Yes the Romans did have abolitionist and they knew slavery was an abhorrent act

context: The earliest slave uprisings occurred during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Second Punic War, when many slaves held by the Romans would have been soldiers captured from the armies of Hannibal, and when at times as many as half the Roman male population of fighting age would have been away serving in the military.^\616]) The Augustan historian Livy is the main but not always a clear source for these uprisings.^\616])

The first recorded rebellion comes in 217 BC, when an informer reported that twenty-five slaves were conspiring on the Campus Martius; they were punished in the earliest securely attested instance of crucifixion among the Romans.^\617])^\618]) In 198 BC, Carthaginian captives rebelled at Setia, which they may have held briefly before being met with force and fleeing, though two thousand were captured and executed. They next made an attempt on Praeneste but were again defeated, resulting in the execution of another five hundred.^\619]) This uprising prompted more policing of the streets and the building of places of confinement.^\620]) Two years later, it took a full legion to quell an uprising in Etruria, after which the leaders were flogged and crucified.^\621])

The last rebellion of this period broke out in 185 BC in Apulia among herdsman, who were also to play a leading role in the first two Servile Wars. The Apulian shepherds were accused of banditry (latrocinium), and 7,000 were condemned to death; some escaped.^\622])

The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC) chronicled the three major slave rebellions of the Roman Republic known as the Servile Wars, the first two of which originated in Rome's first province, Sicily.^\623]) Diodorus gives the total number of slaves participating in the first rebellion as 200,000 (elsewhere, the figure is given as 60,000–70,000), and 40,000 in the second.^\am]) While these large round numbers in ancient sources seem inflated, their significance here lies in indicating the scope of rebellion

The last slave rebellion of the Republic was put down at Thurii in southern Italy by Gaius Octavius), the father of the future emperor Augustus. In 60 BC, Octavius received a commission from the senate to hunt down fugitives who were alleged (emphasis on "alleged") to be the remnants of Spartacus's men and slaves who had been drawn into the Catilinarian conspiracy.^\652])

Though they failed, the Servile Wars left Romans with a deep-seated fear of slave uprisings^\653]) that resulted in stricter laws regulating the keeping of slaves and harsher measures and punishments to keep enslaved people under control.^\654]) In AD 10, the senate decreed that if a master was killed by one or a group of his slaves, all the slaves "under the same roof" were to be tortured and executed.^\655]) In the early Imperial period, the slave uprisings against Lucius Pedanius Secundus, who was killed by one of his household slaves (all 400 were executed), and Larcius Maceo, a praetor who was murdered in his private bath, occasioned panic among slaveholders but failed to catch fire as the Sicilian rebellions had.^\627])^\655]) None of the sporadic attempts at rebellion over the next centuries encompassed nearly as much territory as that led by Spartacus

Reports of mass suicide or suicide by an individual to avoid enslavement or submission as a result of war are not rare in the Roman world.^\745]) In one incident, a group of captive Germanic women told Caracalla that they would rather be executed than enslaved. When he ordered them sold anyway, they committed suicide en masse, some of them first killing their children.^\746])

Roman law recognized that slaves might be driven to suicidal despair. A suicide attempt was one of the pieces of information about a slave that had to be disclosed on a bill of sale, indicating that such attempts occurred often enough to be of concern. However, the law did not always regard slaves as criminally fugitive if they ran away in despair and attempted suicide. The jurist Paulus wrote, "A slave acts to commit suicide when he seeks death out of wickedness or evil ways or because of some crime that he has committed, but not when he is able no longer to bear his bodily pain."^\75)|Vivianus]]),21.1.17.6([[GnaeusArulenus_Caelius_Sabinus|Caelius]]),_and_21.1.43.4([[Julius_Paulus|Paulus]]).-794)

In a society where slavery was not based on race, a slave who escaped could hope to blend in and go unnoticed among the free.^\660]) Certain temples in Greece had long offered asylum to slaves who ran away, and in the Imperial era, a fugitive could claim asylum at the foot of the emperor's statue.^\661])