Citizenship gave a number of privileges to the inhabitants of ancient Rome. The most important was personal freedom. However, in the ancient empire, nefarious practices were common, which made one become a slave overnight. Even though he faced severe penalties, the problem only became more severe over time. Young children were particularly vulnerable.
Kidnappings (plagiarism) were a serious problem for the inhabitants of ancient Rome. Sometimes they were done in order to obtain a high ransom. This was the fate that befell young Julius Caesar (you can read more about this in our other article).
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Abductions in ancient Rome
In most cases, the hijacker (plagiarist the plagiarist) however, acted for completely different reasons. As Alberto Angela emphasizes in the pages of the book Empire. Travels around the Roman Empire the main cause of kidnappings was slavery. People were kidnapped to be turned into slaves.” He further adds that:
You only have to think about the enormous number of slaves exploited in the Roman Empire to realize that those who die or are freed create a “gap” that must be filled with tens of thousands of new slaves each year. According to Professor Krause, this may be up to half a million people every 12 months!
Ancient Roman mosaic depicting female slaves helping their mistress (Fabien Dany/CC BY-SA 2.5).
How to feed this market? There are three ways: prisoners of war become slaves, slaves captured outside the borders of the empire are bought (in modern and recent times, slave hunters in Africa acted in a similar way, and even recently) or people are kidnapped.
Danger awaiting travelers
In ancient Rome, you could be kidnapped literally anywhere. Unless you were a wealthy person accompanied by a strong guard, you couldn’t really feel completely safe anywhere. Throughout the empire, travelers fell victim to this practice. They were kidnapped not only from the trail, but the danger lurked even in the inn. As Angela points out:
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Often, hosts, in cooperation with criminals, cooperate in kidnapping guests who are later sold as slaves. And at the end of the empire’s existence, danger could threaten even in one’s own home: in North Africa, groups of land-based “pirates” unexpectedly attacked lonely houses or suburbs, kidnapping the inhabitants and selling them into slavery.
There is also information that in the suburbs of Rome, bakers kidnapped people. Unlucky travelers who fell into their hands were then used as slave labor to grind grain into flour. The whole thing came to light when “an attempt was made to kidnap a soldier in a bakery, and he, defending himself, killed several of the kidnappers.”
An ancient Roman bakery as imagined by a 19th-century artist (public domain).
What happened to the abductees?
However, the group most willingly kidnapped were not adults, but children. Due to the fact that they could not defend themselves, it was easy to kidnap them. Additionally, they were sometimes transported hundreds of kilometers from home and “couldn’t tell where they came from.”
Since agriculture in ancient Rome was based mainly on the work of slaves, in most cases kidnapped people were sent to large latifundia. As the author emphasizes Imperium, what awaited them there was “very hard work, insufficient food, and a mediocre bed.” The mortality rate was huge.
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The nefarious practice operated throughout the entire period of ancient Rome’s existence. In order to put an end to it, in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, searches of large estates were regularly organized to check whether kidnapped free citizens were working there. Traces of the fight against kidnapping can also be found in Roman law.
Ancient Roman law against kidnappers
As we read in the work by Richard A. Bauman entitled Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome probably written down in the 1st century BC Law of Fabius concerning plagiarism The intentional sale or purchase of a free person was punishable by a fine of 50,000 sesterces. Using the conversion method proposed by Alberto Angela, this gives almost 2 million modern zlotys!
The abductees were most often sent to work in agriculture (JPS68/public domain).
The practice had to be so profitable that the risk did not deter the kidnappers. Therefore, the law was tightened over time. As a result, representatives of the lower classes were at risk of being imprisoned and sent to work, for example in mines. The elite had to take into account exile and the forfeiture of half their wealth.
But even that didn’t help much. Therefore, during the reign of Emperor Diocletian at the turn of the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, the death penalty was finally introduced for kidnappers. As this did not help, Emperor Constantine established a particularly cruel form of execution “against slaves and freedmen guilty of kidnapping.” They were “thrown to wild animals or killed by gladiators.”
Bibliography
- Angela Alberto, Empire. A journey through the Roman Empire following a single coinReader 2020.
- Bauman Richard A., Crime and Punishment in Ancient RomeRoutledge 1996.
