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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8759277" data-attributes="member: 18">Not quite. It's only if they're being sold to private citizens and they really totally own them. As in the slaves have no rights and are purely "chattel". That's only part of the picture of slavery in Rome, and basically every year post-BC it gets increasingly inaccurate (though there is endless dispute over exactly what the law was - certainly ideas like Varro's become increasingly unpopular).Re selling, here are situations where, directly or indirectly (indirectly usually being the land they were chained to being sold), serfs are sold, and indentured servants were regularly sold - a lot of them had a thing meaning they could only be sold once - but many could be sold (and how many times was that "only sold once" violated"?), including virtually all the ones who went to the Americas in the 1600s through 1800s.Sure but it's an American film, made in America, for American sensibilities, that when it gets down almost nothing to do with the Servile Wars and there's no way Americans weren't thinking about their own history with slavery when watching it. We might also point to the similarities to various other slave revolts, including more successful ones, in the Americas (particularly Haiti). Weirdly the Spartacus TV series whilst being far from historically accurate (though less inaccurate than the movie) has a pretty great vibe for just how gross Rome was.I actually agree here! But I think letting the Romans off the hook for their use of slavery is like, pretty low down on the list of things people completely unreasonably let the Romans off the hook for, and yes there is a real problem with extremist reactionaries attempt to appeal to the idea of ancient Rome as if it were in some way a good thing. I kind of got "radicalized" in Ancient History myself because studied what Caesar did to Gaul and Claudius and others did to Britain (which is often played down - a rare pop-culture exception to this is Hardcore History's somewhat aggressively named "Celtic Holocaust" 6-hour podcast - I recommend it largely because it's such a rare example of really giving it to the Romans, not like messing around trying to make out they were okay - even a lot of leftist sources often go a bit soft on the Romans - and are also often ignorant re: the true depth of Roman nastiness), and also just how crummy Rome was even for Romans.I kind of feel like culture/society isn't quite ready for their reckoning with Rome just yet, sadly, there's still too widespread of a sort of propaganda-machine (include very mainstream stuff like the BBC) trying to feed us the idea that the Romans were an "advanced" civilizing force and other utter nonsense. Literally the only things the Romans were "advanced" in were civil engineering and arguably military tactics. Everywhere else they were a trashfire, including stuff like agriculture, where they were downright incompetent (they attempted to "reform" British agriculture, and massively reduced its productivity, because their simplistic system of crop rotation was trash compared to what the Britons were doing, and totally maladapted to the climate - classic imperial boneheadedness).</blockquote>

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