Prof Andrea Giardina
Slavery in Ancient Rome

(3)
In which measure the slavery has been important for the "good roman economy"? Can it be considered the "turbo" of the economic system of that times?

All the most flourishing economies of the antiquity were based in greater or smaller measure on the job of the slaves. But no ancient society carried the exploitation of the slaves to the level of efficiency caught up from the Roman. It is above all demonstrated by the new organization of the slavery diffused from the II century b.C. (at the times of the great Mediterranean conquests) in the farms of average and big dimensions of the central and southern part of Italy, the so-called villae. These productive units were mainly present in Etruria, Latium and Campania, in places not far from the harbours or however easily reachable through fluvial roads or ways.

Strongly oriented towards the Mediterranean markets, these villae produced oil and wine above all; their labour was mostly constituted by enlisted slaves, subordinates to a hard constriction, finalized to efficiency and productivity. This specialization of the job and this coordination generated a remarkable standardization of the products. We assist therefore to the birth of a new type of slavery: previously, as in Greece as in Rome, rural slaves were employed in a large way as labourers. Now they are arranged as a structure finalized to the maximum productivity: the slaves, enchained and subordinated to a continuous control, used to work with precise rhythms under a strong direction. All their existence was finalized to the job: at the sunset they did not came back again in a family or dwellings of domestic type, but in a prison, the "convict-prison", from where they were captured again at dawn for a new day of hard work.
The increase of the system of the villa, attested from literary sources, rural archaeology and the study of the ceramic containers (above all oil and wine amphoras) took place in a massive way between the II and the I century b.C.: this period can be considered like the phase of the greatest increase of the roman economy. This vicissitude shows how a certain type of slavery could determine an intense economic increase.