Quanto era schiavista l’antica Roma? Note storiografiche

Journal title HISTORIA MAGISTRA
Author/s Mattia Balbo
Publishing Year 2015 Issue 2014/15
Language Italian Pages 5 P. 73-77 File size 78 KB
DOI 10.3280/HM2014-015007
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

This article discusses historiographical myths on the role and the size of slavery in the Roman empire (200 BC-AD 200). The text focuses on the misleading comparison between classical slavery in Rome and Atlantic slave trade in modern ages (18th and 19th centuries). Ancient and modern slavery share some common features; however, modern historiography has often over-interpreted this apparent similarity, ignoring many social, economic and juridical differences between these two models. Such a misunderstanding affects two particular topics, above all: the attempts to calculate the rank of salve population in Roman empire and the model-explanation of classical villa, which is often conceived as a colonial plantation.

Keywords: Slavery, plantation, demography, manpower, Roman villa, slave trade.

  1. Beloch K.J., La popolazione del mondo greco-romano in Pareto V. (a cura di) Biblioteca di storia economica, IV, Forni, Milano 1909, pp. 65-459 (ed. or. Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1886).
  2. Brunt P.A., Italian Manpower 225 B.C.- A.D. 14, Clarendon, Oxford 1971. Capogrossi Colognesi L., Proprietari e contadini nell’Italia romana: la preistoria della villa schiavistica (IVII secolo a.C.), in Le travail. Recherches historiques. Table ronde de Besançon, 14 et 15 novembre 1997, Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, Besançon-Paris 1999, pp. 87-100.
  3. Carandini A., Settefinestre.Una villa schiavistica nell’Etruria romana, Panini, Modena 1985.
  4. Finley M.I., Ancient slavery and modern ideology, Chatto & Windus, London 1980. Gibbon E., The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Strahan & Cadell, London 1776-1788.
  5. Hopkins K., Conquistatori e schiavi. Sociologia dell’Impero romano, Boringhieri, Torino 1984 (ed. or. Conquerors and Slaves, CUP, Cambridge, 1984 1978).
  6. Launaro A., Peasants and slaves. The rural population of Roman Italy (200 BC to AD 100), CUP, Cambridge 2011.
  7. Lo Cascio E., Crescita e declino. Studi di storia dell’economia romana, «L’Erma » di Bretschneider, Roma 2009.
  8. Lo Cascio E., Thinking slave and free in coordinates, in Roth U. (a cura di) By the Sweat of your Brow. Roman slavery in its socio-economic setting, Institute of Classical Studies, London 2010, pp. 21-30.
  9. Marzano A., Roman villas in Central Italy. A social and economic history, Brill, Leiden-Boston 2007.
  10. Scheidel W., Human mobility in Roman Italy. II. The slave population, in «The Journal of Roman Studies», n.
  11. 95, 2005, pp. 64-79.
  12. Schiavone A., La storia spezzata. Roma antica e Occidente moderno, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1996.

Mattia Balbo, Quanto era schiavista l’antica Roma? Note storiografiche in "HISTORIA MAGISTRA" 15/2014, pp 73-77, DOI: 10.3280/HM2014-015007