[Chronon]

Orignally posted by QuarianRex;
In short, we would make far more progress in this debate if we found a term to use other than 'myth'. Its meaning is far too biased to be useful.

Absolutely, I won't argue with you on that point, QuarianRex. Now...what term to use? I'm afraid my thesaurus gives me even more terms with connotations of falsehood: lore, fable, legend, and fantasy. Any ideas?

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
The Romans did not enslave everyone...their slaves were mostly prisoners of war, those that could not pay off their debts...it was not racial slavery, but economic slavery. They did not enslave whole races of people.

Technically speaking, you are absolutely right Fyron, but if you substitute ethnic for racial, then the Romans did enslave whole Groups of people. At the end of the Third Punic War (146 BCE), for example, the Romans destroyed the city of Carthage, and sold all 55,000 remaining Carthaginians into slavery.

The Romans had many slaves from their many conquests, and much of their economy depended on the work of slaves. The large agricultural estates in Sicily, for example, and the silver mines, were all worked by slaves. Their roads, aquaducts, and public buildings were built on the backs of slave labor, and then there were the gladiator slaves who died for entertainment.

On the whole, even though they were taken in battle, the Romans treated their slaves poorly. Here's a quote from my Western Civ textbook, "Roman slaves were scarcely considered people at all but instruments of production like cattle. Notwithstanding the fact that some of them were cultivated foreigners taken as prisoners of war, the standard policy of their owners was to get as much work out of them as possible during their prime until they died of exhaustion..." Considering the ubiquity of slavery throughout the Ancient Period, this is one area where the Middle Ages (very few slaves) weren't so dark.