probl
slave society. If, on this view, a slave stage
existed in ancient Rome, it is only in the sen
larger role for a time in the Roman economy
The notion of slave society thus reduces to
denotes no essential distinction in social form. Pulleyblank, in the
article cited above, develops to its logical conclusion this general
and fundamentally empiricist rejection of the theory of social stages.
"Even if my conclusions should be accepted," he writes, "and it
should be admitted that the institution of slavery as it was known in
imperial China only originated in the state of Ch'in in the fourth and
third centuries B.C., it is clear that this would not necessarily affect
the issue of when, if ever, China was a 'slave society.' If this term
means anything (which I am inclined to doubt)," Pulleyblank continues,
"it must have to do with the fundamental economic structure of so
ciety rather than with any particular legal institution." Of the economic
aspects of Chinese slavery he goes on to say that "any discussion of
them can only be vitiated by preoccupation with the question of 'slave
society.' " He concludes his paper with the remark: "The real ques
tion, it seems to me, is not whether China was ever a 'slave society'
but what specific role slavery played in economic life and develop
ment in China in successive ages, a question that can never be an
swered in exact quantitative terms but about which, I believe, a great
deal can eventually be said in a qualitative sense."8
For some of the most penetrating discussion and criticism of the
doctrine of five stages and also of the notion of slave society, how
ever, we can turn to the writings of the Marxists themselves, especially
in recent years. We may illustrate the range of views by a brief look
at some of the arguments as to when and why Rome ceased to be a
slave society and underwent the transition to feudalism. The Soviet
historian A. V. Misulin defended the thesis that the slave economy
depended essentially upon the cheap and plentiful availability of
slaves through war. On this reasoning, Roman slavery entered its
148 David Konstan
decline when Rome, u

some small exceptions,
from Mme. Staerman
A. G. Prigozin, althoug
other non-Marxist hist
article, argued that th
century A.D., during the social and economic crises which led
to the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine.10 In turn, S. Kovalev,
in his paper, "Le Tournant social du IIIe au Ve siècle dans
l'empire romain d'occident," postponed the decisive defeat of
slavery, which was assisted, he argued, by the barbarian inva
sions, until the fifth century.11 We may note that Marc Bloch
dated the critical decline of slavery to the ninth century,12 while
David Brion Davis, who has emphasized the continuity of slavery
in Europe into modern times, writes: "In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries [slaves] formed a significant proportion of Tuscany's popu
lation, and in Florence it was common for petty shopkeepers and
even nuns and priests to own a slave."13 With respect to this contro
versy, we may observe the following. If slavery is regarded, as it is
by many non-Marxist historians, as a mere feature of social history
and institutions, then the many conflicting opinions over when slavery
may be said to have ended will not constitute a theoretical problem.
The history of slavery reduces, on this view, to the sum of what is
known about the existence and role of slaves, and judgments about
its decline will turn entirely on quantitative evaluations. In the doc
trine of five stages, however, slavery is an exclusive category of the
form of society. The transition from slavery to feudalism is qualitative,
and it is a theoretical embarrassment if the boundaries of the two
forms cannot be identified.
Marxists have responded to this difficulty in the definition of
the limits of slave society with the argument that archaic societies
may tolerate a far greater degree of ambiguity in the matter of their
class character than modern forms allow, and thus the periods of
transition from one form to another are frequently uncertain and pro
tracted.14 Similar considerations apply to the determination of the
origin of slave society in Rome, and also of its geographical extent.
Egypt and the Roman provinces in Asia Minor, for example, can hardly
be described as slave societies, and it has been doubted whether
Roman slavery as a system reached further than the villas and lati
fundia of central and southern Italy (including Sicily).15
Two further problems deserve mentio

society are abolished and transcended on
tion have so expanded as to require, for
collapse of the old relations of producti
classes which can carry forth the transformation of those relations.
According to the doctrine of five stages, then, the change from slavery
to feudalism ought to have corresponded to a general rise in the level
of the forces of production. But there is no reliable evidence for such
a development in the third or fifth centuries A.D.16 Finally, it is open
to serious question whether the chief tension in Roman society was
that between the classes of slave and slaveholder. Marx himself, in a
letter to Engels, remarked of Roman society that "its internal history
may plainly be reduced to the struggle of small against large land
ownership, naturally with the modifications due to the existence of
slavery."17
One essay of Karl Marx is now coming more and more to have a
central place in the controversy over the nature of ancient society.
This is the monograph on pre-capitalist economic formations contained
in Marx's manuscripts of the years 1857 and 1858 which are now
published under the title, Grundrisse zur Kritik der politische
Ökonomie." In this document, which is the most extensive investiga
tion of ancient social forms from the pen of Marx, there is not a trace
of the five-stage scheme of history. Instead, Marx describes as many
as four different social forms which may succeed directly upon the
primitive communal form, marked by the absence of private property.
These forms are called the ancient, which refers to the city-state
society of classical Greece and Rome; the Asiatic, which denotes the
village economies of the orient, whether or not they are aggregated
under an imperial despotism; the Germanic, which pertains to the
homesteading form which Marx understood to be characteristic of the
Teutonic tribes, and finally a Slavonic form. Inasmuch as these four
forms, whose number Marx arrived at empirically, represent alternative
developments from the primitive stage, they are not said to correspond
to different levels of the forces of production. The conditions that
determine the emergence of one or another of these forms cannot be
expressed as grades along a single scale. E. J. Hobsbawm, in his
excellent introduction to the English translation of Marx's essay,
observes; "The general theory of historical materialism requires only
that there should be a succession of modes of production, though not
150 David Konstan
necessarily any particu

order."1'
However, even this modest statement of the Marxist theory seems

to presume too much, at least insofar as the slave stage is concerned.
Marx speaks throughout the essay in the Grundrisse, as he does also
in the third volume of Capital, of "slavery and serfdom" in a single
breath, without pausing to draw any distinction between them as
social forms.20 The Soviet writer L. V. Danilova, in a brilliant paper,
draws the conclusion that "for the historian there is no doubt
that the line of demarcation between capitalism, on the one hand,
and all other precapitalist structures, on the other, is more sig
nificant than the internal boundaries among the latter." She goes
on to say: "Some participants in the discussion evaluate the Asian
mode of production (when they recognize its existence), slaveholding,
and feudalism as successive stages, while others regard them as
variants (models) of equal status within the same system."21
We may take the argument one step further: the several modes of
exploitation of labor may coexist within the same society, with no one
of them prevailing over the others. Within the territories embraced by
the Roman empire, and even within Italy itself, there were, alongside
plantations and ranches based on slave labor, whole regions where
small-scale subsistence farming or tenant farming was the rule.22
Slavery became for a time and in certain locations the dominant form
of production, then yielded in turn to other modes "within the same
system." At this point, the notion of slave society has lost its cate
gorical character, and the doctrine of five stages must founder.
If the difficulties which beset the traditional Marxist account of
slave society, and which, as we have seen, Marxists themselves have
illuminated, are not to vitiate the relevance of Marxism to the analysis
of ancient slavery, it is necessary to lay bare the reasons why the
theory has played so prominent a part in Marxist historiography until
now. I believe that the category of slave society developed out
of an erroneous analogy with Marx's theory of capitalist society and
its relation to wage labor. In his pamphlet, Wage Labour and Capital,
Marx described the connection between relations of production and
social forms:
In production, men not only act on nature but also on

one another. They produce only by cooperating in a certain
way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to
produce, they enter into definite conne

with one another and only within thes
and relations does their action on nature
take place.
These social relations into which the producers
enter with one another, the conditions under which they
exchange their activities and participate in the whole act
of production, will naturally vary according to the char
acter of the means of production. With the invention of a
new instrument of warfare, firearms, the whole internal
organization of the army necessarily changed; the relation
ships within which individuals constitute an army and
act as an army were transformed and the relations of dif
ferent armies to one another also changed.
Thus the social relations within which individuals
produce, the social relations of production, change, are
transformed with the change and development of the ma
terial means of production, the productive forces. The
relations of production, in their totality, constitute what
are called the social relations, society, and, specifically,
a society at a definite stage of historical development,
a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient
society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such total
ities of production relations, each of which at the same
time denotes a special stage of development in the history
of mankind.23
Marx does not say just how the nature of the means of production dif
fered in the several stages of society, although it is obvious enough
that the development of large-scale industry is essential to the capital
ist age. Furthermore, he does not indicate how the totality of produc
tion relations in ancient society (presumably, Greek and Roman society)
differs from the relations in feudal society, although again it is pos
sible to supply the definition of capitalist relations. "A cotton
spinning jenny," writes Marx, "is a machine for spinning cotton. It
becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relation
ships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar the
price of sugar."24 And he resumes: "Capital, also, is a social relation
of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production
relation of bourgeois society."25 The suggestion of a tripartite division
152 David Konstan
of social history — a
rated, and in fact, it
Marx's day (and, for t
In the essay, Wages
between three historical forms of labor in the service of another class.
Although one part only of the workman's daily labour

is paid, while the other part is unpaid, and while that
unpaid or surplus labour constitutes exactly the fund out
of which surplus value or profit is formed, it seems as if
the aggregate labour was paid labour.
This false appearance distinguishes wages labour
from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the
wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid
labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of
his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course,
in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his
working day goes to replace the value of his own mainte
nance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his
master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on
between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given
away for nothing.
Take, on the other hand, the peasant serf....This
peasant worked, for example, three days for himself on
his own field or the field allotted to him, and the three
subsequent days he performed compulsory and gratuitous
labour on the estate of his lord. Here, then, the paid and
unpaid parts of labour were sensibly separated, separated
in time and space.26
Nothing would seem more natural than to associate the three historical
forms of labor, which exhibit a progress toward the appearance of
freedom for the laborer while at the same time they more and more
mask the compulsory aspect of his toil, with the three social stages
of history, which Marx referred to as the ancient, the feudal and the
bourgeois. To be sure, there are problems with this model. Each of
the historical forms of labor is to be found in all of the stages of
society, though one or another may predominate, at least for a time.
And ancient society, that is, the society of Greek and Roman city
state, could not, as Marx knew, simply be equated with slave-holding
society. Thus he wrote, in the first v

struggles of the ancient world took the for
debtors and creditors, which in Rome en
debtors. They were displaced by slave
insist on the essential connection between each of the several forms
of labor and a corresponding historical stage was made irresistible,
I think, by the fact that one of Marx's own greatest achievements in
the analysis of capital was precisely to demonstrate the essential
relationship between capitalism or bourgeois society and the form of
wage labor. Marx sums up his theory toward the end of the third volume
of Capital:
Capitalist production is distinguished from the out

set by two characteristic features.
First. It produces its products as commodities. The
fact that it produces commodities does not differentiate
it from other modes of production; but rather the fact that
being a commodity is the dominant and determining char
acteristic of its products. This implies, first and foremost,
that the labourer himself comes forward merely as a seller
of commodities, and thus as a free wage-labourer, so that
labour appears in general as wage-labour.28
(After some discussion of this characteristic, Marx continues: "The
second distinctive feature of the capitalist mode of production is the
production of surplus-value as the direct aim and determining motive
of production.")29 The distinctive characteristics of bourgeois life,
including the tendency toward the universality of wage labor, are not a
mere congeries of accidents; they are rather the forms in which the
political economy of capitalism finds expression.30 Precapitalist
class societies are different from capitalism in that their products
appear essentially, not as commodities, that is, exchange values, but
as use values. They are natural economies, in which production is
above all for local and immediate use, not for the market. But Marx
nowhere draws an essential distinction between the political economy
of feudalism and that of ancient slave-holding societies. And without
such a distinction, the differences between the two forms, however
great, are only variations, and not the hallmarks of categorically
distinct stages in the history of society.31
Finally, apart from the matter of slave society, there is a ques
154 David Konstan
tion in Marxist theo

constitute a class at
observation: "In the
pens is that one part of society is treated by another as the mere
inorganic and natural conditions of its own reproduction. The slave
stands in no sort of relation to the objective conditions of his labour."32
Unfortunately, the third volume of Capital breaks off just where Marx
is undertaking his definition of class, but Marxists have generally
treated as a crucial element in the definition the relation of a class
to the means of production.33 Thus, the Soviet scholar I. M. D'iakonov
draws the conclusion "that the slaves, as we know, were not a class
in themselves; they stood outside the social life."34
The preceding review of problems in the traditional theory of
slave society should indicate that at present there does not exist, or
at least ought not to exist, anything like a dogmatic or official Marxist
interpretation of Roman slavery. Hobsbawm ended the introductory
essay cited above with the remark: "We may conclude that the present
state of Marxist discussion in this field is unsatisfactory."35 Yet
now, when the artificial category of slave society, and the distorted
and sometimes arbitrary generalizations to which it led,36 and along
with it the mechanical doctrine of five stages are cleared away, it
has become possible to examine the rise and fall of slavery as part
of the dynamics of the fundamental class antagonisms in the ancient
world, the struggles between those who held the land, or the better
portions of it, and those who owned little, or none at all. These
developments have already encouraged the publication of important
Marxist works on ancient slavery, as well as a new spirit of exchange
and cooperation between historians in the east and in the west.37 But
before considering some avenues of inquiry opened up by the removal
of this obstruction, I should like to look briefly at another theory of
slave society as a special stage of history, this one defended by
classical historians with no brief at all for Marx.
II. Slavery as an industrial system.
Associated with such eminent students of antiquity, and

ly of the ancient economy, as Eduard Meyer, Max Weber,
Rostovzeff, and Arnold Toynbee, is a theory of the slave s
Rome as the basis of a qualitative step f

Mediterranean world." This view pertain
organization in Italy in the centuries af
the simpler, patriarchal form of slavery
those of the northwest American Indians who had not achieved an
economy of settled agriculture, slaves have been used more for dis
play than for production, while in other societies, such as Mycenean
Greece, as it seems, they have been employed in domestic tasks or
perhaps to assist in the fields without thereby altering in any funda
mental way the prevailing economic forms.'9 In Rome, on the other
hand, slaves came to be employed on estates which specialized in the
production of cash crops for distant markets, even for international
markets. In the cultivation of the vine, the olive, various fruits and
specialty crops, trained slaves labored to enrich masters hungry for
profit. We think of Cato's calculated severities toward his slaves in
the self-acknowledged interest of gain.40 To this radical development
of economic organization and motivation in the ancient world our
authorities have unhesitatingly applied the name of capitalism.41
We may take as an example of this thesis in one of its forms the
argument of Eduard Meyer's elegant essay, "Die Sklaverei im
Altertum."42 The course of history does not exhibit, as the Romantic
view would have it, a steady advance from antiquity through the middle
ages to the modern era.43 Rather, there have been two great cycles in
history. "The first epoch of antiquity, the Homeric and parallel periods,
stands on the same level as the first epoch of the Christian-Germanic
peoples, and ought similarly to be called a Middle Ages; the highpoint
of antiquity corresponds to the modern age." Meyer then draws the
explicit conclusion: "if the serfdom of the aristocratic epoch of
antiquity, of the Homeric period, corresponds to the economic rela
tions of the Christian middle ages, just so the slavery of the following
epoch stands on the same level as the free labor of the modern age."**
Meyer's conception, so beautifully and learnedly elaborated, has
exerted a great influence on later interpretations of Roman slavery.
For Meyer, the slave system was analogous to capitalism;
Rostovzeff and Toynbee, on the other hand, have identified the Roman
slave economy with capitalism itself. Toynbee summarizes the chief
conditions favoring the growth of latifundist plantations and ranches
after the Hannibalic war: the availability of cheap land (as often, no
doubt, simply expropriated land) as a result of the dislocations of
156 David Konstan
war and the ruin of

service; the rise of new markets in the rapidly growing cities of
central and southern Italy; and the availability of a subject labor
force, acquired through the mass enslavement of conquered popula
tions (as well as through the flourishing slave markets, we may add),
to displace the independent peasant farmer.45 Beyond these was re
quired also, as Toynbee observes, the pre-existing circumstance that
Italy did not already have a developed system of dependent labor, like
those of Egypt and the Near East.46 But Toynbee understands the
drive of the Roman ruling class, or "Establishment," as he calls it,
to acquire great slave estates as a function of economic forces and
considerations. The plantations and ranches were "economically
superior" to the "traditional small-scale mixed-farming subsistence
economy,"47 an improvement in the means of production due not so
much to technological innovation as to developments in the social
organization of labor.48 And the motive of the Roman "capitalists" in
employing the labor of slaves was profit alone: "The agricultural
labourers on Italian plantations and the shepherds and herdsmen on
Italian pastures had to be imported slaves if this new economic régime
was to yield the profit that was the only inducement for investing
capital in it."45 Finally, the aim of production was "commodities
suitable for export," as Toynbee concludes from an examination of
Cato's De agri cultural Toynbee's description of the Roman slave
economy thus suggests Marx's account of the two essential features of
capitalism.
Not all historians, certainly, have accepted the equation of

latifundist slavery with capitalism. Moses Finley, for instance, has
argued persuasively that commodity production, production for profit
according to the laws of the marketplace, never really seized in earnest
upon the ancient economy.51 Finley denies that the Romans calculated
or could calculate in any rational way the profitability of their invest
ments in landed property. Cato's list, for example, of the relative
importance of various products on the ideal agricultural villa, he
writes, "ought to be quoted as proof of the absurdity of what passes
for economic analysis in the ancient sources."52 Ancient writers, he
points out, "did not describe land as the best investment in maximiza
tion of income language; it was profitable, to be sure, if held on a
large enough scale, but they ranked it first at least as much on grounds
of 'nature' and morality...."55 It is in the nature of an agrarian society,
however, that such ethical imperatives coincide with the material

requirements by which the propertied classes maintain their supremacy,
that is, their grip on the means of production. "By comparison with
Weber's 'Protestant ethic,' " Finley continues, "their mentality may
have been a non-productive one; it was in no way a non-acquisitive
one. They could permit themselves the luxury of a moral choice and
still wax richer, not poorer. "" Quite naturally, Finley also relegates
to an essentially marginal role in the ancient economy trade and
production for the market." Now the absence of rational economic
calculation, in the modern sense, and generalized production for
exchange are not to be explained subjectively, as an intellectual
limitation or the want of an enterprising spirit. It is rather that the
objectively low level of productivity had not yet summoned into exist
ence the extreme division of labor and, as its complement, the general
absence of self-sufficiency upon which the market system is predi
cated." But it is only when the system of exchange becomes univer
salized and dominates the process of production that the exchange or
money value of products appears as their chief and essential aspect,
that is, that they present themselves as commodities. Thus George
Lukâcs, in his analysis of class consciousness, observes of pre
capitalist societies that "there are no purely economic categories
to appear or to be given legal form.... Economic and legal categories
are objectively and substantively so interwoven as to be inseparable....
In Hegel's parlance," Lukâcs adds, "the economy has not even objec
tively reached the stage of being-for-itself."57
III. Approaches to a new theory.
Marx wrote the notebooks on pre-capitalist economic formations

in the Grundrisse in order to clarify to himself the reasons why capital
ism developed uniquely in Europe out of the collapse of medieval
feudalism, and did not come into being in other civilizations, such as
ancient Rome, where the conditions might be supposed to have been
favorable. It is worth noting that Marx did not here, or anywhere else,
so far as I know, lay the blame on the institution of slavery as such
for retarding production or technological progress." Rather, he enumer
ates several factors, such as the accumulation of wealth, the avail
ability of free labor, and a tradition of skilled craftsmanship, which
158 David Konstan
interact to set free the forces of capital.5' There is no reason to

suppose that Marx regarded this list as exhaustive, and in truth it is
not very satisfactory. For Marx's views on the origins of capitalism
one would do better to turn to the concrete account in the first volume
of Capital. What is important for our present purposes, however, is
Marx's understanding of the general conditions of the ancient mode of
production which the emerging capitalism had to overcome, for here
Marx embarks upon a new path of speculation on the nature of the
ancient economy. These conditions consist in man's natural relation
to the means of production, that is, to the land, which Marx calls
man's "natural laboratory," and "a prolongation of his body."60
"What requires explanation," writes Marx, "is not the unity of living
and active human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their
metabolism with nature, and therefore their appropriation of nature,
nor is it the result of a historic process. What we must explain is the
separation of these inorganic conditions of human existence from this
active existence, a separation which is only fully completed in the
relationship between wage-labour and capital."61 Under capitalism,
man's ability to labor, which, like everything else, appears as a com
modity, must be sold on the market before its use can be realized,
that is, before it can be brought into connection with the means of
production. But in agrarian economies, Marx suggests, man's natural
relation to the conditions of his labor is unmediated. Marx clearly
means that the basis of production remains the individual or household
cultivation of small plots of land. On this view, slavery as the funda
mental form of labor in production must be exceptional. It represents
neither an independent social form in a succession of historical stages,
nor is it a kind of capitalism before the fact. The rise and decline of
slavery in Rome are to be explained rather as a phase in the con
tinuing class struggles in ancient society. In this process there are
two essential factors: the class tensions original to the city-state
form itself, and the new forces released in the era of imperialist
expansion.
This is not the place, of course, for a history of Roman slavery
or of the class conflicts which gave rise to it. But there are several
controversial points in the theory of classes in ancient society which
require at least a brief discussion. In the archaic city-state the chief
social division was between the peasantry and the nobility. Whatever
form of labor the wealthy landowner may have exploited on his own
estates, it is clear that as a class the rich did not occupy an es

sentially different position in the system of production from the free
small-holder as such. Both stood in the same relation to the means of
production, that is, they owned them, and production was carried on
chiefly for immediate use. And, in fact, ownership of land, the funda
mental means of production, was the basis of membership in the city
state. "Property," Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, "formally belongs
to the Roman citizen, the private owner of land is such only by virtue
of being Roman, but any Roman is also a private landowner."" But
this does not mean that the interests of the aristocracy were neces
sarily identical with the interests of the poor peasantry. It was always
compatible with the interests of the richer landowners to encroach
upon the property and the independence of the poor. The city-state
form, however, stood as a barrier against the extreme consequences
of this antagonism, the utter reduction of the free poor. It thus con
tained, for a while, the contradiction upon which it was founded: on
one side, the essential nature of the city-state as a community of
proprietors; on the other side, the institution of private property in
land, which tended inevitably toward the polarization of society into a
land-owning class and a class whose holdings fell beneath the re
quirements of subsistence. But the implicit conflicts tended always to
re-emerge, and the actual history of the city-state is witness to the
perpetual tension between the power of the wealthy and the needs of
the poor.63 When they could, the poor rebelled under the twin slogans
of cancellation of debts and the redistribution of the land. This pro
gram itself reveals the real character of the class struggle in the
city-state. The rebellions of the poor did not aim at transforming the
fundamental conditions of their existence; rather they were the efforts
of the impoverished or dispossessed peasants to recover their land,
whether it had been seized outright by the wealthy or alienated under
the burden of debt, and thus to reassert their right to membership in
the community. Thus the antagonism between the small-holders and
the rich was not a direct function of their different positions in the
system of production, as it is with slaveholder and slave, landlord
and tenant or serf, capitalist and wage laborer. It is a product rather
of the tendency on the part of the great landowners to dissolve the
relationship of the peasant to his land and precipitate him into one of
the classes of dependent labor — the landless freemen, the debt
bondsmen or tenant farmers - which always existed on the periphery
160 David Konstan
of the city-state and w

antry on which it was
relations in a communi
rise to a controversy among Marxists over the nature of classes in
ancient society. To some, the freeholders and the owners of large
estates constitute two opposing classes which, along with wage
laborers, semifree classes, artisans perhaps, and above all slaves
make up the society of the city-state.65 Other Marxists have argued
that the distinction between the nobility and the peasantry is a func
tion more of a hierarchical tradition or caste system, which may occur
even among tribal peoples, than of essentially different roles in produc
tion, and consequently have identified the social division in terms of
status or order rather than class.66 The crucial fact, however, is that
the institution of private property permitted the breach between the
orders to grow ever wider, the conflict ever sharper. When the struggles
of the poor were successful, as in the abolition of debt-servitude at
Athens and apparently at Rome, they reaffirmed and advanced the
solidarity of the city-state as a community of citizen proprietors,
although this very solidarity had the important consequence of directing
the pursuit of dependent labor outward to populations beyond the city
state itself.67 But imperialism, at least in Rome, finally tilted the
balance in favor of the rich, and precipitated a series of crises which
marked the transition from the classical Republic founded on the free
peasant smallholder to the new relations of dependent labor which
became increasingly generalized and formalized in the course of the
empire.
The tendency toward aggressive expansion was inherent in the
city-state, as Marx observed, because of the essentially agrarian
basis of its economy, which made the acquisition of new territory a
condition of the growth and strength of its population.68 We have
already referred to Toynbee's summary of the conditions whereby the
wealthy landowning class of Rome, motivated, as he puts it, by its
"need to go on ruling," seized the opportunity presented by the wars
with Carthage to resolve to its own advantage the stalemate with the
free peasantry and secure their absolute authority in the state on the
basis of their control of the labor of vast armies of slaves.69 The
author of the most recent and authoritative full-length study of man
power and population in ancient Italy estimates that in the two hundred
years intervening between the beginning of the second Punic war and
the end of the reign of Augustus, th

from approximately four to seven millio
accounted for, as he believes, by slaves.70 But it must not be for
gotten that this huge system of slavery, nowhere matched and scarcely
adumbrated save perhaps in some few territories in Greece, near
Carthage, or in the Greek colonies, was bound up indissociably with
Rome's growing supremacy in the entire Mediterranean world.71 Once
again, it is impossible here to do more than point to the chief factors
which permitted the Roman ruling class not only to acquire but also
to maintain and control the slaves who labored on their estates. The
fact that Rome could sustain so large a population of free landless
citizens, displaced by the intrusion of slave labor; that Roman markets
could absorb so great a supply of special produce; that slaves had
been available cheaply enough, in sufficient numbers and from remote
peoples; and that the might sufficient to oppress so massive and
concentrated a slave population was at hand; all these conditions
depended in the last analysis upon the political and military authority
of Rome, which brought the surplus wealth, and indeed at times a
portion of the essential wealth of all the Mediterranean nations to the
rulers of Italy. For we cannot doubt that on the average the economy
of the Roman world was at or very near the level of agrarian sub
sistence.72 The slave system of Rome, then, in contradistinction to
"patriarchal" forms of slavery, was a function chiefly of an extra
ordinary concentration of wealth achieved and maintained by political
means. Upon Roman might rested an essentially local disruption in
the ancient economic mode. The situation is thus the reverse of
modern capitalism, where political supremacy is, in general, a con
sequence of economic resources and development.
The Roman slave system, then, was not a new stage in the
economy of the ancient world. Viewed in the context of the dynamics
of class antagonisms within the city-state, slavery was the historic
means of the reduction of the free citizen-farmers of Italy to the class
of dependent laborers. M. I. Finley describes the process perfectly,
although he refrains from using the notion of class: "The decline of
slavery...was a reversal of the process by which slavery took hold.
Once upon a time the employers of labour in these regions imported
slaves to meet their requirements. Now their own lower classes were
available, as they had not been before, from compulsion, not from
choice, and so there was no need for a sustained effort to keep up
162 David Konstan
the slave supply,nor to

itself where forms of
it was relinquished, on
one or another region
power of the rich. The
was, as we have seen
centuries in which it occurred. This is so because Rome was never
ruled by a class of slaveholders as such. At all times, the great
landowners drew a portion of their wealth from the clients of their
estates and from tenant farmers.74 The Roman ruling class was de
fined, not by the ownership of slaves, or any other relation to the form
of labor, but by property in land, the fundamental means of production
in the ancient world.
Against the background of the Mediterranean world as a whole,
moreover, the slave system appears not as a new economic order but
as a function of the non-economic, essentially extortive accumulation
of wealth at the center of the empire.75 Even at the height of latifundist
slavery, it is undoubtedly the case that the villas and estates in Italy
were organized predominantly as self-sufficient plantations, largely
independent of the market. Nevertheless, the conditions of empire did
permit the development for a certain period of a subsidiary system of
production and trade, based on slave labor, which exhibited as ac
cidents rather than as essence some of the features of a market
economy. This quasi-industrial aspect of Roman slavery, which is the
basis for descriptions of the economy as capitalist, reveals incidental
ly the fundamental distinction between ancient slavery and slavery in
the modern world: slavery in Rome represented the most developed
form of the division of labor, and predominated in the heart of the
empire; modern slavery, on the other hand, is basically a colonial
phenomenon, and a function of the backwardness of the local econo
my.75 But the shadow-economy of latifundist slavery in Rome was in
the final analysis an epiphenomenon of the fundamental development
in ancient society, the transition from freeholding to dependent labor
as the basis of production. In this process, slavery was the means,
imperialism the opportunity. The slaves themselves, on a few oc
casions, made their masters tremble.77 But their fate was to endure
until they were absorbed into the prevailing feudal relations of the
later empire.
Wesleyan University
Notes
1 Extra stages result from the division of the prehistoric period into savag
and barbarism, with Engels, or of the post-capitalist era into socialism
and communism, with the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union. Again,
the so-called "Asiatic form" may constitute yet another stage (see below,
notes 19 and 21).
2 Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958) 185.
3 E. M. Staerman, Die Blütezeit der Sklavenwirtschaft in der römischen
Republik (Wiesbaden, 1969) 27.
4 Cf. Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (New York,
1940: orig. 1938) 33-46, esp. p. 34; Frederick Engels, The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Selected Works vol. 2 (Moscow, 1955) 323; Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Selected Works vol. 1 (Moscow,
1958) 34; Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, ibid., 90; Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York, 1947) part I.
5 Cf. I. M. D'iakonov, "The Commune in the Ancient East as Treated in the
Works of Soviet Researchers," Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology 2
(1963) no. 1, 32-46.
6 The Journal of Economic History 18 (1958) 20, 21.
7 Ibid., pp. 17, 25; cf. A. H. M. Jones, "Slavery in the Ancient World,"
The Economic History Review 2nd ser., 9 (1956) 187, 199 (repr. in M. I.
Finley, Slavery in Classical Antiquity [Cambridge, 19601, cited hereafter
as Finley) for a similar view.
8 Pulleyblank (above, note 2) 219, 220.
9 Staerman (above, note 3) 11-12; cf. Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christi
anity (repr. New York and London, 1972) 74-75.
0 V , '
E. M. S
dans l'a
1 État
2 "Com
(repr. in
3 The P
Origo,
Fourtee
4 Cf. K
spécifi
108 (Ap
5 Cf. A
William
(Philad
been th
closing
tion, in
dubious
164 David Konstan
16 Cf. Staerman (abov

Formations (London, 1964), tr. by Jack Cohen with an introduction by
E. J. Hobsbawm (cited hereafter as PEF) 11-12; Stalin (above, note 4)
32-36.
17 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Letter of Marx to Engels, March 8,

1855," Sochineniia [Worfes] vol. 22 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931) 89 =
Marx and Engels, Werke vol. 28 (Berlin, 1970) 439; cited by I. M. D'iakonov
(above, note 5) 33. Cf. also Karl Marx's "Preface" to the second edition
of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Selected Works vol. 1
(above, note 4) 244: "in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only
within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor,
while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the
purely passive pedestal for these combatants."
18 All references in this paper are to the edition of E. J. Hobsbawm (above,
note 16). The entire text of the manuscripts is now available in English
translation by Martin Nicolaus: Karl Marx Grundrisse (New York, [PEF =
Grundrisse 471-514.] 1973). For a brief history of the Grundrisse and
their significance in the thought of Marx, cf. the introduction in David
McLellan, Marx's Grundrisse (London, 1971).
19 Hobsbawm, PEF 19-20. Cf. also G. Lichtheim, "Marx and the 'Asiatic
Mode of Production,' " St. Antony's Papers 14 (1963) 86-112, reprinted
under the title, "Oriental Despotism," in The Concept of Ideology and
Other Essays (New York, 1967) 62-93.
20 Hobsbawm, PEF 41.
21 L. V. Danilova, "Controversial Problems in the Theory of Precapitalist
Societies," Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology 9 (1971) 289.
22 Cf. Ulrich Kahrstedt, Die wirtschaftliche Lage Grossgriechenlands in der
Kaiserzeit (Wiesbaden, 1960; Historia Einzelschr. 4); Toynbee (above,
note 15) 2.190-285; D. Brendan Nagle, "Towards a Sociology of South
eastern Etruria," forthcoming; A. Kahane, L. M. Threipland, J. Ward
Perkins, The Ager Veientanus, North and East of Rome (Papers of the
British School at Rome 36, n.s. 23, London, 1968).
23 Wage Labour and Capital (above, note 4) 89-90.
24 Ibid., 89.
25 Ibid., 90.
26 In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works vol. 1 (Moscow, 1958)
429.
27 Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1906) 152, cited according to the Modern
Library edition of volume I.
28 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1962) 857.
29 Ibid., 858.
30 Cf. Georg Lukâcs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,"
in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) 95: "Thus
capitalism has created a form for the state and a system of law correspond
ing to its needs and harmonizing with its own structure."
31 Cf. Danilova (above, note 21) 293: "While decla

of means of production to be the basic and deci
the structure of society characteristic of any social order, the model
[i.e., of five stages] introduces into the description of the slaveholding and
feudal systems an extraeconomic factor — the dependent status of the
producer (complete lack of freedom under slaveholding, partial under
feudalism). It is absolutely clear that the elimination of this factor would
deprive the definition of any real content because extraeconomic com
pulsion — relations of dominance and subjection — remained an inseparable
feature of all postprimitive precapitalist structures."
32 PEF 87.
33 G. E. M. de Ste. Croix has informed me that he has not found this definition
in the works of Marx and Engels themselves, but that it appears to have
been introduced by Lenin.
34 D'iakonov (above, note 5) 33. Cf. also P. Vidal-Naquet, "Les esclaves
grecs étaient-ils une classe?" Raison présente 6 (1968) 103-112, and
Rigobert Günther, "Die Klasse der Sklaven und ihr Klassenkampf,"
Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 8 (1960) 104-106, who seeks to
reconcile Marx's statement in the Grundrisse with the traditional view
according to which the slaves constitute the first exploited class, and
the slaveholders the first exploiting class, in the history of human society.
35 Hobsbawm, PEF 65.
36 The most notorious of these was the theory of the "slave revolution,"
sponsored by Stalin, which attributed to slaves a role in the destruction
of slave society exactly analogous to the role of the proletariat as a V
revolutionary class in bourgeois society. For discussion, cf. Staerman

(above, note 3) 27, 29-30.
37 Cf. the dedication of Joseph Vogt's masterful study, "Zur Struktur der
antiken Sklavenkriege," in Sklaverei und Humanität (Wiesbaden, 1965;
Historia Einzelschr. 8) 20: "investigatoribus servitutis antiquae tarn in
occidentis quam in orientis partibus assiduis" ("to the untiring investi
gators of ancient slavery in west and east alike.")
33 Eduard Meyer, "Die Sklaverei im Altertum," Kleine Schriften (Halle a. S.,
1910) 169-212; Max Weber, "Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum," in Gesam
melte Aufsätze zur Social und Wirtschaftgeschichte (Tübingen, 1924)
11-17; Michael Rostovzeff, Rome (New York, 1960) 89-91; Toynbee (above,
note 15) 2. 155 ff.; cf. also Cedric A. Yeo, "The Development of the
Roman Plantation and Marketing of Farm Products," Finanzarchiv 13
(1952) 321-342.
35 Cf. Bernard J. Siegel, "Some Methodological Considerations for a Com

parative Study of Slavery," American Anthropologist N.S. 47 (1945) 357
366 on the Northwest Coast Indians; M. I. Finley, "Between Slavery and
Freedom," Comparative Studies in Society and History 6 (1963-64) 233-249.
40 Cf. Cato's De agri cultura, esp. ch. 2.
41 Cf. Rostovzeff (above, note 38) 89: "The rise of a large class of capitalists
166 David Konstan
desirous to invest their capital in land...;" Yeo (above, note 38) 321:
"the system was capitalistic involving an investment of money capital...;"
Ernest Brehaut, Cato the Censor On Farming (New York, 1933) xxxii:
"The type of farming, then, presented in De agricultura...was a capitalistic
undertaking...."
Op. cit. above, note 38.
Pp. 172-173.
P. 188 (the emphasis is Meyer's).
Toynbee (above, note 15) 2. 166-167. Cf. Danilova (above, note 21) 306
307: "The absence of conditions for the expropriation of the means of
production from the actual producers in precapitalist societies limited the
growth of large-scale private property. Forms of such property that reached
any significant degree of maturity are known only in slaveholding societies.
However, the existence of such societies was limited both geographically
and chronologically."
Toynbee 2. 161; cf. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (London, 1973)
70-71.
Toynbee, loc. cit.

We might compare that stage in the development of capitalism in which
individual craftsmen, for example in the textile industry, were assembled
under the roof of a single establishment, permitting the more efficient
co-ordination of their labors; Marx calls this stage "manufacture," cf.
Capital vol. 1 (above, note 27) 375-385.
Toynbee (above, note 15) 2. 166. In an extreme form, the emphasis on the
economic motive has led to the view that Roman expansion was chiefly
V
motivated by the need for slaves; for this idea in Marxist writers, cf.
Staerman (above, note 3) 12-13.
Toynbee 2.299. This idea has its reflection also in Marxist accounts;
cf. D'iakonov (above, note 5) 33: "A distinctive feature of the slave
holding era is also the fact that intensive development of slaveholding on
a large scale is characteristic primarily of societies with a substantial
development of commodity production or even of those in which commodity
production plays the dominant role.... Therefore, it is only societies such
as Corinth, Athens or Rome of the late Republic and the early Empire —i.e.,
only a few societies of the ancient world in which commodity production
was dominant — that may be cited as examples of the intensive develop
ment of non-state slaveholding on a large scale." Crucial to a Marxist
understanding of the role of commodities in pre-capitalist societies is the
distinction between commerce, which lends to products the appearance of
commodities, and the production of commodities as such. The best dis
cussion is Marx's in Capital, vol. 3 (above, note 28) 318-331, the chapter
entitled "Historical Facts about Merchant's Capital." Cf. pp. 322-323:
"Independent mercantile wealth as a predominant form of capital repre
sents the separation of the circulation process from its extremes, and
these extremes are the exchanging producers themselves.... The product
becomes a commodity by way of commerce. It is commerce which here
turns products into commodities, not the p

its movements gives rise to commerce.' P. 325: In the pre-capitalist
stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse
is true."
M. I. Finley, "Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient

World," Economic History Review Ser. 2, 18 (1965) 29-45, esp. p. 40; The
V
Ancient Economy (above, note 46);Staerman (above, note 3).

The Ancient Economy p. 111.
Ibid., pp. 121-122.
Ibid., p. 122.
Ibid., pp. 33, 133 ff.
Ibid., pp. 22, 34.
Georg Lukâcs, "Class Consciousness," in History and Class Conscious
ness (above, note 30) 57. Finley makes use of the passage just cited in
Lukâcs to assert that "from neither a Marxist nor a non-Marxist standpoint
is class a sufficiently demarcated category for our purposes" (The Ancient
Economy, p. 50). But his argument is a non sequitur. Lukâcs' observation
that in pre-capitalist societies "status-consciousness...masks class
consciousness" (Lukâcs, p. 58, quoted by Finley on p. 50) means only
that classes in ancient society do not and cannot perceive their social
relations as grounded in economic relations. This in no way alters the
fact that where slave or feudal relations prevail, the ruling class is
defined by its control of the means of production. The wealthy Romans
were a class precisely because their supremacy rested not on traditional
or ideological distinctions but on their holdings in land. It is interesting
to note that, according to Finley, the long-range tendency in Rome was
toward "a steady increase in the size of landholdings" (p. 102).
The thesis that slavery retarded the advance of technology has, of course,
been defended by Marxists, but it is by no means exclusively theirs. It is
unfortunate that Franz Kiechle chose to present his study on Sklavenarbeit
und technischer Fortschritt im Römischen Reich (Wiesbaden, 1969) as an
attack on the Marxist interpretation of Roman slavery. Cf. also Finley,
The Ancient Economy 83-84.
Cf. Hobsbawm, PEF 46-48.
PEF 67, 89.
Ibid., 86-87.
Ibid., 74.
Cf. Aristotle Politics 5. 3-4 for remarks on the tension between rich and
poor in the Greek city-states. Aristotle makes it clear that the stability
of the city-state is threatened when the stratum of men of moderate means
declines.
The rise of a money economy greatly facilitated the process of expropriation

of the poor. In Capital, vol. 3 (above, note 28) 585-586, Marx described
the mechanism eloquently: "The same wars through which the Roman
patricians ruined the plebeians by compelling them to serve as soldiers
and which prevented them from reproducing their conditions of labour, and
168 David Konstan
therefore made paupers of them (and pauperization, the crippling loss of

the prerequisites of reproduction is here the predominant form) — these
same wars filled the store-rooms and coffers of the patricians with looted
copper, the money of that time. Instead of directly giving plebeians the
necessary commodities, i.e., grain, horses, and cattle, they loaned them
this copper for which they had no use themselves, and took advantage of
this situation to exact enormous usurious interest, thereby turning the
plebeians into their debtor slaves."
Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto (above, note 4) 34, include
"patrician and plebeian" in the list of opposing classes. They here define
classes as, "in a word, oppressor and oppressed." Cf. also Engels, The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (above, note 4) 264.
On social and economic differentiation among the clans in tribal society,
cf. Paul Kirchhoff, "The Principles of Clanship in Human Society," in
Morton H. Fried, Readings in Anthropology vol. 2 (New York, 1959) 265
269. Engels, op. cit., p. 262, summarizes his conception of the transition
from gentile to class society in the prehistory of Athens. In the Grundrisse,
Marx emphasizes above all the communal aspect of the city-state, and
even offers the suggestion that the Roman proletariat preserved the
vestige of its claim on the property of the commonwealth in the form of
the dole (PEF, p. 102).
Cf. Finley, The Ancient Economy (above, note 46) 70 on the effect of the
Solonic reform at Athens. The history of the institution of nexum at Rome
is exceedingly obscure, but its abolition, along with peasant uprisings
motivated by the problem of debt, such as the secession of 287 B.C., must
also have made the use of imported slaves more attractive.
Cf. PEF 71-72.
Toynbee (above, note 15) 2. 188; cf. above, p. 155f.
P. A. Brunt, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic (New York, 1971) 18.
For evidence and argument (and a slightly different estimate of the relative
figures), cf. Brunt's Italian Manpower 225 B.C.-A.D. 14 (Oxford, 1971)
121-130, esp. 121, 124.
Cf. Toynbee (above, note 15) 2.162-64 on Akragas and Carthage; Finley,
The Ancient Economy (above, note 46) 70-71; also M. I. Finley, "Was
Greek Civilization based on Slave Labour?" Historia 8 (1959) 145-164
(repr. in Finley), esp. p. 164: "The pre-Greek world...was, in a very
profound sense, a world without free men It was equally a world in
which chattel slavery played no role of any consequence."
Cf. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971) 12; "the
classical Mediterranean had always been a world on the edge of starva
tion."
The Ancient Economy (above, note 46) 93.
For an accurate picture of the relative predominance of estates based on
slave labor and small-scale individual or household production, we must
await the results of archaeological investigations, especially those which
may be undertaken at some remove from t

centers like Naples, where production for the urban market may distort
the general picture. Cf. K. D. White, "Latifundia," BICS 14 (1967) 78:
"The most promising line of research in this area is the close study,
region by region, of the changing patterns of land use and agricultural
production, supported by analysis of demographic and other socio-economic
data provided by our sources."
75 Cf. Finley, The Ancient Economy 130: "No one will pretend that Rome
paid in production for even a tiny fraction of her massive imports."
76 Contrast Cedric A. Yeo, "The Economics of Roman and American Slavery,"
Finanzarchiv 13 (1952) 483: "I am convinced that, in spite of wide regional
and chronological differences, Roman and American slavery were es
sentially similar and followed the same general principles." Cf. also
Carl N. Degler, "Starr on Slavery," Journal of Economic History 19 (1959)
271-277, esp. pp. 274-275.
77 Unfortunately, it has not been vouchsafed us to know what the slaves
thought about the social problems of their day. But while it may be doubted
that any developed ideologies were published which criticized the institu
tion of slavery as such, it goes well beyond the evidence to assert, with
Peter Green, "The First Sicilian Slave War," Past and Present 20 (1961)
24, that the revolt was sparked off by men "who (and this cannot be suf
ficiently emphasized) had nothing against slavery as an institution, but
objected violently to being enslaved themselves" (Green's emphasis).
Generally speaking, the desire of the slaves was to return to or recon
stitute their native societies. In the case of most slaves, latifundist
slavery cannot have been a significant institution in their native lands.
That they may not have condemned slavery as such (if this is true, and
we simply do not know) is hardly relevant to a determination of their social
aims, which will have been antagonistic to any system in which slavery
was the basis of production. Finally, it is worth reflecting on the fact
that the slaves apparently could, under the pressures of war, collectively
run the estates they had seized and take measures to protect them against
the disposition of the urban poor to pillage; cf. Diodorus Siculus 34-35.2.
48 and 36.5.2-3, 11, cited according to the Loeb edition, tr. Francis R.
Walton, vol. 12 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) 88-90, 160-162. There is an
important clue here, I believe, to the nature of the class consciousness of
slaves in ancient Rome.

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MARXISM AND ROMAN SLAVERY

Author(s): David Konstan

il here is no established or orthodox Marxist interpretation

I. Problems in the traditional theory.

Marxist writers have traditionally understood slavery as a

One can scarcely pick up a historical journal from China

Arethusa Vol. 8 (1975) 1.

doubt, but that the

his rule. But this "unusual phenomenon," as S

decline when Rome, u

Two further problems deserve mentio

necessarily any particu

However, even this modest statement of the Marxist theory seems

In production, men not only act on nature but also on

produce, they enter into definite conne

Although one part only of the workman's daily labour

society. Thus he wrote, in the first v

Capitalist production is distinguished from the out

tion in Marxist theo

II. Slavery as an industrial system.

Associated with such eminent students of antiquity, and

Rome as the basis of a qualitative step f

war and the ruin of

Not all historians, certainly, have accepted the equation of

however, that such ethical imperatives coincide with the material

III. Approaches to a new theory.

Marx wrote the notebooks on pre-capitalist economic formations

interact to set free the forces of capital.5' There is no reason to

estates, it is clear that as a class the rich did not occupy an es

of the city-state and w

the end of the reign of Augustus, th

the slave supply,nor to

16 Cf. Staerman (abov

17 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Letter of Marx to Engels, March 8,

31 Cf. Danilova (above, note 21) 293: "While decla

revolutionary class in bourgeois society. For discussion, cf. Staerman

35 Cf. Bernard J. Siegel, "Some Methodological Considerations for a Com

Toynbee, loc. cit.

turns products into commodities, not the p

M. I. Finley, "Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient

Ancient Economy (above, note 46);Staerman (above, note 3).

The rise of a money economy greatly facilitated the process of expropriation

therefore made paupers of them (and pauperization, the crippling loss of

may be undertaken at some remove from t

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