To start thinking about Roman slavery is to stare into an infinite abyss of deliberate human suffering. The Roman Empire is considered to be one of the genuine slave states in human history, in that, like the antebellum Southern states of America, it could not exist without slavery. Slavery was the social and economic foundation upon which the entire Roman Empire rested. But while the slave states of Louisiana and Virginia lasted 150 years before abolition, the Roman Empire stood on the backs of unimaginable numbers of enslaved men, women and children for almost a thousand years. A thousand years is thirty-four generations of people enslaved to the Romans. A thousand years before the year I wrote this, King Cnut was glaring down the sea. A thousand years is an immense amount of time. And they didn’t just have domestic slaves, they had vast mines across the Empire for silver, lead, gold, iron and copper. Google the Las Médulas mines in Spain and imagine the sixty thousand enslaved people who worked there twenty-four hours a day to produce the gold the Roman Empire demanded, and then multiply that by hundreds of years and hundreds of sites and all those lives that were sent to toil for nothing and join me staring into this bottomless pit of Roman horror. Then picture the near infinite acres of land owned by the Gaius Caecilius Isidoruses and Melanias of the Roman world, each maintained by chain gangs of hundreds of enslaved people. And on top of that were those enslaved in the house, the cooks and cleaners and washers and dressers, the people enslaved by the state who maintained the aqueducts and laid the roads and built all those temples and fora across the vast Empire and fought fires and carried the emperor in his litter. A general estimate (which means, of course, a total guess but a guess from someone I’d trust in a quantitative situation) is that there were between 4.8 and 8.4 million enslaved people in the Roman Empire at any time, with the city of Rome‘s population including anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent enslaved people. Millions and millions and millions of lives, each a person with a heart full of love and hate and envy and joy and aching knees and sore eyes and dreams and thoughts and desires and hopes, all of whom were owned by another person and subject to the most extraordinary violence every day.
A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon
me: “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back. Only they didn’t, because they were holding on to something…That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
one important thing that Must be understood about interpersonal relationships is that you have to stop interacting with people who love you like they’re one slip-up away from leaving you. you have to trust that the ppl you love mean what they say. you have to believe that when they say “this hurt my feelings,” that they’re also saying, “can you please love me this other way next time?” and you have to wrap your head around the fact that even if you don’t understand Why someone loves you, you can accept that that they do. true, honest, & open love does not function like hp in a video game !!!!!!
Friends, sweet friends. Most beloved ones.
When you are having a hard time, and you say to a friend things like “You’re gonna leave me anyway” or “You don’t really like me, you’re just being nice”—
They do not hear what you mean, which is “I feel like I am not good enough to keep people around, and anybody with sense would leave.” Because, to them, of course you are. They’re friends with you; they have stayed around. They do not exist inside your head; they exist inside their own head, wherein they love and care about you.
What your friends hear when you say “You’re gonna leave me anyway” is “I do not trust you not to betray me.”
What they hear when you say “You’re just being nice” is “You are a faker and a liar, and I think all of the gestures you made and work you did to demonstrate your love for me are insincere.”
That is very hard to hear from someone you care about.
When you push people away again and again in anticipation of being hurt, eventually they will get the (often false) message that they are not wanted or trusted, and leave.
This, of course, hurts you both.
This is what people mean when they say “Nobody can love you until you learn to love yourself.” It’s not that people who struggle with self-loathing don’t deserve love. Of course you deserve love! It’s that if you believe deep down that you are not worth loving, it is very very hard for the people who love you to throw themselves at a brick wall again and again trying to convince you otherwise.
And if the brick wall stays up, none of that feeling of love gets through to you, and you keep suffering.
This is not, of course, to say that people who struggle with trust in relationships, or with feeling loved, are bad people, or inherently hurtful.
It’s to say that the old coping mechanisms that end up hurting you also end up hurting your loved ones, because they care about you.
The next time somebody says that they love you, do them the courtesy of assuming they are being honest.
