It is 3 a.m. and Rome is still asleep. But not you, you are already standing. Barefoot on the stone floor of the pantry that smells of sour wine and sweat. Beside you, five other bodies breathe deeply.
The stove is already on. The head chef pushes you against the wall and points to a sack of wheat weighing 40 kg.
“You carry it up three flights of stairs, go down and then go up again.”
The sun has not risen yet and your hands are already bleeding. And you know that if you make a mistake, if you fall behind for one more second, they will beat you until you can’t stand up. That was the daily life of approximately one-third of the population of Rome.
Today you will live, now, a full day as a slave in the largest city of the ancient world. And before this video ends, you’ll understand why most of them didn’t reach 30.
Roman slavery was not modern slavery, it was not racial, it was not exclusive to one people, it did not depend on the color of your skin or the continent where you were born. The Romans enslaved Gauls, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Britons, Germans, Arabs, and even other Romans when they fell into debt.
In the Roman Forum slave market, on a single day, you could see for sale a Greek philosopher from Athens, a Celtic blacksmith from Britain, and an Alexandrian scribe who spoke five languages, all with plaques hanging around their necks, listing their skills, defects, and price. It was a human catalog, and it was the most common thing in the world.
At the height of the empire, during the reign of Augustus, in the first century AD, it is estimated that 2 million people lived in conditions of slavery on the Italian peninsula alone, 35% of the population. In a city like Rome, with perhaps 1 million inhabitants, that means 300,000 to 400,000 bodies serving. 300,000 human beings without the right to a name, to legal marriage, to property, to the defense in court.
300,000 who could be sold, beaten, raped, or killed at the mere whim of their owner. And according to Roman law, none of that was a crime. You weren’t a person, you were a thing. Res in Latin. The same word that designated a chair, a vase, or a horse.
Now imagine that you have just been bought. Three months ago. You were 22 years old when a Roman legion burned your village in Gaul. Your father died in battle. Your mother was sold in another market. Your sister, you don’t know where she is. You were dragged in chains for 1000 km to the city that rules the known world and are now the property of a senator named Marcus Cornelius.
He doesn’t know you, he probably doesn’t even know your real name.
“Galus the Gaul,” he calls you, because that’s what was written on the auction plaque.
And in the next 24 hours you’ll find out what that means. Let’s begin.
It’s 3 in the morning. The pantry where you sleep doesn’t have a bed, it has straw. The straw is changed once a month and it ferments during that interval. It mixes with sweat, with urine from those who urinate in their sleep, with crumbs from the kitchen. The smell is so strong that you couldn’t eat for the first few weeks. Now you don’t even feel it anymore. Your body got used to it, or rather, your mind stopped registering it.
Waking up is automatic. Even before the rooster crows, before the house bell rings, your body is already seated. Alert. Ready. The first task is water. Rome has magnificent aqueducts, but the aqueducts don’t reach inside every kitchen, they reach the public fountains in the neighborhoods. And who fetches that water all the way home? In cubes, that’s you. Each cube weighs between 18 and 20 kg when full.
Every morning you make at least 10 trips. That’s 200 kg of water that needs to be in the kitchen tubs before dawn, before the head cook wakes up in a bad mood and looks for reasons to whip you. The nearest public fountain is 200 steps from the house. To get there, you cross an alley where three families are huddled together, sleeping on the ground. Free people so poor they don’t even have a home. You walk over a dead dog that’s been there for two days. Human footprints because Rome does not have a sewer system that covers the poor neighborhoods.
Nobody is looking at you. Slaves walking before dawn with buckets on their heads. It’s part of the city’s background noise, like the crowing of roosters. You are invisible and that is at the same time your greatest humiliation and your only protection.
At 5 a.m., the sun begins to illuminate the horizon. You finish the water work with the soles of your feet cracked because the slaves don’t have sandals. Sandals are a privilege of free people. Modern archaeologists studying skeletal remains found in mass graves in Rome say they can immediately identify who was a slave, just by looking at the foot bones. The feet of Roman slaves were deformed from walking barefoot on stone since childhood. Flattened heels, twisted toes, chronic cracks. It was the anatomical mark of servitude.
Now begins the second task of the day, turning on the ovens. The kitchen of a large domus has three ovens. One for bread, one for roast meats, one for sauces and stews. Lighting them means taking charcoal from the pile, blowing on it until embers form, and feeding the fire little by little. Your hands turn black, your nostrils fill with soot. Your lungs will eventually pay the price. Modern doctors who studied preserved bodies in Pompeii and Herculaneum found severe lung damage in young slaves. Chronic bronchitis, sick, recurrent pneumonia. The ovens were slowly a death sentence by asphyxiation.
While you light the ovens, other slaves in the house begin to stir. The house of a Roman senator of good lineage had on average between 30 and 50 slaves within the urban residence alone. It does not count the slaves from the villages in the countryside, from the farms, from the mines, from the ships. Here inside the Domus everyone has their function. There is the slave who takes care of the clothes, the one who braids the lady’s hair, the one who teaches Latin to the senator’s children, the one who takes care of the horses, the one who writes letters, the one who takes care of the accounts, the one who opens the door to visitors.
You are at the bottom of this hierarchy. You’re a kitchen servant, new, with no special skills, bought cheap. In the market you cost 600 sestertii. For comparison, a Roman soldier earned nine sestertii per day. You are equivalent to two and a half months of military salary, and that’s how your life is measured.
At 6 a.m., the family begins to wake up. Senator Marco Cornelio gets up in the second-floor suite. His wife has been awake for an hour now, being combed by a Greek slave who learned the art of hairstyling from her mother-in-law, enslaved before. The hairdresser will spend 2 hours working on the lady’s hair, and during those 2 hours, if a single strand goes wrong, she will be beaten. It has already happened that a slave lost an eye, because the lady put a bronze mirror in her face in a fit of rage. You heard the story, you remember it when the head chef curses at you.
Your job now is to help serve breakfast. Wealthy Romans eat little in the morning. A piece of bread, honey, olives, cheese, maybe diluted wine. You carry the bread from the kitchen to the living room where the family eats, but you cannot enter. You stop at the doors of the rooms, hand the tray to another slave of higher rank and return.
You can never look directly at the homeowners. You can never speak unless you are asked. You can never pass between two patricians in conversation. Your existence needs to be silent, laterally useful like a shadow.
At 7 a.m., the senator leaves home, goes to the forum, to the Senate, finds clients, conducts business, the house is left empty of the main free men and that’s where the real hard work begins. Cleaning. Rome is a city of elaborate mosaics, painted walls, oriental carpets, and ivory furniture. All of that needs to be immaculate when the owner returns. Mosaics need to be scrubbed on your knees with stiff bristle brushes. Painted walls need to be cleaned with damp cloths without discoloring the paint. Ivory furniture needs to be polished with special waxes. All done by people like you who got up at 3 in the morning and still have approximately 16 hours of work ahead of them.
Here appears an important detail that many people ignore. Roman lords were obsessed with the visual cleanliness of the house, but that did not mean real hygiene. The same hands that scrubbed tiles also handled raw meat in the kitchen. The same cloths were used to clean toilet bowls and dining tables. The notion of cross-contamination did not exist and diseases spread through the houses in deadly waves: dysentery, cholera, tuberculosis, measles. When an epidemic struck, the first to die were the slaves. They were the ones who came into contact with everything, and they were also the least cared for when they got sick. A seriously ill slave could simply be abandoned in a wasteland to die, and the master would buy another. It was cheaper to replace than to treat.
9 a.m. You are on your knees in the atrium of the house, the main entrance hall, scrubbing the impluvium. The Impluvium is that rectangular tank on the floor where rainwater is collected in the middle of the room that has an opening in the roof. It is a Roman status symbol. Every wealthy household has one. And keeping that crystal clear water without leaves, without dirt, without insects is a daily job. Your hands are in the water for hours. The skin peels, the nails soften and sometimes fall off completely. In winter the water freezes. In summer it attracts mosquitoes that bite your legs, leaving wounds that will become infected.
While you’re cleaning, you hear a noise in the street. Floats, shouts, vendors. Rome is fully awakening. The city has a peculiar rule. Carts carrying merchandise are not allowed to circulate during the day. Only at night to avoid congestion, but everyone ignores it. The result is a permanent sonic chaos. Dogs, horses, oxen, people selling fish, bread, water, sandals, wine, firewood, a constant murmur that enters through the courtyards and never ceases. And you, who woke up at 3 and haven’t even eaten yet, listen to all this while your spine screams in pain from the position you’re in.
At 10:30 in the morning, the head chef calls you for the first meal of the day. A slave’s food is leftover food. Leftover stale bread from yesterday, a piece of musty cheese, water. If you’re lucky, you’ll get one olive or another. If you don’t have it, it’s just bread. You devour it in 3 minutes standing up, leaning against a corner of the kitchen. There’s no time to sit down. There is no table for slaves. Eating standing up, quickly, without chewing properly. That is why many slaves developed chronic digestive problems, ulcers, reflux, and constant hunger that was never fully satisfied.
Do you know an older slave named Hermes, who has been in this house for 17 years? He told you once when no one was listening,
“The secret is not to think about hunger. Thinking about hunger is letting hunger control you. The secret is to pretend that the stomach doesn’t exist. Train the mind not to register what the body is asking for.”
Hermes is 42 years old. For a slave, he is practically an old man. He will probably die within the next 5 years from exhaustion, malnutrition, or one of the diseases circulating in the city. But until then, he is the wise one who teaches the newcomers how to survive another day.
At 11 a.m., the senator returns home for lunch. Bring guests. Three other senators and two Roman gentlemen are going to dine with him in the triclinium. The dining room with reclining sofas. The Roman luncheon of the elite is a spectacle. Five to seven dishes. Wine from various regions, fruits brought from Syria, fish from the Tyrrhenian Sea, roasted meats with elaborate sauces. And who prepares, serves and cleans all that is the team of kitchen slaves.
You, who used to do water and cleaning in the morning, are now temporarily promoted to kitchen assistant. You grab containers, wash dishes, run from the kitchen to the triclinium and back. The pace is frantic. Here, during lunch, something happens that will mark you for the rest of your life. One of the guests, after drinking too much, decides he wants to prove something to his friends. He takes a glass of wine and deliberately pours it onto the mosaic floor. He looks at Senator Marco Cornelio and says with a smile,
“Let’s see the discipline of your slaves.”
The senator understands the joke. Call a slave to clean. You’re the first one to appear at the door. You kneel down without saying anything and begin to scrub the wine with a cloth. The guest, still laughing, takes another drink and pours it over your head. The wine drips down your face, your neck, your back. The other senators laugh. Your owner laughs. You need to laugh quietly too. Because not laughing would be to offend the guest. You laugh and continue washing dishes.
This is the kind of humiliation that Roman literary sources rarely record, but which was constant. Seneca, who was a Stoic, wrote a famous letter against this type of behavior. But the mint was the exception. The rule was exactly what you just experienced. For the Roman elite, slaves were not just labor, they were living toys, platforms for the exercise of power. A way to show your peers that you had enough wealth to humiliate people without any consequences.
At 1 p.m., lunch ends, the guests leave. The senator retires for a 2-hour nap, a sacred Roman custom. The house should rest, but the slaves do not rest. You are cleaning the triclinium, picking up debris, washing cups, scrubbing the floor where wine, grease, gnawed bones, and pieces of bread have fallen. The smell of the room after a Roman banquet is specific. Wine turned sour, fat coagulated, the sweat of six men who ate too much reclining on leather sofas.
At that moment, a slave named Agrippina, about your age, passes through the corridor carrying a bronze vase. She is from Thrace. She was captured in a Roman attack 4 years ago, when she was 16. She has been a concubine slave of the house for 4 years. It means that the senator, and sometimes the senator’s children, and sometimes the senator’s guests, can use it whenever they want. The lady of the house hates her. The lady cannot hit her husband for cheating on her, but she can hit the slave and she does. You lock eyes with Agripina for a second. She diverts. They can’t talk. Conversation between slaves without permission is punished, but in that second of eye contact they communicated everything. They are trapped here, they will probably die here and no one will remember either of them.
At 3 in the afternoon, the senator wakes up from his nap. Bathroom time. Rome has magnificent public baths, but wealthy senators prefer to have private baths at home. The house of Marcus Cornelius has a small set of baths at the back, a hot caldarium, a warm tepidarium and a cold frigidarium. For those baths to work, someone needs to keep the hypocaust furnace lit. The hypocaust is the Roman system of underfloor heating. It works with wood burned in an underground oven whose heat circulates through pipes under the floor. Who feeds that oven? They are slaves and it is a hellish job, literally. The temperature in the hypocaust compartment reaches 60º. The air is unbreathable. Your hands get burned when you touch the firewood. The skin is peeling.
Today is your turn. Go down to the sub-basement. You get into that unventilated compartment and for an hour you feed the fire while the senator takes a bath up there. He talks to his manager, receives a massage from another slave. The contrast is absolute. Upstairs, marble, perfumed steam, oils, comfort. Below, a black hole where a human body slowly burns so that comfort may exist. You leave the hypocaust with your clothes stuck to your body with sweat, your eyebrows singed, the taste of ash in your mouth.
5 p.m. The day is ending for most free Romans. For you, the night hasn’t even begun yet. Here it’s worth pausing, because what comes next is the point in the story that most surprises someone studying for the first time. Ancient Rome was not uniform. There were different layers of slavery and your condition could be even worse than what I have described so far. You are an urban domestic slave. That’s already bad, but within the spectrum it’s one of the best positions. Above you are only the skilled slaves, secretaries, doctors, teachers, librarians, scribes. They could, with luck, buy their freedom after many years.
There is an abyss below you. Rural slaves on large agricultural estates, latifundia, lived chained up in barracks. They worked 16 hours a day. They were fed like animals, but even that wasn’t the worst part. The worst thing was being a mine slave. Roman mines, especially silver mines in Hispania, were punishable by death. Diodorus, the old man wrote about them. The slaves descended into shafts that were literally vertical holes, holding oil lamps whose smoke filled their lungs for hours. They worked 12 hours straight digging rock in tunnels less than 1 meter high lying face down. When they came out, after years they were blinded by the prolonged darkness, twisted by the positions, spitting blood.
The life expectancy of a Roman mine slave was less than 5 years from the moment he entered the tunnel. 5 years. For a man bought at 18, that meant dying at 23. And that was the source of the silver that adorned Senator Marcus Cornelius’s goblets when he dined with his guests. You are privileged in the kitchen today. Your condition, which seems hellish, was the mild version of Roman slavery.
It’s 6 p.m. and it’s time for the family dinner. The scene repeats itself. You run, you carry and you clean, but you still don’t eat. Your second meal of the day will only come after the family has finished and you’ll make what’s left on their plate. Today, with luck, there will be a half-chewed piece of meat that one of the senator’s sons rejected. You’re going to eat, or rather, swallow without chewing.
It’s now 8 p.m. The dinner dishes need to be washed. The cups dried, the mosaics of the triclinium scrubbed again, the kitchen organized for the next day, the provisions checked, the ovens carefully turned off so as not to cause combustion. All of that is still your job.
At 10 p.m., the senator and his family retire to their rooms. The house begins to get quiet, but even now you’re not finished. The last task of the night is the most intimate and the most humiliating, the nightly glass. Each room in the house has a ceramic cup used at night for physiological needs. Those cups need to be collected before dawn and taken to a public latrine or thrown into a pit designated for that purpose. Guess who’s wearing them. You.
Six glasses full of urine and feces from the family of Marco Cornelio. Carried one by one through the dark corridors of the house, up the stairs to the back of the courtyard. The smell gets into your clothes, it gets into your hair, you sleep with that smell. But there is one important thing. When the Romans emptied nightly cups in designated places, the contents were not thrown away, they were sold. Human urine, rich in ammonia, was used by Roman laundries, the fullonicae, to clean fabrics. Laundry owners bought urine from neighbors and Emperor Vespasian even created a tax on the sale of urine. When his son Titus complained about paying such a dirty tax, Vespasian put a coin on his nose and said a phrase that went down in history,
“Pecunia non olet.”
Money has no smell. Your work as a slave collecting the cups fueled that trade. You were part of a production chain from which you would never see a single penny.
It’s 11 p.m., you finally finish. You go back to the pantry. The other slaves are already there lying on the straw. The old smell returned. You go to bed. The stone floor is cold, your back throbs, your hands are raw, your belly murmurs, your eyes burn. You have maybe 4 hours until the head chef yells again. You try to sleep, but before you fall asleep, for a moment, a dangerous thought crosses your mind. You think about escaping.
Thinking about escaping is the riskiest thing a Roman slave can do. Rome has an entire legal and cultural system set up against runaway slaves. There were the Fugitivari, professional hunters of outlaw slaves who earned rewards in coins for each capture. There were dogs trained to track slaves by smell. There were forced tattoos that many owners made on the foreheads of slaves. The letter F of Fugitivus was branded onto his body so that if he escaped and was captured, everyone would know immediately.
There was a cruel custom of hanging bronze collars around the necks of slaves with inscriptions such as, “If I escape, catch me and return me to my master Marcus Cornelius on the Appian Way. Reward guaranteed.”
If you escaped and were captured—and you almost certainly would be—the punishment was brutal. Crucifixion was the standard fate for runaway slaves. When Spartacus and his followers were defeated in 71 BC, after a revolt that had mobilized nearly 90,000 slaves, General Crassus ordered 6,000 prisoners to be crucified along the Appian Way, the main road from Capua to Rome. 6,000 crosses in 200 km. One cross every 30 m. It took them days to die, and that forest of corpses was left there rotting as a warning to any slave who thought of escaping in the decades that followed.
You remember it and renounce thinking about escaping. You close your eyes and fall into a deep sleep, dreamless, hopeless. Suddenly it’s 3 a.m. again, you open your eyes and it all starts again.
