SPES · Servi Publici: Everybody's Slaves
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-10-01 → 2018-09-30
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Servi Publici: Everybody's Slaves
The goal of the SPES project was to provide a full-scale reconsideration of the position of public slaves in the Roman economy and society, through a multidisciplinary and comparative study. In the Roman world, slavery played a fundamental role: slaves performed all kinds of manual labour and domestic services, but some had highly skilled professions. Besides private slaves, owned by private masters, and imperial slaves, who were in the property of the emperors, there were the so-called public slaves (servi publici): they were non-free individuals owned not by a private person, but by a community, such as the Roman people as whole or by the citizen body of a municipality. Public slaves were considered as a state chattel, in much the same way as occurred in the Ancient Greece and in some modern slave-owning societies. Complying to the objectives presented at the beginning of the project, SPES has come to these conclusions: - All the available literary, juridical, epigraphic and iconographic sources concerning public slaves and freedmen in the Roman World have now been gathered, organized and interpreted as a whole; - A new comparative approach has been developed, in order to understand the role of public slaves and freedmen in the organisation of slave labour and the Roman civic life, as well as opportunities for their social advancement; - For the first time, a theoretical and comparative approach encompassing both public slavery in the Roman period and in some early modern and modern societies has been offered, resulting in a methodologically up-to-date discussion of the nature of the phenomenon. SPES, thus, has successfully brought together and cross-fertilised two areas that are usually treated in isolation from each other: the study of slavery in the Roman world and in the early Modern age. For the first time, all the available information concerning the Roman public slavery have been effectively stored in only one place, and they are now available for further comparative studies on this topic.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The researcher is moving from Italy to Newcastle University in the UK to embark on a full-scale study of the role of public slavery in the Roman world. The SPES project sets out to provide a full-scale reconsideration of the position of public slaves in the Roman economy and society through a multidisciplinary and comparative study. The preliminary step will be a full overview of the primary evidence, which will combine textual sources with iconographic and archaeological material. The second step will be engaging with two major interrelated questions: a) how a comparative and diachronic study may allow us to further our knowledge of public slavery in ancient Rome; b) how a stronger understanding of the social reality of public slavery in the Roman world may be achieved by the comparison with some modern manifestations of it. The importance of the project is twofold: a) for the first time, the researcher will build a versatile on-line database, which will collect all the sources concerning public slaves in the Roman world; b) it is also the first attempt ever made to cross-fertilize ancient and modern historians of slavery in order to deal with the problem of the slaves owned not by a private person, but by a whole community both in the ancient and modern history. The significance of the project goes thus beyond the remit of Ancient History. It is expected that the project will bring about dramatic changes in understanding how slavery became deep-rooted in all the slave-owning societies: public slaves were in fact essential for the State administration both in the ancient Roman world and in some modern Mediterranean and Transatlantic countries. Working on this project at Newcastle will enable the researcher to develop new sets of expertise and skills both in the IT area and in developing comparative approaches. The host organisation will in turn benefit from the researcher’s world-class expertise in the Latin epigraphy and the social history of the Roman world.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE · Newcastle Upon TyneCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union