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a topical guide to freedom, control, and confinement in the Roman world
CONTENT WARNING:
This webpage includes content relating to fear, enslavement, mistreatment, sexual exploitation, and violence. If you are sensitive to this type of content, please proceed with caution. Thank you.
The typical picture of the Roman world that we see in movies, TV shows, and social media is one filled with white marble columns and busts, toga-clad politicians and philosophers, sword-wielding gladiators, wide stone streets, and an abundance of wealth, luxury items, and festivals. Names like Caesar and Augustus, figures whose wealth, imperial control, and posthumous deification have raised them to the status of legends, dominate the popular narrative and reinforce ideas about what constituted a “normal life” in Rome’s ancient cities.
Though these ideas were all important parts of Roman culture and society, the truth is that the average Roman citizen wasn’t one of those aristocratic elites or even one of the rich, industrial freedmen with access to the objects and events that we today inextricably tie to being Roman. The majority of the Roman population were poor, rural workers, peasants near the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy who often worked the land of the rich outside of the hustle and bustle of the metropolis. And below these plebeians in Roman society, there were those without personal rights, citizenship or citizenship who did live in the central hub of each Roman province: enslaved individuals. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s much more to the Roman world and its cities below the veneer of broad themes like opulence, government intrigue, and philosophy. In order to get an accurate idea of what a Roman city was like, we evidently need to dig deeper into the interior lives of its enslaved people.
Slavery in the Roman World
Slavery in the Roman World
Slavery in the ancient Roman world was similar in many aspects to our notions of slavery today. Enslaved individuals were often prisoners of war or other captives; children either born into slavery by an enslaved parent, sold by their free parents, or abandoned; or people who sold themselves or were sold by people in power. As such, enslaved individuals were not a homogeneous group, but came from a diverse range of cultures and ethnicities that tracked with the Roman world’s expansionist aims and military triumphs. Unlike slavery in Europe and the Americas in early modern/modern history, however, these people were not always racially distinguishable, but often considered culturally instead of physically inferior to their Roman captors. Prisoners of war who were enslaved served as reminders of Roman victories over a wide range of territories, while also contributing to the labor force that supported the people group who had overtaken their homeland. These people were sold to, bought by, or inherited by their master and treated as property, as objects or things rather than human beings; they could be used as laborers, guards, as transactional objects to settle debts, or as a means of entertainment and were subject to whatever treatment—fine or poor—that the master inflicted upon them. One aspect of Roman slavery that is often discussed is the idea of manumission, the freeing of enslaved individuals by buying themselves out of servitude using money gifted or paid to them by a master or by being freed by the master verbally or in writing. However, the majority of enslaved individuals were never freed, while few others would spend a lifetime in servitude before being freed in their master’s will upon his death.
The roles enslaved people would perform as servants would also vary. Some enslaved people would work in building civic works, as miners, in household mills, or as field-hands, where they would often be forced to endure abysmal working conditions, long hours, and mistreatment at the hands of overseers (often other enslaved people). Other enslaved individuals, however, would serve highly specific, sometimes skilled positions in Roman households as cooks, servers, weavers, cleaners, or estate managers. Enslaved people from Greece, whose culture the Romans admired and valued, would often be put to work as tutors to the children of the household or as physicians. Though the exact number of enslaved individuals who lived, worked, ate, and slept in these homes along with their masters is unknown, some estimates put the number between 10% and 20% of the overall population. So why haven’t we remembered enslaved people in Rome in the same way we have the wealthy elite? Why have we often left them out of Rome’s history? In order to answer this question, we have to understand a bit more about the spaces that these people were occupying in the Roman house.
The Roman Domus
Much of what we know and assume about the Roman house can be traced back to a treatise written by a first-century B.C.E. scholar and architect, Vitruvius. In his De Architectura ("On Architecture"), Vitruvius names the ideal parts of the Roman atrium house and the placement of these parts in relationship to one another. When entering the home, one would come through an ostium or entrance into a narrow space called the vestibule (or, sometimes, fauces) which would funnel the person into the main space, the atrium. The atrium was the main reception hall of this type of house and central to most of the other rooms, recognisable by the rectangular basin set into the middle of the floor called the impluvium, which would catch water from a hole in the roof (a compluvium) for use in the home.
To the sides of the atrium could be cubicula, rooms that could have shifting purposes depending on the needs of the household, from bedroom to storage space to private meeting room. Also on the sides of the house could be alae, whose function archaeologists and classicists haven't quite discerned yet, but they often had large windows cut into their exterior walls to allow light and air into the home. Additionally, a culina or kitchen may have been placed along the walls here, though they were often sequestered to corners and placed outside of the main sight-line of the house in order to hide smells, noise, and the enslaved people working there from notice. Past the atrium was often a tablinum, a study and meeting room for the master or paterfamilias, the male head of a household, to meet with his clients and to maintain his records. The tablinum was open to the peristyle garden at the back of the house as well, allowing the master to enjoy the fresh, open air, art, and natural beauty while inside. The peristyle garden would be the central space of the back of the house, an open air green space filled with trees, shrubs, flowers, fountains, and sculptural works and surrounded by rows of columns (colonnades) on all sides.
The last major feature that archaeologists and historians assign to ruins of Roman atrium houses is the triclinium, an elaborate dining room. In Book 6, Chapter 4 of De Architectura, Vitruvius says:
"Winter triclinia... are to face the winter west, because the afternoon light is wanted in them..... Spring and autumn triclinia should be towards the east, for then, if the windows be closed till the sun has passed the meridian, they are cool at the time they are wanted for use. Summer triclinia should be towards the north, because that aspect, unlike others, is not heated during the summer solstice, but, on account of being turned away from the course of the sun, is always cool, and affords health and refreshment."
In the ideal Roman house, there were several triclinia that could be rotated between depending on the amount of sunlight and heat that would come into the room while dining. The idea of the "ideal" Roman house is important to consider because it provides us with some way of repopulating the extant remains of houses that we have uncovered in order to better understand ancient Romans' priorities and personalities, aesthetic sensibilities, and ways of communicating through art and architecture. The placement of the culina within the larger scheme of the atrium house plan above, for example, reveals that the enslaved individuals were often deliberately made invisible and kept out of sight to guests entering the house. Looking at the architecture of the Roman domus, we can begin to understand why enslaved narratives have been lost, obscured, and hidden. However, it is important to consider how many of ancient houses would have actually fit the ideal Vitruvian model. Though we today have cookie-cutter houses, designed to look alike inside and outside, we also have homes which have the same basic features (kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, etc.) but arranged in different ways. One of the sites in the ancient world which gives us some of the most interesting and complete evidence for this variation is the city of Pompeii, where houses in standing condition survive in greater numbers.
The City of Pompeii
The City of Pompeii
The ancient city of Pompeii is probably best known for its destruction. In the midst of rebuilding after an earthquake struck the city in 62 C.E., the people of Pompeii were hit by another natural disaster from the local volcano, Mt. Vesuvius, just 17 years later. In October of 79 C.E., the city was leveled by Mt. Vesuvius' eruption with a devastating loss of human life that extended to the other Roman provinces around Pompeii: Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Stabiae. In the first of two letters written by Pliny the Younger, a Roman lawyer and statesman, to the historian Tacitus following the eruption, he describes the tragic death of his uncle Pliny the Elder:
"...flames and a strong smell of sulphur, giving warning of yet more flames to come, forced the others to flee. He himself stood up, with the support of two slaves, and then he suddenly collapsed and died, because, I imagine, he was suffocated when the dense fumes choked him. When light returned on the third day after the last day that he had seen, his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like a man asleep than dead."
The state of being "more like.... asleep than dead" is also what archaeologists discovered about the city as a whole through excavations from the 18th century to the modern day. Though Vesuvius may have destroyed much of Pompeii, many of the buildings were remarkably preserved, being buried under layers of ash for nearly seventeen centuries.
Though excavations of the buildings have taught us much about the architectural plans of these buildings, including the houses which made up much of Pompeii's structure, they have also revealed the elaborate wall paintings, mosaics, inscriptions, and graffiti that adorned them. Viewing much of the surviving art from Pompeii at a glance (see below), it's easy to form a one-dimensional image of what Pompeians were like: sex-obsessed, extremely wealthy and frivolous, violent and gladiatorial, and party animals. These images may give the impression that enslaved individuals, perhaps even more numerous in a trade city on the coast like Pompeii, were completely invisible in the space, and that the lifestyles of the wealthy elite—as in our ideas of Rome as a whole—form a cohesive picture of Pompeian life.
This view seems more plausible in part because we do not have the same types of material evidence that can be tied directly to enslaved people, who often worked on ephemeral projects, did not have ability to produce dedicatory inscriptions and statues, and did not often leave distinctive markings of both their enslavement and their name on objects. Many of the literary sources that we use to identify buildings, objects, and subjects in art are also from the perspective of slaveholders rather than enslaved people themselves, so the stories we have about what went on in Pompeian homes is in part restricted to "master narratives" and histories written by the victors.
Yet if we know that slaves in the Roman world were abundant and filled the house, performing all kinds of tasks behind the scenes, then it makes sense that many of these rich objects and paintings would have been seen and experienced, if not touched, by them as well. It makes sense that when masters in literature complain about the behaviour of the enslaved people in their homes, or when we speculate about how Pompeians would have interpreted the paintings on their walls, that we have the ability to imagine the other side of the story.
Our Mission
Our Mission
In order to accomplish this goal, of reinserting enslaved individual's real, tangible, visible existences into popular narratives about Pompeii, this virtual project hopes to serve as a guide to introduce you to the detailed lives of enslaved individuals, by breaking down pieces of evidence for their presence in one structured environment: the home, or domus. Using architectural, literary, and artistic evidence from various sites in the ancient city of Pompeii, this project hopes to explore and suggest the multifariousness of enslaved experiences of work and life in the Pompeian domestic sphere, in order to explore the binary between “free” and “enslaved” that existed in these spaces. Given the lack of direct evidence that specific objects belonged to specific enslaved people, it is important to note that all of the interpretations on this site are theoretical. The pages are arranged thematically and can be navigated using the drop-down menus in the top right-hand corner. If you see a bolded word, feel free to click on it to be directed to the Glossary & Bibliography page to see its definition.
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