Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists?

I largely agree with most of what you said, and it sounds like you have a bigger historian armchair than I do, and thank you for your interesting insights about the ancient world.

>> ... Roman's weren't racist, they were.

>Were they?

My understanding is that they were, or at least would be considered so by modern definitions. Romans certainly held opinions that were biased, stereotyped, and judged others by their "phenotype" and cultural ancestry. That said, my impression was that Roman culture at large did not institutionalize racial opinion in the same way one might see in the antebellum south, or Indian caste system. A roman might despise and refuse to dine with a Gaul, but another might wed one.

>In point of fact, the Enlightenment draws its origins to early humanists dredging up the wreckage of the ancient world.

This is true, but they were also reinterpreted it through the lens of contemporary Christian philosophy and values. This certainly introduced a greater emphasis on fundamental human rights.

>I love the ancient world because they saw some things so much more clearly than we....That we care not today for the ancient world serves us poorly, and only delivers us as prey to today's howlers.

I think a lot of people long for the perceived simplicity of worlds closer to an animalistic natural order, with rules that from our perspective seem clear and internally consistent. The world we live in has complex challenges with ambiguous and continually changing rules and expectations. I think there is a big crossover the post-apocalyptical fantasy, where the burdens of society are lifted.

One of the challenges and intrigues of history, is trying to understand how much of that sentiment is accurate (if any). While the unintuitive complexity of modern life can be tiresome, it also enables social stability, freedoms, and collaboration impossible in the ancient world.

> Humans have been around for 300,000 years

Humans have been around for millions of years. Modern humans have been around for 3 - 600,000 years.

> There really weren't any practical differences between Roman and American slavery, at least from the slaves point of view.

I really don't think that's true. Especially given that "Roman slavery" spans 1000+ years (ignoring the Eastern Roman Empire) and the legal situation was not static during that time.

> The owner had the absolute power of life or death over their slaves

If the owner was the paterfamilias, he also had that power over his children, including adult children. Legally, that is. It wasn't generally considered ok from a social point of view to kill your grown-up kids without provocation.

The paterfamilias also had the rights to any income earned by his kids (with the exception of military wages), etc, etc. But I would still have a hard time arguing that there was no difference between his kids and his slaves in practical terms, even though the legal structures were not as different as one might think.

Going back to that "change over time" bit, starting in the 2nd century CE killing a slave without a good reason would be tried as homicide, so even this "power of life and death" claim is not strictly true over what one would consider "Roman slavery".

> Few slaves in ancient times ever saw freedom except by escape,

I would actually love a good reference on this. My understanding is that manumission of household slaves was fairly common (double-digit percentages, and common enough in some periods that legislation got passed limiting how many slaves one could free), while manumission of agricultural/mining/gladiatorial slaves was nearly non-existent. So if you were an enslaved doctor or tutor or whatnot your chances at freedom were quite good. If you were a farmer, not so much. If you were a miner... well, you would be dead before it started to matter. But I have to admit I have not kept up with scholarship on this in the last 10-ish years.

In _practical_ terms, it's probably more correct to talk about "Roman slaveries", because the actual conditions of one's existence as a slave in Rome (the polity, not the city) depended heavily on time period, occupation, etc, etc.

If I had any point, it was to suggest that our ideas of "race" are anachronistic to the ancient world (and not even really scientific today), being so burdened with post-enlightenment ideas of "savage" and cultured peoples (I've tried to keep religion out of this, but it is a critical through-line) and which later finds its most sublime form as pseudo-Darwinist notions about "race" which renders the U.S. institution of slavery (like our flavors of Christianity) quite something new and different.

> I think there is a big crossover the post-apocalyptical fantasy, where the burdens of society are lifted.

I agree with you on this. In fact, I've had a thesis (that is surely bogus and which no one believes) that the Godzilla movies are about the sublimated desire to see the whole facade held up against earthquake, tsunami, and atom bombs finally be done in by a monster who casually destroys Tokyo Tower. If you like coastlines, maybe that idea will give you a chuckle.

The value of the ancient world to me, however, is as a counter-balance to everything timely. Sometimes it shines a brilliant light on what is today obscured by our modern confusions, but more often a deep well of fascination over how we used to speak and what we used to think, however errant it was.

> was much more a part of a client-patron relationship

This is, AFAICT, taking a tiny minority of literate/skilled/highly trusted slaves and treating them as the norm. The slaves who were basically worked to death in the Roman mines were not meaningfully "clients" of their masters. They were very much seen as mere instruments, or chattels, even without a race-based justification. It's interesting that the most refined and perhaps benign forms of slavery could shade into patron/client (and the Romans would've known this - the freedman was literally a client of their former master) arrangements, but that was not the wnole institution.