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Slavery in ancient Rome played an important role in society and the economy. Besides manual labor, slaves performed many domestic services, and might be employed at highly skilled jobs and professions. Teachers, accountants, and physicians were often slaves. Greek slaves in particular might be highly educated. Unskilled slaves, or those sentenced to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short. Slaves were considered property under Roman law and had no legal personhood. Unlike Roman citizens, they could be subjected to corporal punishment, sexual exploitation (prostitutes were often slaves), torture, and summary execution. The testimony of a slave could not be accepted in a court of law unless the slave was tortured—a practice based on the belief that slaves in a position to be privy to their masters' affairs would be too virtuously loyal to reveal damaging evidence unless coerced. Over time, however, slaves gained increased legal protection, including the right to file complaints against their masters. Attitudes changed in part because of the influence among the educated elite of the Stoics, whose egalitarian views of humanity extended to slaves. Roman slaves could hold property which, despite the fact that it belonged to their masters, they were allowed to use as if it were their own. Skilled or educated slaves were allowed to earn their own money, and might hope to save enough to buy their freedom. Such slaves were often freed by the terms of their master's will, or for services rendered. A notable example of a high-status slave was Tiro, the secretary of Cicero. Tiro was freed before his master's death, and was successful enough to retire on his own country estate, where he died at the age of 99.〔Cicero, ''Ad familiares'' (16.21 )〕〔Jerome, ''Chronological Tables'' (194.1 )〕〔William Smith, ''Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'' (vol. 3, p. 1182 )〕 Rome differed from Greek city-states in allowing freed slaves to become citizens. After manumission, a male slave who had belonged to a Roman citizen enjoyed not only passive freedom from ownership, but active political freedom (''libertas''), including the right to vote.〔Fergus Millar, ''The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic'' (University of Michigan, 1998, 2002), pp. 23, 209.〕 A slave who had acquired ''libertas'' was thus a ''libertus'' ("freed person," feminine ''liberta'') in relation to his former master, who then became his patron (''patronus''). As a social class, freed slaves were ''libertini'', though later writers used the terms ''libertus'' and ''libertinus'' interchangeably.〔Adolf Berger, entry on ''libertus'', ''Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law'' (American Philological Society, 1953, 1991), p. 564.〕 ''Libertini'' were not entitled to hold public office or state priesthoods, nor could they achieve senatorial rank. During the early Empire, however, freedmen held key positions in the government bureaucracy, so much so that Hadrian limited their participation by law.〔Berger, entry on ''libertinus'', ''Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law'', p. 564.〕 Any future children of a freedman would be born free, with full rights of citizenship. ''Vernae'' (singular ''verna'') were slaves born within a household (''familia'') or on a family farm or agricultural estate (''villa''). There was a stronger social obligation to care for ''vernae,'' whose epitaphs sometimes identify them as such, and at times they would have been the children of free males of the household. The general Latin word for slave was ''servus.'' A major source of slaves had been Roman military expansion during the Republic. The use of former soldiers as slaves led perhaps inevitably to a series of ''en masse'' armed rebellions, the Servile Wars, the last of which was led by Spartacus. During the ''Pax Romana'' of the early Roman Empire (1st–2nd century CE), emphasis was placed on maintaining stability, and the lack of new territorial conquests dried up this supply line of human trafficking. To maintain an enslaved work force, increased legal restrictions on freeing slaves were put into place. Escaped slaves would be hunted down and returned (often for a reward). ==Origins== In his ''Institutiones'' (161 BCE), the Roman jurist Gaius wrote that: The 1st century BCE Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus indicates that the Roman institution of slavery began with the legendary founder Romulus giving Roman fathers the right to sell their own children into slavery, and kept growing with the expansion of the Roman state. Slave ownership was most widespread throughout the Roman citizenry from the Second Punic War (218–201 BCE) to the 4th century CE. The Greek geographer Strabo (1st century CE) records how an enormous slave trade resulted from the collapse of the Seleucid Empire (100–63 BCE).〔(Roman Slavery: The Social, Cultural, Political, and Demographic Consequences ) by Moya K. Mason〕 The Twelve Tables, Rome's oldest legal code, has brief references to slavery, indicating that the institution was of long standing. In the tripartite division of law by the jurist Ulpian (2nd century CE), slavery was an aspect of the ''ius gentium'', the customary international law held in common among all peoples (''gentes''). The "law of nations" was neither natural law, which existed in nature and governed animals as well as humans, nor civil law, which was the body of laws specific to a people.〔Brian Tierney, ''The Idea of Natural Rights'' (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002, originally published 1997 by Scholars Press for Emory University), p. 136.〕 All human beings are born free (''liberi'') under natural law, but slavery was held to be a practice common to all nations, who might then have specific civil laws pertaining to slaves.〔 In ancient warfare, the victor had the right under the ''ius gentium'' to enslave a defeated population; however, if a settlement had been reached through diplomatic negotiations or formal surrender, the people were by custom to be spared violence and enslavement. The ''ius gentium'' was not a legal code,〔R.W. Dyson, ''Natural Law and Political Realism in the History of Political Thought'' (Peter Lang, 2005), vol. 1, p. 127.〕 and any force it had depended on "reasoned compliance with standards of international conduct."〔David J. Bederman, ''International Law in Antiquity'' (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 85.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Slavery in ancient Rome」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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