Enslaved people built the Roman Empire. Here's how their legacy has survived.
Historians often downplay the significance of Roman slavery, but it was the engine of the Empire's economy.
Roman history began in 753 B.C.E., when Romulus killed his twin brother and founded the city that would eventually rule the Mediterranean. That power would be built on slavery. No modern depiction of the Roman world omits this reality, but all tend to minimize it. Although writers and historians acknowledge the Roman enslavement system, very few look straight into the abyss of just how extensive, socially integrated, and brutal enslavement in the Roman Empire was. It was not a mere part of the Roman economy; it was the Roman economy. Slave labor supported every aspect of Roman life from domestic care to tax collection.
As Rome conquered more territory, it grew in both power and influence—and to support this its enslaved population grew too. To the victor go the spoils, as the saying goes, and in the ancient world that included people. Human beings who lived in sacked cities or despoiled farms from Britain to Syria were rounded up and sold as chattel to the slave traders who followed the army and profited from Roman victories.
In 295 B.C.E., the Romans captured 1,740 people in the sack of Perusia (Perugia) in modern-day Umbria. A generation later, the Battle of Agrigentum, the bloody opening of the First Punic War, resulted in 25,000 people being enslaved. When Julius Caesar returned from conquering Gaul in the 50s B.C.E., he claimed to have enslaved a million people, a boast of his immense power.The numbers of people enslaved by the Romans ballooned as the empire grew, as did the number born into slavery. It’s estimated that 30 percent of people in the empire were enslaved at any one time.By the time Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.E., the economy and bureaucracy of Rome could no longer function without enslaving people. The empire enshrined by Augustus, Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, lasted 500 years in the western Mediterranean and it too rested on the brutal oppression of human beings. Here are the key places formed by slave labor and the often forgotten people who did that work.
An Empire built by slaves
To imagine the Roman city is to imagine magnificent edifices: temples and forums, amphitheatres and bathhouses, aqueducts and arches. To build such glorious monuments required the production of millions of clay bricks and tiles by hand; marble was quarried in Greece and Egypt and transported across the Mediterranean, carved into columns and statues, the white polished or painted until it glowed. Enslaved people did that work.
People like Jader and Dativus, condemned to enslavement in the mines for the crime of being Christian in the third century C.E., toiled without hope in hideous conditions as they extracted stone and metal from the earth. “Their limbs wounded with clubs, their feet bound with fetters … their heads half shorn,” according to a letter they wrote to St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage.
The bricks and tiles were mass-produced by enslaved hands in factory conditions—often, it seems, by women. An unusual tile found in Pietrabbondante, in southern Italy, shows two footprints deliberately pressed into the clay as it was drying and signed with the names of two women named Detfri and Amica, slaves of Herrenius, who lived around 100 B.C.E.
Once the amphitheatres, forums, and temples were built, they had to be staffed and maintained. This work too was carried out by enslaved people called “public slaves” because they were not owned by a person but by a city. Public slaves could be temple attendants who prepared sacrifices and cleaned the altars, like Epagathus, attendant of the Temple of Juturna—goddess of wells and springs—who is remembered on the epitaph of his three-year-old daughter, Attia, along with his wife, Felicitas. Or they could work on the census or as document copiers, like Cornelius, who worked in the offices of lower magistrates, and Laryx, who worked in one of the state-run libraries in Rome. The aqueducts and fountains in Rome were maintained by a specialist team of 700 enslaved men, including Hevodus, who married Gavia and is remembered in the tomb of his friend Domitia Olympias. Hevodus worked every day to clean the pipes and replace broken fountains and keep Rome’s water flowing.
Alongside the public slaves, in every city and province and mine across the vast empire worked another class of enslaved men who were owned by the emperor himself. The imperial civil service was centrally controlled from the Palatine in Rome by offices that oversaw the finances and bureaucracy of the empire. The empire, as an administrative entity, could not function without these offices, which were staffed entirely by enslaved, or formerly enslaved, people. At the top of the hierarchy, some of these men became wealthy and powerful, even as they remained enslaved, through a complex legal mechanism called peculium. Peculium allowed enslaved men to control property and money without ever legally owning it. When Musicus Scurranus, the enslaved treasurer for the province of Gaul, died, he was buried by 16 enslaved attendants, including two cooks, a doctor, and two people in charge of his silver collection. His life was quite extraordinary, or at least rare, because his is the only example ever discovered of such massive wealth for an enslaved person.
A more representative experience of life in imperial enslavement can be seen in Roman Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, where a cemetery containing 1,300 graves includes people like Primus, a supervisor of letter carriers (and a husband and father) who died in slavery at the age of 102. Or Iustinus, a secretary in an imperially owned gold mine who died at the young age of 15. The life of an imperial slavery could be very short or very long.
Surviving letters from an imperial bureaucrat named Septimianus give us a glimpse at the disrespect and abuse an enslaved bureaucrat experienced from local freeborn soldiers and magistrates: “They persist in the same defiance and say they will pay no attention to my letters or even if you were to write to them yourself,” he complained to his boss. Septimianus was charged with giving directions to soldiers, but he could not make them listen because he was, in the end, a slave.
Filling the gaps between monumental buildings in the Roman city are shops and houses, which would have been full of enslaved people. Great Roman houses boasted enormous numbers of enslaved workers with specialized jobs. Large houses would feature a range of roles, from Stactes, the wet nurse whose own son, Atticus, died aged four, to Exuperius the doorkeeper, enslaved until he was 70, to Aphrodisius the curtain-opener. Graffiti and epitaphs record just a fraction of the millions of lives spent in domestic enslavement. Some houses contained several hundred enslaved people tending to the needs of a handful of freeborn aristocrats, but most of their stories have been lost to history. Even more invisible are those who were enslaved in non-elite houses or in the countryside. Evidence from Roman Egypt suggests that it was common for families of all socioeconomic levels to contain one or two enslaved people as “the living implements of household management.”
(Is this the real reason the Roman Empire collapsed?)
An inescapable reality
Walking the streets of Rome would have revealed slaves at every turn. Enslaved men in the mills made Rome’s daily bread. Apuleius, a writer from the second century, described their appearance in his novel The Golden Ass: “their foreheads branded, their feet chained…hideously sallow, their eyelids eaten away by the smoky darkness of the scorching murk.” Bread would have been made by a formerly enslaved baker whose back and ankles still showed the marks of the lashes and chains. We can still pass the bars that sold both wine and enslaved women for as little as the equivalent of two pennies, and by workshops where children worked both day and night under the threat of violence to make jewelry, tunics, and garlands. Pagus, a professional jeweler praised on his epitaph for his skill, died while enslaved at the age of 11. There is no record of how old Pagus was when he started working, but we do know that much of Rome’s professional population was born into slavery, trained from the moment they could walk and set to work producing profit for someone else.
Slavery seeped into every aspect of Roman life and was as inescapable as the air the Romans breathed. It was so quotidian that no Roman, enslaved or free, ever thought life might be possible without it, making it easier to ignore the violence that underpinned the empire. As in the antebellum American South, enslaved adults were commonly called “boy” or “girl” and denied the legal right to property or children or marriage. Every time an archaeologist unearths a sales document for an enslaved child like Passia, who was sold when she was only five years old to a soldier in a gold mine, it records a mother deprived of a daughter, a heart-wrenching grief, and a small child alone in the world.
Life began with freedom
To be enslaved in the Roman Empire was to be stripped of personhood and subjected to violence. The physician Galen, drawn to Rome in the second century, wrote about the number of patients he tended who had hurt their hands from punching their slaves. He also wrote of watching friends attack enslaved people with pens and swords, breaking their bones and destroying their eyes.
Every enslaved person in the empire could be harmed or killed at the whim of the person who owned them, and Roman senators often imagined themselves to be “slaves” to tyrannical, bloodthirsty emperors. In 319 C.E., the emperor Constantine outlawed the deliberate murder of enslaved people by their enslavers and, in so doing, detailed the ways in which the free destroyed the enslaved: with stones and clubs, hanging, poison, burning, being thrown from a roof, being fed to wild beasts or being tortured to death on the rack. For most of Roman history, these violent possibilities loomed over every enslaved person.
No wonder then that those few who managed to win manumission, by buying their freedom or being freed on merit, celebrated it as an achievement. No wonder that so many freed people commemorated themselves as having truly started to live at the point of their manumission. Dozens of epitaphs survive from Rome in which men like Marcus Aurelius Marcio describe their illustrious bureaucratic careers in detail, virtually erasing their lives before manumission. Marcio, who lived in the second century C.E., spent the money to list all five of his post-manumission jobs on his epitaph, including a demotion from procurator of an entire province to running the costumes department in the Colosseum. He didn’t mention his years of work in slavery. For him, life began with freedom. For many, a full life never began: Of the 1,300 people buried in the imperial cemetery in Roman Carthage—Marcio’s colleagues—two-thirds died in slavery. Freedom was a reward hard-won by a special few.
I’ll close with the story of two men who obtained their freedom: Clarus and Urbanus. The two men met on the auction block in Rome in the first century C.E., where they were being sold as goods in a mass sale. They were quite probably children taken as captives in one of Rome’s many wars. They became friends when they were purchased by the same man, worked together for years in slavery, and were freed together. They remained together as “fellow freedmen and dearest companions” until Clarus died. “No day could have separated us, apart from this fateful one,” wrote Urbanus in Clarus’s epitaph. Together they experienced subjugation and the humiliation of being sold as chattel. Together they found solace in their relationship, and they submitted sufficiently to win freedom and together they made a new life as freedmen.
Urbanus and Clarus remind us that even in the vast and unrelenting institution of Roman enslavement, every Roman slave was a human who loved and grieved and is worthy of remembrance.
