Replies

The rest is history. Don't think the parallels aren't here

I'll admit you make a solid argument.

The main difference is the access to wealth.

Even our "slaves" may attain wealth in a short time with luck and hard work.

Dynamic capitalism will outpace socialism, thus refreshing each generation.

You're confusing Roman slavery with the slavery practiced in American history. Totally different types.

Roman slaves were not simply field hands, but also the vast bulk of the skilled labor of the Empire- many of the civil servants, essentially all of the educators, a large portion of commercial management, etc.

They can, and did with quite a bit of regularity, become very personally wealthy and powerful. This was because the Romans culturally treated the slaves as part of the household, and not as a group somehow apart (of course, made easier by the fact that the Romans were willing to enslave anyone, with the exception of other Roman citizens apart from abandoned children, and thus didn't have the convenient racial divide that made the distinction between slave and free in America more visible).

Further, the Romans had a very strong tradition of manumission, which was more than simply saying "you're free, now get out." Freed slaves remained a part of the family, and were even entitled to adopt the nomen of their former owner- for example, Marcus Tullius Cicero's slave Tiro, when he was freed, became Marcus Tullius Tiro. Furthermore, freed slaves were entitled to continued financial support from their former owners.

A common example of how this all worked was say that random Roman patrician owned a shipping business. Every dock warehouse he owned at the various ports was managed by one of his slaves. Later, he decides to free one of them. When he does, he would often give them the dock warehouse, or one of the trading ships, and operate the business with them as a partner rather than a slave.

This was quite common, and for the average urban slave, wealth was not as far out of reach as one might imagine from hearing the word "slave."

Nor were the field laborer slaves much worse off than the other peasants of the time, who would, under the later Empire, end up as the same status as the slaves- serfs bound to the land. There wasn't a lot of opportunity for either class of people, so your comparison isn't correct.