Gender & History Annual Lecture 2026 - '"An illegal and dishonourable deed": The sale of children by their parents in the Roman Empire (200-600 CE)'

However, he continued, Saturnina could recover the children by going to the proper legal authority. 

Imperial Rome was a slave society, and the sight of enslaved children by no means uncommon. But they were, or were supposed to be, children born to enslaved mothers or acquired through the legal slave trade. Nevertheless, some parents did consign their own children to enslavement, by sale, debt pledging, or abandonment. They acted in response to crisis, either individual crisis like the loss of a spouse or crushing debt, or widespread, like war or environmental disaster. Because Saturnina's petition is not preserved, we can only speculate about why she made the illegal and drastic decision to sell her children. No father is mentioned, suggesting that she was widowed or the mother of illegitimate children. Widows and single mothers easily fell into destitution in the ruthless, male-centred Roman world, and fatherless children were particularly vulnerable to abuse and enslavement. We do not know the ages or sex of Saturnina's children, both of which would affect their experience of slavery. Young children were probably destined for domestic service, where they would be subject to violence and sexual abuse, as all slaves were. Older children might be purchased by itinerant slave-dealers, and sold on at one of the slave markets ubiquitous in the Roman world. Girls especially, and sometimes also young boys, might end up in the brothels of Rome or other large cities, in the most degrading sex slavery.

The late Roman Empire (c. 250-550 CE) endured multiple crises: civil wars, invasion and conquest, famine, and the first outbreak of bubonic plague. These events disrupted civic and social bonds, including that of parent and child. My talk draws on imperial Roman laws, documents on papyri, and the writings of Christian bishops to illuminate how the large-scale crises of late antiquity precipitated the sale or abandonment of society's most vulnerable members, its children. Although we do not have testimony from the children themselves, the evidence we do have, along with recent scholarship on child agency in the Roman world, can help us to understand the trauma and loss experienced by children forced into slavery by their own parents."                

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Professor Judith Evans Grubbs is Betty Gage Holland Professor Emerita at Emory University. The author of Law and Family in late antiquity: the Emperor Constantine's Marriage Legislation (1995) and Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood (2002), Professor Evans Grubbs is renowned for her scholarship on the history of law, family and women in the Roman world.