How Did Rome Become Slaves In Ancient Rome?

In ancient Rome slavery was considered normal as well as a necessary part of Roman society. People in ancient Rome became slaves through a number of ways. One of the main ways was through the capture of enemies on the battlefield. When Rome would defeat their foes they usually left some survivors who would then become slaves. The Romans tended to associate conquest and slavery together; they almost always took slaves after they conquered an area. They sometimes reduced an entire population to slavery one of these being the city of Veii in the early fourth century which is believed to have produced about ten thousand slaves. In 256 B.C. slaves were taken in the first war against Carthage; the city called Aspis took about 20,000 captives who would become slaves. In 198 A.D. the emperor
Septimius Severus took 100,000
Slaves who were born by slave women had to take their status from their mothers since the fathers were considered irrelevant. Slaves who were born in Rome by slave parents distinguished themselves from prisoners who were enslaved through war by referring to themselves as home-born for instance “the slave Abascantus described himself on a tombstone for his prematurely dead son as ‘a home-born slave of the emperor ‘, in contrast to his wife Carpine who simply gave her single name” (Bradley pg. 34). People could not just become a slave through war or being born a slave they could also be sold by their Fathers into slavery or by the eldest male in the household. If the family was in debt the solution would sometimes be to sell their children into slavery. It was a means of survival if they were poor and starving with no way to take care of all their children. Children were sometimes abandoned by their parents in which case they would become slaves as a means of survival. Slave children could be adopted by a family and treated the same as their own