The Ancients - How Slavery Built the Roman Empire

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Was the Roman Empire really made by conquest? Or was it powered by something much darker?For centuries, millions of enslaved people sacrificed their lives and their labour on the altar of Roman progress, an integral cog in the grinding imperial machine. And so today on The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Emma Southon, author of Servus: How Slavery Made The Roman World to bring their overlooked stories back into the limelight. From the mines and farms to the households of the imperial elite, they discover how slavery was woven into the fabric of the Roman society and ask what life was really like for enslaved Romans.MORESpartacus:Listen on AppleListen on Spotify Zenobia: Queen of Palmyra:Listen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Producer is Joseph Knight. Edited by Natasha Hughes. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. They built pristine temples, carved emperors faces into history, and marched legions across three continents. But the Roman Empire also ran on something far more uncomfortable. The labour, bodies and lives of enslaved people. From Rome's earliest myths of Romulus opening the city gates to runaways and the dispossessed, through centuries of conquest that flooded markets with captives, slavery was not a side issue. It was an integral cog in the machine of the empire. Now today, we're asking what it means to say the empire was built on slavery.

We will trace how enslavement changed over time, from prisoners of war in chain gangs, to people born into slavery during the Pax Romana, and how enslaved lives could look utterly different from imperial secretaries and household servants to minors, farm workers, and those in the army. falls into sex work. Now I'm joined by best-selling author and historian Dr. Emma Southern to explore all of this,

all the violence and coercion, and what life was like for those who became freedmen. I'm your host, Tristan Hughes, and welcome to the ancients. Emma, welcome to the show. Hello, thank you for having me. You're more than welcome, and this is the first time we've done an interview together in person. It is. We've done several interviews together over the years. all this time. I'm a real person. You are and I'm the real person as well. That's so nice to know.

And to talk about a topic that it's so easy, quite frankly, to overlook if you want to focus on like the big figures or the architecture, but you forget that at the heart of Rome was slavery. Is it fair to say that the Roman Empire was built on slavery? Yes, because the Roman Empire doesn't exist without slavery. Like, as a, even as a bureaucratic institution, like every single person who is doing the paperwork that makes the empire run is an enslaved or formerly enslaved person. So literally the empire doesn't work. You don't get roads. You don't get, you know, stone being moved from one place to another. You don't get the army being paid. You don't get anything done in the empire without enslaved labor. So it fundamentally cannot exist without it. And then the daily life

of most Roman people at virtually every level of society also is so defined by. their reliance on enslaved labour. Like in the house it is enslaved people doing almost everything, like through almost every class of Roman society. In every area of professionalism, you will have a lawyer, but his entire staff will be enslaved or formally enslaved. You will have a silversmith who may well be enslaved or free, but his entire staff will probably be enslaved.

and just every part of the empire runs on this massive pool of forced labour, basically. And it's uncomfortable to talk about and nobody really wants to look at it head on because it feels kind of uncomfortable to look at. But it really is so much a part of the Roman Empire that to remove it completely is like taking one leg off of a stool and then expecting it to stand up. And the fact that it is so widespread and that there are slaves doing all these different, types of labour and skilled labour at the same time, then actually exploring what slavery was actually like. It's not as straightforward as that because one slave's experience would have been very different to

another slave's experience. Yeah. And that's on purpose. The diversity of enslaved experience means that there is no ability of enslaved people to kind of coordinate with each other because instead they compete with each other, that somebody who is even within a household. So like when we think of slavery, domestic slavery is probably the one that we would think of the most. You're going to have people who are at the bottom who are dormant, for example, who are very often chained and are considered to be very low status within the household. And then you're going to have somebody who's very high status within the household, like the steward of the household is called a dispensator. And they're

basically like the over butler, and they run all of the finances and all of the running of the household, and they are very high status. And then to add a kind of weird complication, because the Romans love to be complicated, people at the highest status level of slavery could own their own slaves or could sort of own their own slaves. Without being free yet? Yes. Right. And so you then get layers of slavery within a household where a person will be both slave and master at any given time, like they can switch between those roles, which makes it very complicated for people who are enslaved to feel any kind of kinship with one another and maintains a level of animosity and competition within even people who live together very closely

to prevent them from coming together and being like, hang on, this doesn't seem right. And the Romans are very good. And they do it deliberately there. We'll write about it. You get people like Cato, the Elder, is kind of the most famous. But plenty of Roman kind of elite men will write about how it's a good idea to keep people in competition with each other in your household or in your fields or to make sure that they don't speak the same language, for example. or try to make sure that they're constantly battling against one another

because if they're fighting one another, they're not fighting you. And when someone says slavery in Rome, they might immediately think of the Roman Empire, the time of the empress, places like Pompeii and so on. But you mentioned there, Cato the Elder, so he's very much at the time of the Roman Republic. Carthage must be destroyed to the second century BC. But that helps me now in the first question

because I want us to go back to the mythical origins of Rome to kind of explore slavery even back then because even with Romulus, the founder of Rome, mythical founder of Rome after killing his brother Remus, there is a story to slaves here as well. Yeah. And one of the first things that Romulus does

is he opens the city of Rome to enslaved people from around Italy. And, well, enslaved men from around Italy and says come to Rome and we will, you will be free here, basically. So slavery is a part of the world right back then. And slavery is like at the core of every stage.

Like it's normal in the ancient world. And it is something that every single part of the ancient world is doing. Like the Greeks are doing it. The Persians are doing it. The Egyptians are doing it. Like every ancient society had slavery. And so as soon as Rome starts, it is there.

As soon as they're writing the 12 tables, some of the first laws they're writing are about slavery and about manumission and about how to, because they're so fascinated by contracts, like they love contract law to a degree that's very...

Very bureaucratic Romans, okay. They do, they're a real tedious people sometimes. And so like some of their earliest laws are about because humans are a different kind of property to other kinds of property, but they are still bolt and sold as... And so the complications that arise from buying and selling people are already in the 12 tables.

And manumission, so that is the ability for a slave to earn their freedom? Yes. So manumission is freedom from the power of a person who owns you. So it is something the Romans did relatively frequently compared to the rest of the ancient Mediterranean, which is that they would grant freedom or allow people to buy their freedom and then had a full class of people that they, called freedmen who were, according to their laws, like, in between slave and free. So there's

free people, enslaved people, and then this kind of in-between class of people who have experienced freedom and experienced slavery as well. A mix of both. Exactly. Yeah. And they're stained by that. So legally, they are prevented from doing certain things. They can't have certain jobs. They can't engage in certain contracts. They can't be in the Senate, for example, and their children have certain restrictions on them as well. And they can also be re-enslaved if they are not grateful enough, usually.

Because there has to be some horror. I mean, the fact that, yes, okay, the story of Romulus is mythical, but at the same time, if all of these kind of great legendary stories about a place, it's foundation or so on, there's normally some kernels of truth that you can learn behind it,

so probably was like slavery at that time in the early first millennium BC. Do you think, is it ironic at all that in that story Romulus helps build the population of Rome early on by giving slaves their freedom

when, you know, several centuries later, Rome will be, I mean, slavery will be such a core part of it becoming one of the greatest empires of the ancient world? I think it speaks to the relentless pragmatism of the Romans

because they will also do this. You see these stories pop up time and time again when they're writing their own history, like Dionysus of Halicinacus and Livy and they will occasionally whenever there's a crisis like offer enslaved people their freedom if they'll like join the fight or if they will do some service for the empire.

And they will, freedom is something that they will offer if it's to the state's benefit. And they are like very pragmatic about everything in that regard. And then they will take it away as swiftly as they have given it if they feel like the service is not being done properly. But it kind of appears constantly as a response to crisis that they'll be like, we need men, particularly in the Republic actually when they don't have a professional army and they're having all of these crises about who is going to man the armies

because there's a property qualification for a long time about whether you're allowed to join the army right up until like Marius, so right in the late Republic. So they don't have enough people who have enough property to join the army. So whenever they need extra warm bodies, they're like right, just round up some enslaved people.

They're free now and they're in the army. So it's a very rubbish form of freedom because they're kind of only if they join the army. But it does happen nine or ten times. that they will do it. So they wouldn't have thought it was ironic anyone reading this. It's just like, no, yes, we do do this once in a while. We do give slaves their freedom if there is a necessity for us.

Yeah, if we need them warm bodies to fill up a space, then they are a useful, they're a resource, basically. Like, human labour is a resource, and if they need to be converted into a free resource at some point, then they will be. But it is like they have no say over it. Like they will be freed. in order to be thrown into the army

but they're going to end up as like cannon fodder against the Macedonians or something and so it's one of those things where you're like they're probably in fact they are kind of patting themselves on the back about what a brilliant problem solvers we are and there were a bunch of guys who are like

I really actually I'm a secretary I don't know like I'm a silversmith I don't actually have any idea how to fight in an army and is there any term we can use to call slaves that can help us humanise them a bit more because it is so easy just to group them all together and basically kind of objectify them

because they are because of how they're portrayed. Is there any better term we can use than just saying slaves? I prefer enslaved person just because I think it is deliberately difficult to an extent and the word slave is the word that was used to describe them but it is so dehumanizing I think it strips away any sense of individuality amongst people. It is a word that is used by the Romans and by modern societies as well

to turn somebody into a thing and then or to turn them into an abstract concept. And one of the things that I think is really important to remember is that every single person that we talk about when we say the word slave is a living, breathing human being. And like we've just talked about how nice it is to talk to each other in person for the first time. and, you know, remembering that these are people with bodies, that these are people who have had physical experiences and each one of those is unique. I think it's calling them an enslaved person kind of forces you to just stop for like half a millisecond and remember that they're people, not this concept of the slave. I also think that it, because you can homogenize Roman slavery so much, you can. can turn it into like there is one experience of the Roman slave.

Like I remember when I was in undergraduate many thousands of years ago. And we used to get like one lecture, if that, on women and slaves in the Roman world. And it would always be like, this is what slavery is like. But it was always just the experience of male slaves, like men who were enslaved, men who were enslaved in domestic environments or in bureaucratic environments, usually in the imperial palace. and people who had one really specific experience of slavery. But there are so many people who are enslaved in the Roman Empire. And it includes women and it includes children and it includes women who are pregnant.

And it includes babies who learned how to walk. And it includes people from everywhere, from like northern Britain to Syria, to people who were trafficked in from sub-Saharan Africa to all the way over in, like, Armenia. like all over the entire entirety of Europe and West Asia and North Africa are all encompassed by the word slave. And so I think that interrupting that in any way, like intellectually, is something that should be done. And is it possible today with archaeology and even with the source material that survives to try and get a sense of what life would have been like for an. individual like, yeah, a pregnant woman who was an enslaved person or someone like that for whom usually the surviving sources would not touch upon, would not have a favorable view on, let's say,

or the archaeology, it's very limited for their, you know, their remains. There is not a lot. You cannot get much of a sense of like what life was like. You can only get that they existed and that they were very often remembered. So for example, every single time a child, An enslaved child is commemorated. They're usually commemorated by their parents. And so if you have, so there's like, for example, there is a really lovely, I say lovely, very depressing, poetic inscription for a child called Gratis who died in slavery in an elite household in the first century and he was commemorated by his parents.

He's three years old when he dies. and his mother and father spend quite a lot of money to have him commemorated. And from that fact, you know that a man and women came together, created a relationship, had enough of a relationship that they are calling each other husband and wife, which is not something they can legally do. That has no legal meaning in the Roman world, but they've chosen to do it. They had a child. This child was wanted.

This child, therefore his mother was pregnant. Like one day she found out she was pregnant. One day she got like really heavy. One day she felt the first kick. One day she felt the first contraction. And all of those things that happened to pregnant women happened to her. While she was probably working the whole time. Then she gave birth, which is a, you know, was probably a terrible day.

And then for three years they raised their baby and they talk about how he was like the sweetest child and that he had a, lovely personality. All of this survives in their dedication. Well, the dedication is just like this child died basically and had a lovely personality, but you know that these things happened because of that inscription. And you have to kind of imagine that like take the implication. Like if a person had a child, they had all of these experiences. And we have no idea what those experiences were like because nobody ever wrote about it. All we know is that they happened and they happened constantly. A lot of the work you have to do to try to work out what life is like is

imaginative because you have the tiniest fragments of enslaved lives. You have the tiniest little asides. You have the tiniest little moments where they commemorated people that they loved or where they wrote graffiti on the wall in like Pompeii and Herculaneum that survived. And then you have to imagine around that. Shall we start at the beginning, the first phase? I mean, When are we talking and what types of slaves should we be thinking? Sorry, what types of enslaved people should we be thinking about that time? So early Rome is basically exactly the same as everywhere else in the ancient Mediterranean, which is that there are a relatively limited number of enslaved people,

most of whom have been taken in warfare. This is warfare. Yes. And this is where the kind of slavery begins and ends for a lot of people in the very earliest period of Roman history. And it is when you capture someone, when you capture a town, when you have besieged somebody, you get to kind of take all of the booty and humans count as a lot of that. So you can, some of them are people who were already enslaved in a house in, you know,

Tusculum or whatever. And some of them are just guys who are around that you can sweep up and sell because they can be worth something. And then that kind of goes back and forth when powers are fairly equal. And this is the thing because like the Samnites are doing this, the Etruscans are doing this. So when the Romans are defeated, there may well have been Romans who became enslaved people of the Samnites or the Etruscans. And this is something that you see in the law goes because they worry about what to do with people's property if they've been enslaved. Like do you treat them as dead or do you think that they might come back when you have the next war with the Samnites, which they might?

And, you know, if every time they lose a battle, they lose a certain amount of people to slavery in a distant place. But then they're going to have another battle and they might take them back. And people can move around the Mediterranean in this way. And that continues really until Rome starts expanding to overwhelm everybody else. And there's this key date that I've got, this terrifying date of 146 BC. The one big date, yeah, which is the fall of Carthage. And is the breaking point which allows Roman. power to just explode across the whole of the Mediterranean and then even further as well,

because Carthage is the big bad of early Roman history. Like, as far as they're concerned, they are the power that needs to be defeated. You have Cato, Carthos might be destroyed. And it's like banging that drum. And they are the check on Roman power as soon as they reach the limits of Italy. and when they do destroy Carthage, the numbers of people that they suddenly are taking into slavery from everywhere that Carthage was controlling,

who now belong to them, and then everywhere they're able to access now because Carthage isn't a check on them. So they can be in all kinds of places in the East Mediterranean that they were not before, and they're just scooping up people. And that's when they become what feels like an unstoppable force. and it really shifts how slavery works in Rome and in all of their, all of the spaces that they

have been using enslaved people. It turns Rome and the Roman Empire into a slave economy, into an economy where they can no longer exist after a couple of hundred years without enslaved labour. It's no longer like 10% of the population are enslaved people and that like their land is being run by free peasantry, all of a sudden, eight people own the entire province of Africa and all they're running their estates with enslaved labor. They're, you know, a very small number of people own a huge estates in Sicily and they are going to fill that with enslaved labor, which is then going to cause some problems. But it is a real shift in the numbers of people that they are enslaving and then how they

use in slave labor and how they come to massively rely on it. So we shouldn't be surprised that the greatest kind of increase, the kind of the step change in the use of slavery in ancient Rome, is very much entwined with the massive expansion that they do in those final centuries of the Roman Republic where you've got the fall of Carthage, the fall of Corinth the same year, the defeats one by one of the great Hellenistic kingdoms in the Eastern Mediterranean, ultimately Julius Caesar in Gaul as well and Spain and so on. and Prithridates and being able to get into Turkey in Anatolia and yeah and these and they just

take so much and you know empire is the extraction of resources from lots of places and the centralisation of them into one places and it is just resource extraction and one of those resources for the ancient world is people. And labor is something that they can extract. And you start to see the people that they are conquering, complaining that they've taken all of their men. So you get a client king in Bethinia. They keep demanding men, basically. They keep demanding labor from him, as well as taxes and all the rest. And he eventually says, like, I don't have any more to give you. Like, you've taken every, you've taken all my men. Like, if I give you. anymore than for your armies.

Like between the tax collectors who have taken people into slavery, the initial sweep of people into slavery from the defeats that we've had that have taken us to client kingship, like, I just don't have any more. And they start passing some laws to try to free up men elsewhere, because they just take everything and that includes people. That's really interesting because if someone mentions like a client king of Rome, I think a power that is willingly basically submitted to Rome, basically for Roman protection against another power. So Armenia, Bithynia, Bosphoran kingdom in Crimea, and so on.

But was it actually sometimes part of the bargain was that they would have to sacrifice some of their population to basically be thrown into slavery to become enslaved people for Rome? Well, part of it would be they would be taken as an insurer. Yeah. And then a lot of it gets taken because as soon as you become a client king, then suddenly I taxes to the Romans. And some of that taxation will be through human labour. And then if you don't pay your taxes, then they will take people. Some of it will be that they are just being kidnapped.

Like human trafficking is big business, especially at times of war. And they will just like slave traders will just go through and steal people. It's kind of the pirates, the ancient pirates, right? And then, yeah, and sometimes you just run out. out of men. And these people are specifically, they want Bethenian men to fight in Marius's war in Gaul. So they want to take them right to the other side, to the other frontier, and throw them at Gauls. And he's like, well, I've got like six guys left. I would quite like to keep them, me. Six Bethenians thrown to the front, not quite it. So that's, that's the big

step change phase when enslave people it becomes the growing Roman empire empire-wide industry basically level and does that last until the end of the Roman Republic can we get a new phase from then on yeah pretty much

although the real shift is the decline of warfare or the decline of expansionist wars which is you know once they start turning against each other and then they're not taking slaves from that, those wars. And then when Augustus basically declares the Pax Romani,

shuts the doors of the temple of Janus, and he says no more expansion. And that means that there's no more new blood coming in, or significantly less. Because he's still fighting. He's still fighting loads of people. And you are still getting. But compared to the scale,

it's been for the previous 100 years, it reduces significantly. But because Rome practices chattel slavery and because children born to enslaved women are born enslaved, and by that point they have such an enormous population of enslaved people, they're able to just keep the population going through reproductions, just reproducing itself, basically. And they will offer incentives for that to happen sometimes. So you get, see things like women being offered their freedom if they have three sons. And, well, you know, they've reproduced their own labour three times and then, and any daughters that they have don't count that kind of thing. But you, because they are, they have such a large amount. And they've always been reproducing,

but it is striking, I think, that they are able to make. maintain the level of slavery that they have and the success of the slave economy that last for the next, you know, 800 years. We're now going to explore some of the various experiences that they could have had during their lives. And that's going to come up right after this break. So, Emma, we left off by highlighting the nature of slavery in the Roman Empire by the time of empire. so Augustus onwards. And is this the, do I say, the peak, the zenith, the high tide of slavery in the Roman Empire? Probably not.

Probably not. Well, I think that probably in terms of just sheer numbers, the peak is probably really around where the peak of the size of empire is. So trajan. So a bit further on, so we've still got to get that. So what we consider to be the high empire is kind of the Trajan, Hadrian, 120-ish-ish. see just because they do such big wars of expansion that by that time you have both people being born into it and vibrate and they're also shoveling new men in.

So this is the fact it's not that all of a sudden none of the people they defeat in battle are becoming slaves. That is happening. It's just alongside what sorts of being prepared. So you have Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian and Trajan all have particularly Trajan, but they have these big wars. where they are fighting and they are all doing the same thing and they're you know they're taking masses of enslaved people um annoyingly we don't have like the written sources which give us numbers but

vespasian for example and titus they have their wars in jerusalem against um the jewish uprising and the texts of josephus are like they took 90,000 people they take 120,000 people they take and then like from the cities that they're defeating across the Levant they are you know they're taking thousands of people out of everyone and then they talk quite clearly about where they're sending them as well and you're okay so they're still feeding in captives as well once again as morbid as it is a captive someone who was born and raised in what is today the Scottish Highlands or like a northern Caledonian or later are picked could be seen probably as more dare I say if they're being advertised if they're being sold in the empire arguably more exotic more

exciting to someone than someone who's born into slavery who once whose ancestors were from Macedonia many centuries earlier well you get interesting things because you get then being what's called they call a homeborn slave

of Werner becomes a kind of status in itself because they are born, they're trained from birth, they are working from a very young age and they are considered to be more trustworthy, they're considered to be more well-educated, they will more often be found in kind of higher positions than someone who is born free and captured, who will always be considered to be slightly untrustworthy. Because they've known different in their lives, right? And they may hope for something different, whereas somebody who's born in slavery,

might not. And so sometimes you will see people define themselves as this as well. But when your people are buying and selling, being a verna is considered to be a bit of a higher status. And then they have, they do have kind of strange racial categories as well. So there will be one of the laws of buying and selling people in the Roman Empire is that you have to say where they're from. You have to say what their racial category is. So you have to say if they're Macedonian or if they're Greek or if they're a Gaul or if they're from Syria because they believe that there were certain things that certain races were better for. So Thracians are always going to be better as litter bearers or doing heavy lifting work. Oh, okay, Hardy phone.

Exactly. And so are Gauls. Whereas you wouldn't put a Greek in a field. You would always put a Greek or a Macedonian in a domestic setting or an educated setting because they're not Hardy, they're clever. And so you need to know where they're from. so that you know what they're like racial, like, predilection is, basically. But once again, this is dehumanising them to kind of say the stereotype of where they come from. So they're like, oh, you're a Greek, so this is what you're going to do. It doesn't matter if this is what you want to do. It doesn't matter if this is actually what you're good at.

You're a grammar teacher now. Well, your Thracian doesn't matter what you're actually, no interest in what you're good at, but you're a Thracian, so you are litter bearer. And the, like, characteristics that they will ascribe to people are, like, absolutely embedded in their laws and in their thought processes. And we tend to think of the Roman world as not racist because it's not racist in the same way that the modern world is. And because they don't have the same racial categories that we have that are specifically aligned to skin color. But they have their own, like, racisms that they will apply very happily to slavery and which is. is like an extra level of dehumanisation that they apply to the people that they use.

Well, this is a question I'm very keen to ask now then, is that could a Roman become a slave in the Roman Empire? Yes. Interesting. As a punishment usually. So they could be sentenced to slavery. So you can be sentenced to be a gladiator, for example, which is a form of slavery as a form of capital punishment. you can also be sentenced to the mines or the quarries, which they do to Christians a lot as a form of capital punishment. And it is kind of the most hopeless form of slavery

is to be stripped of your citizenship and stripped of everything. It is because you become a slave, it's called a slave of the punishment, so as Puena, rather than a slave of a person. So there's no hope of ever getting out of it or ever improving your condition. because there's nobody who can favour you, basically. And it's considered to be a form of capital punishment.

There are also in the later empire questions about whether it's possible to sell yourself into slavery. Because you can sell yourself into being a gladiator, but you do technically remain free. And you can, there are laws that suggest that you might have been able to, sell yourself into some kind of debt slavery, although we don't have any examples of any real people, which is always annoying, because law is such an abstract. You never know whether it's describing something that happened

or something that might happen or something that happened one time. But it's possible that you could have sold yourself into it if you felt the desire to do so. Did they have any protection, I guess, legal protection or anything like that that could stop them being harassed, abused, I think of this like. No. In general, no.

There are two specific categories where they do. One is if you are the dispensator, like the steward of an elite household, or if you are in the imperial household, and you are a public-facing representative of that family, then abuse to you might be seen as abuse to the elite family. And therefore there are certain protections around that. So if you are like, you know, you get those powerful freedmen, for example, in the reign of Claudius. So palace and narcissus and calisters. So people who would be just under them who might be, if you saw them in the street, you'd be like, I know that guy. He is a dispensator of, you know, the emperor or of the emperor's like brother. and if you threw something at him,

then that would be perceived as an attack on the family, then there are protections around those specific people. And there are also protections for people who are owned by cities. So if you, because everything runs on enslaved labour, there are basically all of the kind of bureaucracies and civil service of any settlement in the Roman Empire is, run by enslaved people. And they're not owned by a person.

They're just owned by the city. And so because they're not owned by a person, they are given protections that the city has to provide them somewhere to live. The city has to provide them something to eat. It has to provide them with some clothes. And it also pays them. So they get a little salary because otherwise it would get struck off of the like municipal budget at some point.

And so by law there has to be, they have a certain amount of, they have a lifestyle that is kind of guaranteed, basically. And what types of jobs are we talking about if you're owned by the city? Should we just be thinking tax collectors or maybe something like, are they the people who would be sent down the sewers to clear them out once in a while? Tax collectors are actually not. They're private. Because they're privateers, which is a weird thing. But they, yeah, people who are sent down the sewers to clear them out. people who are building the aqueducts, people who are doing any kind of maintenance around the city, temple workers, but also people who are, like, if you have, you've got, like, public officials, like, Decurians who are elected, like, civil service around them, like, all of the people who keep things running.

But basically any kind of, what you might think of as civil servicey job or public job, is usually done by enslaved people. And is there any equivalence? Because sometimes you might think in some enslaved societies where someone will use slaves as their kind of own police force or kind of like a protection force

or protection market. Do we have any sense of that as well? Would they have armed their slaves once and a while? Yes, that's a general, a very useful thing that they can do. You can use them as a mini militia. So you can, obviously that happens to Lowe's during the Late Republic

and you find things like people attacking each other's houses with each other's. But that's part of the kind of domestic households' responsibilities would be always to be on the defence and also if necessary on the offence. Thankfully, I mean, the one of the few upsides of the reign of Augustus is that he limits the competition between the elite households, so they spend far less time arming their slaves and then sending them to burn each other's houses down. but it does happen and you do find that they are very much expected to be a militia if necessary.

So can we create a scenario? Well, I've used Scotland already, so let's keep in Northern Britain. But let's say you grew up in a hill fort and East Lomond and you were an ironsmith or some of that. So you're a blacksmith and you are captured during a Roman rule. raid or by a Roman ally and you're taken deep into the Roman Empire and as you are to become a slave. Do we know much about the bidding process for an enslaved person? Is it very much this idea of them all standing up in front of a group of people and effectively being a bidding war?

Yeah, pretty much. That's exactly what it is. So if you end up in the market, then yeah. And probably what will happen is the first place you'll be sold is immediately after the battle. The general, like, you know, slave traders follow armies and they're sold off immediately so that the state doesn't have to deal with transporting them. And then you will be, so that's the first time you'll experience it. And then you'll be taken off to wherever the slave trader is from and you'll be sold.

And what they do is they will usually strip them naked. and if they're not naked, then the buyer is very much advised to strip you to make sure that the slave trader is not hiding anything. They're very much considered to be as a profession, like use car salesmen. Like everybody assumes that slave dealers are lying. And there eventually are quite a lot of laws about what slave dealers have to disclose. Like you have to say whether this person was captured, whether, where they're from, what their, like, history is, whether they've ever stolen anything, whether they've ever been punished for anything, like, whether they've ever tried to run away, because people just don't trust that that will be disclosed for fairly

obvious reasons. But you will be, usually, if you're in the market, there is a tag that's hung around the neck, like a wooden tag, which will say that information. So say your name or whatever name you have been given, your origin and, like, you. a kind of broad age. And then the way that the sources talk about slave markets is exactly the same as they talk about livestock markets, which is, you know, examine the teeth, ask questions, like make sure that you examine everything, make sure that you ask around about the slave deal. But it is, you know, we have like letters of Pliny, letters of Seneca,

letters of Cicero talking about buying and selling people where they talk about it in a very, very casual manner and they describe these markets as in the exact same terms that they use to describe like selling livestock or land. And it was probably one of the most profoundly dehumanizing and unpleasant and just traumatic experience. and they, the weird, I say the weird thing, the quite shocking thing I think is that they know this.

Like when they put slave markets in art, which they don't do very often, but there is in the British Museum a, it's not on display, sadly, though I think it should be. It's like a little statuette of a child, an African child being sold. And he has the tag around his neck, which is how you know.

and he is kind of scrunched up in a kind of fetal position almost and he is crying and you're like okay so you know that this is all yeah so and it's beautiful and it would have been very expensive and they but they know that it is a horrific experience and that is kind of almost the point it is part of the breaking down of a person to subject them to this and force them to submit to it. And once they, and it's part of the, the process of enslaving a person is to make them as dehumanized as possible and force them to take it. And free Romans men and women, like, it worked evidently.

They were completely, they themselves were dehumanized of it as well. Yeah. Emotion, well, I guess we don't know completely of that. But, you know, that wanting to help them, I guess, or wanting to free them. Do we get any sense at all in any surviving sources? Any people feeling, hang on, this is wrong. An abolitionist movement to all this.

There is no abolitionist movement, as far as we can tell. The only reference I could find to anything that even hinted that the possibility that, like, abolition might be a topic of conversation is in Seneca's letter to Lucullus. Letter 47 where he talks about how he sees his peers abusing enslaved people, particularly in like public context of like dining. And it upsets him. And he is writing from a stoic perspective of like the, we should remember that the people

we enslave are people and they have souls. And I think, and he basically says, I think that we should probably not just beat people half to death for sneezing. That is a position he thinks is morally and ethically incorrect. And he clearly considers this to be such a radical position within his peers because Seneca is very high up. Like he's one of the most elite people, this is while he is in the court of Nero. So the people he's talking about are Nero's friends and relatives.

That he says, oh, there are people who are going to read this and they're going to say, oh, Seneca wants to abolish slavery, but I don't. Just saying that it's just very clear that I don't want to abolish slavery. I just think that we should maybe not treat them as horrifically as we do on a daily basis. And that is like the only reference. That's the closest we guess. Yeah. So possibly like whether there are people who band it around as a kind of joke like la la la, la, you want to abolish slavery,

or whether there are radical elements who are like we should abolish slavery. Maybe this isn't cool. but they are fringe kind of political movements that therefore have no impact on the kind of written sources that we have, which are very, very traditional, conservative, good Roman values. But that's the only little reference. But then Seneca and to a lesser extent Pliny do talk a lot about how they consider themselves to be very kindly as. slave owners and as in slavers they consider themselves to be kind of the kindest that you can be and so they advise that other people are as kindly as they are but that's about as good as it gets

that's the closest you get is the fact that whether you have a kind slave owner or you have as is quite frankly often portrayed in novels and tv series alike today a terrorizing slave owner who will you know, do all matter of things, what we think, illegal things. They treat them completely with contempt. They treat them as their property, which is popular in, you know, medial portrayals today. And almost certainly would have happened for many, many enslaved people and how they lived. We're going to finish this up by exploring a couple of other key areas in which enslaved people work and the Roman Empire at its height and then exploring their question and the possibility of freedom. and that's going to come just after this.

Emma, we've already covered how slavery and slave people were, all types of different professions in the Roman Empire, different hierarchies as well, so there's not that unity there, there's no more Spartacus revolts or anything like that, there's none really like that in the imperial period at all. And the various professions, we've touched upon their use in the civil service, how they can be used in the imperial with a royal palace household as well

but can we explore a bit about enslaved people in the house of a Roman and this feels well the most recognizable I think I would say today that's normally what you think of of an enslaved person they're working in a in a Roman man or woman's

house and everyday Roman would have an enslaved person or do we have any idea where the cutoff point of The best evidence that we have for kind of everyday Romans comes from Roman Egypt because we have from like Oxyrinkas, we have huge amount of papyrus. And we have like family archives where people would keep all of their like their version of a filing cabinet where you keep all of your contracts and census declarations and that kind of thing. And you can see what you might think of as kind of relatively middle class families who are. not local elites who are the kind of people who have to write letters to the local elites or to the local Roman governors or whatever to get any kind of any kind of thing done.

And it seems that at least in Egypt there is a huge amount of slavery at very low levels of society, like very kind of average everyday levels. You see people who have one or two enslaved people. you will have a family who has two or three enslaved women who live with them. And it seems that it was quite common for, you know, quite low levels of society. It's not just the elites are going to have loads. It is a matter of volume, I suppose. It becomes such a thing that so many people,

have enslaved people that having useless enslaved people in your household becomes a marker of status. So having beautiful boys particularly or having people with visible disabilities, particularly in very elite households, becomes a marker of status that you can afford to own a person whose job is just to be looked at. And they have no kind of economic function within in the household, they have no domestic function, they just exist to be either beautiful or unusual looking. So I actually think that's probably the cherry on top of the dehumanisation of people in my opinion because that's when they are literally now becoming like collectibles, quite frankly. So you have like Augustus and Livia and his daughter Julia compete over

who can own the smallest little person. And you have Seneca who complains. that, well, he thinks this is a very funny joke. His wife has a little person who has gone blind, but he claims that she doesn't know she's gone blind. She just thinks that her apartment is very dark. And the joke is that she also has intellectual disabilities as well. And that's Seneca, who thinks of himself as the good guy. And you get, or so many stories,

about, like, demission has a guy with microcephaly that he is, like, just takes around with him and he whispers secrets to him, which really upsets all of the senators that this guy who is disabled knows all of these secrets and they don't. And so you, you, within those households, and then once the emperors are doing it, the people around the emperor are doing it. And you get all kinds of stories about, yeah, basically they're, the, their approach to humanity is that it can be there just to be looked at and you can purchase a person. And even that this is, you know, that this is somehow an appropriate way to deal with people with disabilities, that they can be put on display alongside monkeys and tigers and the other kinds of things that,

and, you know, granite that you got from Egypt. And it's all basically the same in their head. And the enslaved people in these houses, whether it is an everyday Roman's house, as you say, which as always very interesting, it's like, you're a Roman citizen, you get an enslaved person. Kind of, you know, it's just so easy to get hold of enslaved labour. So you get things like in Egypt, there's various contracts of like there's one where a woman is selling a child who she says she picked up off the ground. So it was a child who was exposed and she picked it up. She's raised this child as a slave and now she wants to sell it. So she's raised it as an investment and now she's going to sell this five-year-old girl.

And so she, like people are, it's just so easy to access enslaved labor that basically it almost feels more unusual for families to not have one. And these in slave labor, especially when you focus on the villas and the domic is, like the great houses you can see at Herculaneum and Pompeii and so on today, they'd be doing everything from helping gather the food to, this is the one that I always found, maybe not the most difficult, but always the most striking, is we all marvel at the underfloor heating,

like the hypercourses and of certain rooms. And then you're shown, or it's pointed in a diagram where you have the archaeology, there was this little room to the side where this poor enslaved person was stoking the fire, all day, all day. Yeah. So somebody could have warm toes.

So someone could have some, no, but that's kind of the great variety or they could be a teacher. And as you say, the variety of jobs within a household for an enslaved person, men that especially the more higher up Romans, their abundance of enslaved people in an household, if you were growing up in that household, you'd see slaves for enslaved person for basically everything. Yeah. And some of the really big households, you see people with really specific job titles, like second person in charge of the wardrobe, assistant shoe carer. There's one in the House of the Stately, who are like a very big famous family in like the first century, where one kid is a curtain opener, nobody knows what that means, but that's what he is described. as in the epigraphy, and like very specific positions.

Or then you have people who are brought in specifically because they're beautiful. So beautiful long-haired boys become a status symbol. And there is lots of bringing, because if you own an elite villa in Pompeii or Herculaneum or Rome or any of the big cities, you can afford that because you have land. and you've got farms and you know you're producing somewhere and the you see lots of them swapping out so sending people who are perceived to be unattractive to the countryside and then picking up handsome children who were born in the countryside and bringing them into the cities because they're entirely judged on their attractiveness and then they're raised to be servers

or they're raised to be um you know to be on display at dinner parties. That's the, yeah. So it's not just the wall paintings and the frescoes and the food and drink that's being cooked, where the food that's been cooked by a particular cook as well, because sometimes the cooks are very sought after. It's the servant, well, sorry, it's enslaved people. You see how easy it is to say servants.

Yeah, it is. So easy. Because all those things you describe, you think of actually servants from one recent history, but of course they're not servants, they're enslaved people. They are, yeah, many of whom are, you know, born into this situation and then specifically chosen out of looks with no regard for anything else. There's a really great novel, which is a kind of pastoral novel set. It's a historical novel, but it's written in like the third century CE. And one of the great, it's set in a villa in like the, this very bucolic, lovely Greek

countryside where everybody is a shepherd and is very happy about it. And they're kind of frolicing around with their animals. But then the city people come and the master comes and takes a liking to the protagonist who's called Daphnis. And he's so pretty that they say they're going to take him to row. They're take him back to the city to be a sex slave. And that's very specifically what they say they're going to do to him. And he only escapes it because it turns out through a series of ludicrous coincidences that he was born free and therefore isn't a slave at all. but that's presented to him and his father as though it is a great privilege that he's going to go and be a server and he's going to be a sex slave and he's going to be on display in the city and have much better opportunities than he would as a shepherd in Greece.

So of course there are other kind of key areas in which enslaved people work in the Roman Empire like industry and mines and agriculture, vineyards and we don't have time to cover them now, but we can each in detail. But it sounds like those are the people, the slaves that many Romans wouldn't see, but they're doing the hard grinding labour that is providing the grain shipments to Rome, them quarrying the granite and the special types of stone from quarries in distant parts of the empire for building of luxury houses and all that. They're doing all of that heavy lifting and food acquiring for the great monuments and the great achievements. that are linked to emperors and generals today and so on like that.

Yeah. And they're also doing the very fine, you know, marble working that is necessary. They're polishing that marble so it shines. They're painting the marble so that it looks jazzy and the sunshine. And then they're maintaining as people drive their car into a column. There's a person who comes along and fixes that. And so there is every part of it. is enslaved people.

And like once you get out of that kind of rarefied city environment, you are going to see, like just, and it's going to be quite hard to tell apart enslaved people and kind of free peasantry for a lot of the time. But there are going to be in virtually every space where there is production, whether it is, if you're walking along like the shopping streets of Rome and you want to go and drop off your, you know, your new cloak at the fuller's, to get fluffed up, that's probably enslaved people.

If you then want to knit by and buy some new earrings, then that's going to be an enslaved gold worker. If you want to go and get your hair done for a special occasion, that's probably going to be an enslaved ornitrix, like hairdresser. And in the cities, you find just huge amounts of slavery in virtually every profession. We've covered so much for a topic like this, And I'm sure there could be so many more particular stories. We could shine a light on and, yeah, particular avenues.

As we've mentioned time and time again, as you've mentioned, the varied experience of someone who was enslaved in ancient Roman, how it would have differed. But I do want to leave it on, dare I say, a more positive note. Freedom. How likely was it? I mean, were there different avenues through which an enslaved person could aim for freedom?

There are. There's a big debate, really, about how common it was. For a long time, it was very much believed that freedom was so common as to be expected. And you get lots of mid-20th century writing about how every person who was enslaved would basically be freed by the time they were 30. But that is based very much on the experiences of men. who work in bureaucracies or who work in domestic environments. When you break it down into gender, for example, you find far fewer freed women than you do freed men.

There are various ways that people can kind of be freed, so you can be granted it as a gift, basically. So you can earn it through good service. and it almost is a kind of promotion for a lot of people. So in a lot of professions, particularly if you move into a managerial role, so if you're put in charge of a silversmith shop, or if you're put in charge of a department in the imperial bureaucracy, or if you are put in charge of a department, like the wardrobe department

of a massive household, then you're likely to be given freedom to do that. you can also get it in a will so you find a lot of people who are manumitted as a reward for service in Testaments so Augustus puts a limit on that because people complain at the end of the Republic that certain people are nefariously freeing

too many people and they're doing it like with broad brushes So they're saying like all of my litter bearers are free. All of my secretaries are free so that they will have a funeral procession that has loads of grateful freedmen in it. So they're basically padding out their funeral processions. So once again, this isn't this idea of I'm very gracious. No.

This is, I just want more people at my funeral. Because then they're obligated to turn up at the funeral. So Augustus puts a stop to it. He says you have to name a person. so you can't say all my secretaries. You have to say, Secundus, one isimus and primus, my secretaries. And there's a limit to the percentage,

so of people that you can free. So if you own a thousand people, you can free 100, but you can't. That's a hard limit. And then you can buy your freedom. So there are certain legal instruments which allow enslaved people to control property. And so they can save up money.

and purchase their freedom, or they can take out loans from friends, so free friends and purchase their freedom as well, which does require the person that you're buying it from to agree. And it also requires you to be of a level where you can earn that money. So if you are, for example, a luxury slave, and you have no kind of purpose, really, then you can't go out and buy your freedom.

particularly because you were probably very, very expensive. And if you are very low in the pecking order, then you probably also isn't available to you. But it is something that for the kind of relatively privileged few is something that could be available that they could buy it. That is something you only see men do. There are virtually no, in fact, I can't think a single one off top of my head examples of women buying their freedom.

The only thing that comes to mind there would be thinking of, Isn't the Regina tombstone near Hadrian's wall with the Palmyron flag cellar or whatever he is? And is it a freed woman because he's married her? That's what you get instead. Is that you find women who are freed to marry free men. And normally is that free man their former owner? Yes, it is.

And this was kind of encouraged at various points in Roman history in order to encourage the production of legitimate children amongst citizens. But so that's what you see instead is basically they end up in marriages that they are strongly disincentivised from ever leaving. But very, it does not seem to have been

certainly not as available for women to be able to save up and purchase their freedom. Must be a couple of cases of slaves killing owners, right? Oh yeah. In fact, one of them, like the most famous one is Padanius who is killed in the reign of Nero. He's stabbed to death by a guy who is enslaved in his household. And then there's a big outcry because the law says that every person in the household,

every enslaved person in the household gets killed in retribution, which results in 400 people being crucified in one go. And this, even for the Romans, that's a bit much. But one of the reasons that Tacitus gives for why Padanias was murdered is that he said that his murderer could be free, said that he would let him buy his freedom and then reneged on it at the last minute. Bad Bad Baddana, got his comeuppance, but at the same time.

Emma, this has been very enlightening, quite frankly. It's, as mentioned, it's a topic that we can easily navigate around because it is so uncomfortable, quite frankly, to talk about. But it is actually, this is what built the Roman Empire, these enslaved people who were at the foundation of almost every aspect of it, particularly by imperial times. So you're shining a light on them and their stories which are being hidden for so long. Yeah. And I think that the important thing is that there are so many enslaved people in the Roman Empire, at every point of it, that the story of enslaved people is as much the story of Rome as the story of an emperor. if anything is more representative to tell the story of an enslaved person than it is to tell the story of Caligula. And so I think it's nice to know that they existed and to shine that light on them and be like this is also part of the empire.

And some of it's horrific, but some of it is quite beautiful as well. And you have got all of those stories, all those tales in your new book? Yes, service, how slavery built the Roman Empire, which does exactly. exactly what it says on the tin, I hope. And it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. Always a pleasure, thank you. Thanks so much for joining us on The Ancents today.

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