Alan Watson has characterized slavery as "the most extreme form imaginable of exploitation of one human being by another[.]" A. Watson, Roman Slave Law, Johns Hopkins University Press (1987), at 1. As Watson points out, however, the exploitation need not always proceed in only one direction. Id.. It is correct to say that, as a class, slaves are always exploited. That is, after all, the purpose of owning slaves—to benefit from their compelled labor without the necessity of paying a wage. However, an individual slave frequently found himself or herself in a good position to cheat the master, rob him, damage the master's property, render him liable to others for property damage, enter into disastrous contracts on his master's behalf, provide damaging reports of the master, exploit him sexually or even to assault or kill the master. (Murdering one's master was discouraged by the legal requirement that the perpetrator and all other slaves owned by the victim had to be executed.)

The Romans recognized that slavery, as an institution, operates on economic, moral, social and political levels. They also recognized that it was necessary to create an orderly system to control both slaves and masters for the purpose of balancing the societal needs of the Roman state. The question was, what incentives and penalties could be established by law to ensure that the slave provided his best efforts for his master? The major emphasis on resolving this problem, naturally enough, focused on maximizing the master's profit (economic, social and political) while minimizing all types of risk for the master.

It cannot be over-emphasized that in Rome, slaves could be of any race or background. They could derive from one of the Italian peoples (including other Romans), Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Gauls, Britons and any other racial or ethnic group the Romans encountered and conquered. (Contrary to the plots of time-travel romance novels, Romans did not enslave stray people who just happened to be walking around on their own.) A slave might be extremely well educated, even better educated than his master, or he might be profoundly ill-educated and ignorant. A slave might be incredibly intelligent or remarkably stupid. He or she might function as a physician, businessman, craftsman, prostitute, dockhand, gladiator, fine artist, house servant, secretary, sexual toy or farm worker. An extremely unfortunate slave might be forced into a chain gang working on public projects, condemned to the mines or worked to death on one of the latifundia (huge Roman agri-business estates) where the slaves were herded into locked pens at night.

One of the most amazing points of Roman law is that it applied equally to all members of society because it was situational rather than personal. (At least this was so in theory. In Rome, as in so many other locales both modern and ancient, equality before the law was sometimes more of an aspirational goal than an actuality.) But Roman law, unlike all previously developed legal systems, focused on legal principles of generic relevance that were applied as required to a specific set of facts as developed during a trial. Roman law progressed in the main through juristic consideration of innumerable individual situations, hypothetical as well as actual. This effort constituted a "continuing search for improved solutions" to concrete social and legal problems. See Watson, supra at 4.

One significant aspect of the Roman attitude on slaves frequently escapes modern attention: under Roman law, a Roman citizen captured by the enemy immediately became a foreign slave and lost his Roman citizenship. He might escape or be freed, of course. In that event, upon his return, he would be entitled to reinstatement of some, but not all, of the rights to which he previously was entitled as a citizen of Rome. In the early days of the Roman state, the situation most likely would have involved a member of the military who was seized by one of the Italian enemies of Rome. Thus, it was not entirely improbable that a man who was enslaved in this manner would return and reclaim his citizenship rights. The fact that a Roman citizen, whether military or civilian, might at any time be captured by the enemy--and might subsequently return--colored the Roman approach to slave law.

Moreover, the Romans were fully conscious of the fact that slavery was a misfortune that could happen to anybody. While the he slave was invariably economically inferior to the master, the slave could not necessarily be safely regarded as inferior in other ways just because of his or her slave status. In keeping with the concept that the law must be broad enough to cover all situations, the Roman legal rules on slavery bear no sign of prejudice against racial or national groups. Id. at 3. This is not the same thing as saying that Romans had no ethnic or racial prejudices. However, the prejudices held by ancient Romans were not the same as those that one might expect at a later era of history and on a different continent. In particular, blacks and other slaves of African origin were not particularly singled out as the victims of racial prejudice. Id. at 139 n.5. See also F. M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Harvard University Press, 1970) at 169 ff. and F. M. Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: the Ancient View of Blacks (Harvard University Press, 1983) (identifying and discussing the treatment of African blacks from Egypt, Nubia (the modern Sudan), Ethiopia, and Carthage (Tunisia)).

Slavery in the Ancient World was fundamentally different from more recent manifestations because it was not racist in character. In Rome, to be a slave was a grave misfortune. But the status of being a slave imposed no necessary obstacle to the idea that the slave might be morally, intellectually or educationally superior to the master. Impediments to manumission existed, but they did not depend on race or ethnicity. Furthermore, there was no benefit or incentive to denying full citizenship to freed slaves. The master benefited from the patron/client relationship established by manumission, the Roman state gained a taxpaying citizen, and the freedman not infrequently became quite wealthy. The freedman owed his former master obsequium, a legally enforceable right, which enhanced the position of the former master. In Rome, it truly could happen that a slave could become a freedman, the father or mother of a full citizen, whose grandchild or great-grandchild could aspire to admission into the Senate and high rank therein. (The family of Cato the Younger falls into this category.)

References:

F. M. Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Harvard University Press, 1970).
F. M. Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: the Ancient View of Blacks (Harvard University Press, 1983).
A. Watson, Roman Slave Law, Johns Hopkins University Press (1987).