It isn't less loaded than an American, in the stream of American history calling the system of servitude in Rome "slavery" as if it is the same thing as the American slave trade.
My point is, servitude that can't be just walked away from (whether it was entered into initially voluntarily or not) covers a huge spectrum of institutions and these have a wide variety in terms of capacity for abuse. A system which takes people from another continent, frees very few of them, and has essentially no rights to them (and few rights to freed slaves or their descendants) is ripe for abuse in a way that "revolving door slavery" of the sort the Romans had was not.
Several important points about Roman slavery are worth repeating:
1. The largest source of Roman slaves (at least from the surveys I have looked at) appear to have been debt slaves -- people being sold into slavery by their parents or selling themselves into slavery to pay debts.
2. Children of freed slaves were citizens (the United States, OTOH settled the question with a "no" in Dred Scott v. Sanford, categorically barring not only slaves like the petitioner, but also the descendants of freed slaves, from citizenship status).
3. Freedom was a transformation, not a total release from, the mutual obligations to the former owner. Consequently, freed men in Rome were an important source of political support, and a fairly large percentage of slaves could expect freedom in their lifetimes.
4. The revolving door had a tendency to revolve so fast that at one point Rome restricted the practice of selling one's children repeatedly into slavery, by insisting that if a father sold his son into slavery three times, the son would be emancipated from the control of the father. Livy mentions this was very controversial.
As for prisoners of war, what you have to understand is that if captured (whether a combatant or not) there were very few legal rights one had. That meant effectively that slavery, compared to freedom without family, actually meant some degree of protection. This protection would not go away on freedom, but neither would an obligation to support politically and otherwise the former master. This meant, effectively, that slavery was an institution by which prisoners of war achieved a degree of protection otherwise not available and, should they later be freed, a degree of economic support.
It took until the second century for there to be any restrictions on a Roman killing one of their slaves. For a while after that they just had to have a reason.
That paints a clear enough picture of what was going on.
And yet for those without family, there was nobody to prosecute their murder even not being a slave. If you had no real legal protection anyone could kill you. If you were a slave, only your owner could. That's still a major step up.
My point is, servitude that can't be just walked away from (whether it was entered into initially voluntarily or not) covers a huge spectrum of institutions and these have a wide variety in terms of capacity for abuse. A system which takes people from another continent, frees very few of them, and has essentially no rights to them (and few rights to freed slaves or their descendants) is ripe for abuse in a way that "revolving door slavery" of the sort the Romans had was not.
Several important points about Roman slavery are worth repeating:
1. The largest source of Roman slaves (at least from the surveys I have looked at) appear to have been debt slaves -- people being sold into slavery by their parents or selling themselves into slavery to pay debts.
2. Children of freed slaves were citizens (the United States, OTOH settled the question with a "no" in Dred Scott v. Sanford, categorically barring not only slaves like the petitioner, but also the descendants of freed slaves, from citizenship status).
3. Freedom was a transformation, not a total release from, the mutual obligations to the former owner. Consequently, freed men in Rome were an important source of political support, and a fairly large percentage of slaves could expect freedom in their lifetimes.
4. The revolving door had a tendency to revolve so fast that at one point Rome restricted the practice of selling one's children repeatedly into slavery, by insisting that if a father sold his son into slavery three times, the son would be emancipated from the control of the father. Livy mentions this was very controversial.
As for prisoners of war, what you have to understand is that if captured (whether a combatant or not) there were very few legal rights one had. That meant effectively that slavery, compared to freedom without family, actually meant some degree of protection. This protection would not go away on freedom, but neither would an obligation to support politically and otherwise the former master. This meant, effectively, that slavery was an institution by which prisoners of war achieved a degree of protection otherwise not available and, should they later be freed, a degree of economic support.