The Invisible Romans: how the brutal lives of the enslaved shaped an empire

Ancient Rome was a grisly and a glamorous place. The sun was barely able to creep down the narrowest alleys beside which most Romans lived, briefly illuminating the dirt, peeling plaster and filthy streets. Only a short distance away that same sun burnished the glittering temples of the forum with their garishly painted statues of the gods, the emperors and other greats. This bustling metropolis was home to the obscenely wealthy, to the middling sort of soldiers, bakers and actors, and, at the bottom of the pile – subject to the brutalities meted out by the ancient Roman justice system – to thousands of slaves.

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A huge proportion of the population in Rome was made up of slaves, former slaves, or the descendants of slaves. They were merely the tip of an iceberg: untold numbers worked on vast estates and mines across Italy and the empire, out of sight and out of mind. Even in and around Rome, slaves were both visible and invisible. They were visible in the sense that they were to be found in every home, factory and farm; invisible in the sense that most of them were simply part of the background noise of life.

Just as we ignore the hum of our fridges and the buzz of electric fans, so the Romans often took little notice of the human beings whose servitude and labour made their lives possible.

Looking the other way

The range of jobs slaves performed ranged from the hard labour of working in the mines or on vast agricultural estates to being the secretaries or personal assistants of Rome’s most
senior magistrates or even the emperors.

In the household a slave might find herself at the beck and call of a demanding domina (mistress) to help her dress, while also being subject to the sexual demands made by the dominus (master). The Roman general Scipio Africanus’s wife, Terentia, was highly regarded for looking the other way and ignoring her husband’s activities – if she had spoken out, she might have damaged his reputation.

Slaves were also required to haul rainwater by rope out of the cistern in buckets under the atrium (hall) floor. They cooked, they tended the garden. And they fulfilled tasks like dashing out of the house carrying a tray of hot food kept warm by a brazier all the way to the Forum for the master while he dealt with politics and deals.

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Slaves arrived for sale in Rome and Italy from all over the Roman world. They formed a huge part of the booty from wars of conquest and could then be used or sold on by the generals responsible, with some soldiers also receiving an allocation. Julius Caesar had a reputation for collecting slaves of “exceptional figure and training”, and this had supposedly attracted him to invading Britain.

There was a vast and ceaseless second-hand market in slaves. Pliny the Younger, a wealthy senator and writer in the early second century AD, received a recommendation from Plinius Paternus, probably a relative. Having looked at them himself, he wrote to say: “I think the slaves you recommended I buy look fine. The only other thing I care about is that they are honest. On this, I can only rely on their reputations rather than their appearance.”

A writing tablet from Pompeii refers to the sale of slaves “on 13 December next… at Pompeii in the forum publicly in the daytime”. Slaves for sale could expect to be stripped and inspected by a slave dealer, usually known as a venalicius. Pliny the Younger referred to slaves casually, using the related word venalibus, which was a synonym for saleable, and in this case sentient, commodities. It’s the origin of our word venal, which now means something associated with corruption – and indeed the trade was notorious for sharp practice.

Threats and punishments

Slave dealers had plenty of tricks up their sleeves because there was a vast amount of money to be made from the trade.

Hyacinth root could be placed in sweet wine to help delay signs of puberty (how this worked, if indeed it did, is not clear) and was clearly designed to help sell a slave to a buyer interested in having children either as a decorative ornament or for sexual purposes. Castration was another method. Meanwhile, resin dissolved in oil made an ointment used by dealers to rub all over the limbs of slaves. According to Pliny, this had the effect of “relaxing the skin upon all parts of the body, and rendering it more capable of being plumped out by food”.

One trader, Gaius Sempronius Nicocrates, detailed on his tombstone how troublesome and arduous long sea and overland journeys with slaves were. The tombstone of Aulus Caprilius Timotheus, who died around the end of the second century BC, showed his chained slaves being pulled along like mules. At least two children were involved. Timotheus, ironically, was a freedman and thus a former slave who made a living out of enslaving others.

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When another slave-owner, Marcus Antonius Creticus, was asked by a friend for money, Creticus gave him a silver shaving bowl and told him to make what use he could of it. His wife, Julia, was furious when the bowl was discovered to be missing. She was about to interrogate the slaves individually, believing that one of them had been responsible. Her husband had to come clean to save them from punishment.

In a Roman household, the servile staff were seen as a potential threat to such an extent that they were automatically believed to be culprits. Of course, in practice they probably often were since theft was one way of supplementing their marginal existences.

The poet Juvenal (cAD 55–128) slated a woman whose husband seemingly turned his back on her at night. She took out her angst at her marital woes by presiding over the beating – and execution – of their slaves. “While the flogging goes on, she daubs her face, she listens to her girlfriends or considers the measurements of a gold-embroidered gown,” wrote Juvenal. “Her household is no mellower than a Sicilian [tyrant’s] court.”

These instances of cruelty were far from isolated. Slaves were subjected to an array of punishments. They might be punished by being sent to an ergastulum (‘slave prison’ or ‘workhouse’) throughout Italy where they had to work in the fields in chains. The managers of these establishments also increased their labourers by capturing travellers, or those trying to dodge military service.

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Any mutiny within the household, or an attack on an owner, could result in all the household slaves being executed – as was the case following the killing of Pedanius Secundus in AD 61. In the early second century, the emperor Hadrian had to ban masters from killing their slaves and ordered that a slave who had been accused of a capital crime should be tried by the courts instead.

Also in around the early second century AD, Largius Macedo, a senator, was relaxing in the baths at his country villa when he was surrounded by some of his slaves. While one grabbed him by the throat, a second punched him in the face and more began to kick and trample him, including his private parts. Macedo was soon unconscious, or had the wit to pretend to be. The slaves threw him on the floor of the heated bath and decided to pretend that he had been overcome by the temperature.

Macedo only survived a few days. Most of the guilty slaves were caught and would undoubtedly have been executed. The motive is the one key factor missing from Pliny the Younger’s account of the incident. But the assault on Macedo’s body, and his genitals, suggests that he had gone too far with his prerogative to impose sexual demands on the female or young male slaves.

From bondage to business

Rome differed from other slave-owning societies in the ancient world in one key respect: its relationship with its freedmen and freedwomen class. No other ancient civilisation distinguished freed slaves so clearly and in such huge numbers.

Rome’s senatorial upper classes spurned the idea of earning money through commerce and trade. But by freeing selected slaves they were able to create retainers who were tied to them through personal obligation and could run businesses on their behalf.

Freedmen and women became merchants, shop owners, managers of public baths, or pimps, and indeed almost any profession imaginable. Freedmen could not stand for office or even vote, but their sons could. Success in business enabled them to raise the funds to bankroll their sons’ political careers.

Some freedmen did exceptionally well. Euhodus was a freedman dealer in pearls (margaritarius) who lived and worked in Rome in the second or first century BC. We have no idea whether Euhodus was thought well of or not by his family and descendants. However, he was undoubtedly impressed by himself.

His epitaph reads: “Stranger! – stop and look at this mound to the left where the bones of a good, compassionate man and friend of those of modest means are contained. I ask that you, traveller, do nothing bad to this tomb. Gaius Ateilius Euhodus, freedman of Serranus, pearl seller on the Via Sacra, is preserved in this tomb. Farewell traveller. Under the terms of the will, it is not lawful to preserve or bury anyone in this tomb except those freedmen to whom I have granted and assigned [this].”

Euhodus’s name was Greek. He probably came from the eastern half of the empire, perhaps being sold in a Rome slave market as a child or youth. The Via Sacra, where he sold his wares, ran through the forum in Rome. This was a prime location that brought Euhodus sufficient success that he could afford to have his tomb and epitaph prepared, free his own slaves, and offer those whom he specified in his will a place in his tomb, too.

Just outside the Porta Maggiore in Rome is an incongruous sight. A prominent Roman tomb, made in the shape of a stack of bins for kneading dough, stands surrounded by modern streets and overhead cables, silent among the racket from the traffic that churns around it. This was the burial place of the ashes of a successful freedman (libertus) called Eurysaces who lived in the first century BC. He had a sense of humour. “It is obvious this is the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, baker, contractor,” proclaims the inscription.

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The tomb is an elaborate joke, hence the substitution of dough bins for the usual cremation urns. Eurysaces and his wife, Atistia, had made a small fortune from his nearby bakery business and was keen for everyone to know it for all eternity.

Eurysaces’s tomb towered over a road junction and the endless cavalcade of carts, animals and pedestrians that entered and exited the ancient city on either side. It’s fascinating to stand there today and imagine the cluttered drama that took place all around it as Romans of all types from rich to poor, free and enslaved, passed by.

Thanks to the boastfulness of men like Eurysaces, we have an unparalleled window on this period in the ancient world – and of the men and women who emerged from the agonies of bondage to make a success of their lives.

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Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and broadcaster. His new book, Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome, is published by Abacus in April 2024.

This interview first appeared in the May 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine