When In Rome

Some time back, I went down the Seattle Art Museum to see a "Roman Art From the Louvre" exhibit. I recall (mainly because I made a note of it) that it was fairly interesting; but personally, the military history buff in me was hoping for more legionnaires and gladiators - reliable information about equipment is hard to come by.

Part of the exhibit dealt with the empire's non-Citizens, foreigners, freemen and slaves. One statue of a slave was obviously African. Even from a distance, it had a cartoonish, minstrel-show sort of look about it; the facial features were exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. Below the neck, however, the youth's statue was clean and buff - the sort of physique that people today would (and usually have to) pay good money for.

In the description of the statue was a curious statement - something along the lines of "Not all Africans in Rome were slaves." Once I got past my initial reaction - which was "Well, duh," I wondered about that. Who had they felt the need to state something so obvious for? Who was the intended audience? I started formulating theories about what the curators meant to say to perhaps Whites, perhaps Blacks or perhaps others who might see this statue, and draw some sort of undesirable conclusion from it. What (and whose) racist message were they attempting to combat?

Or maybe it was just a simple statement designed to draw a distinction between Roman history and what we understand American history to have been. Because I have noticed a tendency for Americans to think that slavery everywhere was prosecuted in the same way that Southern slavery is often stereotyped - beatings were frequent and arbitrary, conditions were nearly universally wretched, there was no such thing as a stable family life and that it was mainly visited on outsiders. (In this, I suppose the Biblical Exodus story also plays a role.) And so I suppose that it may be helpful to point out that the Roman's didn't limit themselves to one place in the same way that Americans (mostly) did.

I suspect it's a flaw in the way that history is taught that America's "peculiar institution" doesn't come across as peculiarly American, such that we do have to point out the ways in which other cultures didn't prototype and/or emulate it. But, of course, it wouldn't be the only one.