The History Book Club discussion

Hello Everyone,

For the week of June 5th - June 11th, we are reading chapter 8 of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard.

The eighth week's reading assignment is:

WEEK EIGHT - June 5th - June 11th -> 8. The Home Front (297-336)

We will open up a thread for each week's reading. Please make sure to post in the particular thread dedicated to those specific chapters and page numbers to avoid spoilers. We will also open up supplemental threads as we did for other spotlighted books.

This book was kicked off April 17th.

We look forward to your participation. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders and other noted on line booksellers do have copies of the book and shipment can be expedited. The book can also be obtained easily at your local library, or on your Kindle.

There is no rush and we are thrilled to have you join us. It is never too late to get started and/or to post.

Vicki Cline will be moderating this selection.

Welcome,

~Vicki

TO ALWAYS SEE ALL WEEKS' THREADS SELECT VIEW ALL

by Mary Beard

REMEMBER NO SPOILERS ON THE WEEKLY NON SPOILER THREADS - ON EACH WEEKLY NON SPOILER THREAD - WE ONLY DISCUSS THE PAGES ASSIGNED OR THE PAGES WHICH WERE COVERED IN PREVIOUS WEEKS. IF YOU GO AHEAD OR WANT TO ENGAGE IN MORE EXPANSIVE DISCUSSION - POST THOSE COMMENTS IN ONE OF THE SPOILER THREADS. THESE CHAPTERS HAVE A LOT OF INFORMATION SO WHEN IN DOUBT CHECK WITH THE CHAPTER OVERVIEW AND SUMMARY TO RECALL WHETHER YOUR COMMENTS ARE ASSIGNMENT SPECIFIC. EXAMPLES OF SPOILER THREADS ARE THE GLOSSARY, THE BIBLIOGRAPHY, THE INTRODUCTION AND THE BOOK AS A WHOLE THREADS.

Notes:

It is always a tremendous help when you quote specifically from the book itself and reference the chapter and page numbers when responding. The text itself helps folks know what you are referencing and makes things clear.

Citations:

If an author or book is mentioned other than the book and author being discussed, citations must be included according to our guidelines. Also, when citing other sources, please provide credit where credit is due and/or the link. There is no need to re-cite the author and the book we are discussing however.

Here is the link to the thread titled Mechanics of the Board which will help you with the citations and how to do them.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Also, the citation thread:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Introduction Thread:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Table of Contents and Syllabus

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Glossary

Remember there is a glossary thread where ancillary information is placed by the moderator. This is also a thread where additional information can be placed by the group members regarding the subject matter being discussed.

Here is the link:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Bibliography

There is a Bibliography where books cited in the text are posted with proper citations and reviews. We also post the books that the author may have used in his research or in her notes. Please also feel free to add to the Bibliography thread any related books, etc. with proper citations or other books either non-fiction or historical fiction that relate to the subject matter of the book itself. No self-promotion, please.

Here is the link:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Book as a Whole and Final Thoughts - Spoiler Thread

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Link:

by Mary Beard

Everyone, for the week of June 5th - June 11th, we are reading Chapter 8.

The eighth week's reading assignment is:

WEEK EIGHT - June 5th - June 11th -> 8. The Home Front (297-336)

Chapter Overview and Summary:

8. The Home Front



This chapter looks at some aspects of everyday Roman life in the Republic, including the role of women and slavery.

Roman marriage

Discussion Topics:

1. Do you think the serial divorces and remarriages for political purposes were as hard emotionally on the men as it was on the women?

2. What did upper class women do all day, with the housework, etc. being done by slaves?

Roman slave market

Discussion Topics:

1. How was Roman slavery different from that in the U.S.?

2. How were babies born to slaves or picked off of garbage dumps raised? The children wouldn’t be useful until they were about 5.

This is an interesting chapter, but doesn't seem to go with the rest of the book, as it's not about specific people and events. I guess this was a good place to put it, between the end of the Republic and the beginning of the emperors.

Does seem to be the best place to put this chapter.

Found these videos

A glimpse of teenage life in ancient Rome - Ray Laurence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWYh...

Four sisters in Ancient Rome - Ray Laurence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQMgL...

Thanks for those videos, Michele, they're very cute. Wish there were more.

Michelle the glossary is always best for placement of ancillary material.

I do wonder how babies were brought up as slaves. I can imagine that mothers could carry them around sort of tied to their backs with cloths, like you see in pictures of people working in the fields in the olden days. But what would you do when they start walking and running around? The mother (or caretaker if the baby was saved from being discarded) had work to do and couldn't be chasing after the child. Maybe they had the equivalent of playpens, i.e. cages. Tried to Google it but didn't find any good links.

Nope there doesn't seem to be any info out there. Maybe because slaves were not important, so nothing was recorded.

Bentley wrote: "Michelle the glossary is always best for placement of ancillary material."

I'll duplicate the post in the glossary..

I also wonder how owners felt about slave babies that were their own children, which I'm sure happened often. It's hard to imagine that they were treated the same as all the other slaves, but that's probably what happened. As it did during our own years of slavery (i.e. in the US).

Thank you Michelle - always best to add media to the glossary or books, podcasts, videos, news articles if not done by mod.

Since wealthy Romans were in the habit of dumping unwanted babies, I am sure they never knew or cared if someone picked up the baby and enslaved it.

Actually, I was talking about babies created when owners had sex with their female slaves. Of course I guess we don't know if slaves had sex with each other, so the paternity might be unknown.

The main reason I put up the topic about whether men were affected by political divorces was the case of Tiberius, Augustus' step-son and successor emperor. He was originally married to a woman named Vipsania, Agrippa's daughter, but was forced by Augustus to divorce her and marry Julia, Augustus' daughter. He was reportedly very upset by this divorce, as he really loved Vipsania and didn't much like Julia. I wonder if this had anything to do with his later dour personality and withdrawal from governing.

The week 9 thread is open. Chapter 9 covers the career of Octavian/Augustus.

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

1 On divorces: I think it depends entirely on the individual. Pompey the great was absolutely in love with Julia. Had divorce occurred then it would've cut him deeply. Marcus Cicero was divorced from his wife near the end of his life and his family troubles (especially the loss of his daughter) wounded him greatly. I doubt there's too big of a difference on the feelings involved with loss of love now as there ever was then.

2 What did women do? Give support to their husbands, get tutored, hang out. At least for the rich. The average woman had their labor roles just like everyone else.

1 How was Roman slavery different from American slavery? Perspective and role. American slavery was primarily for the benefit of plantation owners; labor involved labor hard on the body and slaves could generally be identified by racial features. Plus the whole enlightenment period and emphasis on freedom of choices rang differently in the ears of those living in the industrial and barely-pre-industrial eras. In Roman times, anyone could be a slave (not merely identified by skin color), a slave could fill more functions than just a farm laborer, and it was even sometimes preferable to the lifestyle "enjoyed" by citizens (wondering where your next meal would come from) and indeed people would even sometimes opt into slavery. For example, on education, it was frowned upon to educate an American slave, arguably to keep them unaware of the principles of freedom circulating about (like the kind of rhetoric in the document that declared the freedom of the country in which they lived). In contrast, a Roman slave might be a transcriptionist or a librarian. In the Roman eyes, slavery was just a fact of life. Abolition of slavery is a very new idea.

2 How were slave children raised? Probably with lots of mental conditioning. Making the children aware that their position is simply a fact of life and that their life's fulfillment or advancement would be by means of their master's satisfaction. If born to slave parents, I wouldn't doubt they still received some level of tender love and care; many an equestrian would perceive their slaves and freedmen as extensions to the family. An example of which might be Quintus Tullius Cicero, brother of Marcus, of whom held his slave in higher esteem than most around him. Just because a slave owner was financially responsible for a slave's well-being doesn't mean that they were treated poorly or raised as less than human. I'm sure both sides of the argument were played, but it all boils back to the Roman vs modern perspective of what slavery is.

Edit: To Vicki, I totally spaced your example on divorce, recall it, and like your example better than my own.

Thanks for the comments, Taylor. The comparison of Roman slavery to our own is particularly interesting to me. I'm sure there's a book out there about it.

Perhaps individually, but probably not drawing a comparison between the two. Besides, it would be hard to find a book written drawing the comparisons without a modern bias against simply the word slavery. This, of course, being due to most nations in the world having a rule about not having slaves and those that don't have a rule about not having slaves probably don't have a rule because they don't have government infrastructure.

TL;DR If such a book does exist, it probably isn't without modern biases.

I've always wondered how servitude in Europe morphed from slavery to serfhood. And just saw a new book about the subject -

by Alice Rio (no photo)

(BTW, what does TL;DR mean?)

Yeah Vicki, that book does seem fairly interesting. Although what I was really getting at was that I think it would hard to approach the subject being impartial. Many of the core tenets of western culture have this bias against slavery.

Disclaimer: the following is about the use of language without an appeal to scriptural, doctrinal, or religious debate.
For example, the bible, an undisputed centerpiece to Western culture has been modified to appeal to the distaste of slavery. Very often in English versions of it (as early as the original king James version), the Greek word δουλα (doulos) is translated as "servant" where the translations more closely resemble the context of slave. In that case, the general usage is about conduct of slaves or the desire to be a slave to the Judeo-Christian God. But the context is avoided due to the somewhat modern (the last 400-500 years) distaste for being a slave. Granted, in many versions it is still translated as slave, but it is one example of many.

TL;DR means "too long; didn't read". It's just a very brief summary in case what I write is too long of a dissertation to get through. Having it in all caps just makes it more noticeable when the eye gets lazy. :)

I read this chapter last night before going to bed, so here are my answers for these discussion questions:

1. Do you think the serial divorces and remarriages for political purposes were as hard emotionally on the men as it was on the women?

If it was, it didn't really show. It seems as if the men treated their wives more as a vehicle for social mobility than a person to be loved and treasured as is our modern connotation. That's not to say that Roman husbands didn't love their wives, but it seems as if for men (and probably elite women) there was a disconnect between who you loved and who you married. If a wife did not live up to a husbands expectations in terms of childrearing or commercial & political connections, they seemed quite eager to get rid of them for someone who could meet those needs.

2. What did upper class women do all day, with the housework, etc. being done by slaves?

It's quite possible that women were working behind the scenes to try to improve their husband or children' standing. If wives were indeed only useful so far as they advanced their husband's careers and procreated, then a woman's two hopes for avoiding a divorce would be to either bear as many children as possible before dying or doing whatever they could to advance their husbands careers.

3. How was Roman slavery different from that in the U.S.?

Two things seem clearly different from U.S. slavery. First, slaves were a diverse lot that included defeated captives, slaves bought on the fringes of the empire, and unwanted babies discarded by their disappointed families (very sad by the way). Second, there was very little stigma involved with freeing slaves. Manumission was regularly practiced and it was not believed that too many freedmen would be dangerous to society, as was believed in the Antebellum U.S. South.

4. How were babies born to slaves or picked off of garbage dumps raised? The children wouldn’t be useful until they were about 5.

It seems to me that there must have been some kind of slave nursery in Roman households. Slaves may have been directed by their masters to find baby slaves or have been entrepreneurial enough to find baby slaves in order to maintain the value of a master's slave stock. Babies could then be raised up for particular tasks and either kept on for those casts or sold off in order to raise money for their masters.

Thanks again, Christopher, for adding to the discussion.