Subject: 
            A Kinder, Gentler Slavery ... in Rome?
       Date: 
            Thu, 12 Apr 2001 18:11:31 -0500
       From: 
            weaire gavin allen <weaire@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: 
            University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
 Newsgroups: 
            soc.history.what-if


        "In view of this openly recognized ambivalence about torturing
slaves, a drive to eliminate it from the Roman judicial system might well
have arisen and there certainly were some emperors who took positive steps
to discourage its indiscriminate use."

        Keith Bradley _Slavery and Society at Rome_ (Cambridge 1994)

        If Bradley says it was possible, I can't argue.  So what if
judicial torture was eliminated from the system, say by Augustus (who took
some steps in this direction)?  If the official position became that slave
testimony no more needed torture than free, that might affect elite
mentality, since oversight of judicial proceedings was an inescapable part
of any official career.  It's not too much of a stretch to envision
Stoicism and jurisprudence interacting in such a way as to produce real
measures to ameliorate the treatment of slaves by the C2nd.  Of course,
this would not entail any questioning of the existence of slavery - but it
would be carried into later eras, preserved in the corpus of Roman law.


        Gavin Weaire.