The first thing you notice isn’t the noise. It’s the smell. Burning thatch, wet iron, blood drying on cold stone. The air inside your chest feels solid. One moment your hands are in the river pulling a net heavy with morning fish. The next your village in Germania is a furnace.
They come through the trees in silence. No war cries, no drum beat, just the rhythm of boots and the clatter of scuta locking into place. Their armor catches the fire light from your father’s roof. They do not run. They do not slow. A line of shields and short blades moves through the huts like a plow through soil. This is not a battle.
It’s a harvest. And you are the wheat. The march south erases you piece by piece. An iron ring closes around your neck and bites until the skin weeps. A chain runs forward to the man ahead, backward to the woman behind. You become a link in a column of bodies that stretches for half a mile, dragging itself through alpine mud while legionaries watch from horseback, chewing bread, saying nothing.
The slow ones disappear. A neighbor from your village, his thigh shattered in the raid, falls a third time on a ridge above the road. A centurion walks over. One stroke. The chain parts. The body stays. The column does not. By nightfall, wolves know the smell of your group and follow it through the passes. Your name leaves you somewhere in the mountains. Your mother’s face goes next.
By the time you see the red roofs below, hope is a weight you’ve already set down. Then comes Rome. The city hits you before the gates do. The roar of carts on stone. The shouting in tongues you’ve never tasted. And then the slave pens beneath the forum where the air is so thick with sweat and waste that your throat closes on it.
Hundreds of bodies pressed against wood and iron. Gauls, Dians, Syrians, Greeks, old men with empty eyes, children who have stopped crying, a dealer walks the rows. His eyes do not blink. He says nothing to you. He simply lifts a small wooden board on a cord and drops it over your head, choked across it.
Where you came from, how old you look, what your back might carry. The Romans call it a titulus. It is your name now. And the only question left in this city, the only question that decides whether you live another month is no longer who you are. It is what you are worth.
The wooden board hanging from your neck weighs almost nothing. The words on it weigh everything. This is the titulus and it is the first machine in a machine the Romans have built to convert human beings into money. Your whole life now sits on four lines of chalk. Origin: Germanis. Age: 20 winters. Build: strong. Lettered: No. You are no longer a son. No longer a brother, you are a specification.
The Romans loved categories. They sorted grain by quality, wine by region, soldiers by rank, citizens by census class. Aulus Gellius, writing in the 2nd century AD, preserved the legal language for it. A slave was a “res,” a thing in the same grammatical drawer as a roof tile or a copper pot. The jurist Gaius in his institutes would later write the formula plainly: “Omnes homines aut liberi aut servi.” All men are either free or slaves. There was no third category. There was no soft middle.
The titulus is not a description. It is a verdict. Your origin alone decides most of your future. Every region of the empire carries a stereotype, and those stereotypes have hardened into prices on a wax tablet.
A Greek in chains is read as clever, soft, useful in a library, dangerous near a wife. He may end up teaching Latin to a senator’s children, copying scrolls in a quiet room, balancing accounts by lamplight. He will sleep under a roof. He will eat olives and bread. And he will know every hour of every day that his mind is rented and his body is owned. The same master who calls him “my dear Demetrius” at dinner will sell him to a mine the day his eyes go bad. The historian Suetonius records that the grammarian Marcus Antonius Gnipho, a Gaul by birth, was sold into a Roman household, taught Julius Caesar in his youth, and was eventually freed. For every Gnipho, there were 10,000 who were not.
An Assyrian on the platform is read differently: quick with numbers, slippery, useful for running a shop, a warehouse, a fleet of barges. He will be given keys. He will be given a desk. He will never be given trust. Every coin he touches will be counted twice. Once by him and once by an overseer who watches him count.
But your board does not say Graecus. It does not say Cyrus. It says Germanus. To a Roman buyer, that single word is a story already written. Tacitus in his Germania fixed the image in print. Huge frames, blue eyes that stare without blinking, bodies built for the first crash of combat and useless for the long discipline of farmwork. He called them “ferocia,” savagery on legs.
Caesar himself writing 40 years earlier in his Gallic Wars had described the Suebi crossing rivers with horses and warning that no civilized people could live among them. That is the file the buyer is reading when he looks at you. No senator will let you near his sons. No merchant will hand you his keys. Your board promises one thing and one thing only. Meat that can lift.
That promise has destinations. The silver mines of Hispania around Carthago Nova, where Polybius walked the tunnels in the 2nd century BC and counted 40,000 workers underground at one time. He wrote that the slaves who entered them prayed for death within the first month. The shafts dropped 200 ft on wooden ladders. The air at the bottom carried so much lead dust that miners coughed blood into their hands and wiped it on the walls.
Or the wheat estates of Sicily, the latifundia, where you would be chained at the ankle to nine other men and walked into a field at dawn and walked out of it after sunset every day until the day you don’t walk out. Diodorus Siculus, who saw those estates with his own eyes, wrote that the slaves there were branded on the forehead, fed on a single ration of barley flour and left to sleep in underground pits called Ergastula, dug into the floor of the villa with a single grate at ground level for air.
Or the quarries of Luna in northern Etruria, where marble blocks the size of a man’s chest fell from ropes that had been frayed for weeks, and the broken were dragged aside and replaced before the dust settled. Your strength is your price. Your strength is also the sentence the price pays for.
The titulus has spoken. Now the body speaks. You are pulled from the holding pen and shoved up onto a raised wooden stage called the catasta. The platform stood near the temple of Castor in the Roman Forum. And again near the Saepta Julia, where the high-end auctions happened under colonnades of painted stucco.
The wood under your feet is worn smooth by 10,000 bare feet before yours. The boards are stained at the edges where men have been sick from fear. Your tunic comes off. Then the rag underneath. You stand naked on those planks under a sky the color of beaten tin. And the shame is something physical, something that pushes the breath out of your lungs. A breeze comes off the Tiber and finds every part of you that the sun has never seen.
The buyers gather. They do not stare. They appraise. Their eyes move the way a butcher’s eyes move over a hung carcass, looking for the cut, looking for the flaw. Most of them are not senators. They are stewards, agents, freedmen working on commission for villas in Campania and Apulia. They carry small wax tablets in leather cases. They scratch numbers into the wax with a bronze stylus while the dealer talks.
The mango, the dealer, walks a slow circle around you with the patience of a man selling a horse. He grips your jaw and pries your mouth open. The crowd leans in to see your teeth. Strong teeth mean you can chew the coarse barley that fills a slave’s bowl. Soft teeth mean disease, mean you will die before the investment returns.
He slaps your thigh. He squeezes your bicep. He makes you jump in place so the buyers can watch the muscle move under the skin. He makes you bend, lift an iron weight, turn, show your back. The back is what they want to see.
The Mangones, the slave dealers of Rome, were artists of the lie. The most famous of them, Tyrannius Flaccus, sold matched pairs of boys to the emperor Augustus, claiming they were twins from different mothers, one Asian and one European. Suetonius records the trick. The boys were not twins at all. The dealer had simply found two children who looked alike and dressed them identically. When Augustus discovered the fraud and demanded his money back, Tyrannius answered that this was precisely why the price had been so high, because finding two identical strangers was harder than finding two brothers. The emperor laughed. He kept the boys. That is the kind of man you stand in front of now.
They rubbed oil into pale skin to make it glow. They smeared red ochre on cheeks that had gone gray from months in a wagon. They dyed hair with walnut juice to shave a decade off an old man’s age. If a captive had stopped eating and gone hollow in the eyes, the dealer would force a draft of wine mixed with something stronger down his throat an hour before the sale, just long enough to put light back in the face.
Pliny the Elder in his Natural History lists the cosmetics by name. White lead for the skin. Charcoal lines around the eyes. Bean flour to fill in hollow cheeks. They were selling a fantasy of a perfect tool. And they knew exactly which paint covered which crack.
Every mark on your skin is read like a sentence on a scroll. A long scar across the ribs from a sword that tells a story a buyer can accept. You fought. You lived. You are durable. A burn on the forearm from a forge. Acceptable. You worked metal once. Useful. But the thin crossed lines on a back. Whip marks. Old ones layered over newer ones. Those tell a different story. And every buyer knows how to read it.
A whipped back means a slave who would not bend. A slave who tried to run. A slave who had to be taught the same lesson three times because the first two did not take. A back like that cuts a price in half, sometimes more. The Aediles, the magistrates, who policed the markets, even passed an edict requiring dealers to disclose hidden flaws. The Digest of Justinian preserves the rule. Any chronic illness, any tendency to run, any history of attempted suicide had to be declared on the titulus. If the buyer found the truth later, he could undo the sale within 6 months.
The law was not written to protect the slave. It was written to protect the buyer’s purse. The men in the crowd want a tool. They do not want a project. They do not want a war. In the cold arithmetic of Rome, your life is an asset that loses value the moment it is bought. You are like a plow horse or a wagon wheel or a clay amphora. There is a window during which you are worth the most and that window is narrow: roughly 15 to 25 winters.
The Edict of Diocletian posted on stone walls across the empire in AD 301 set the maximum prices. A male slave between 16 and 40 was worth 30,000 denarii. A boy under 8 was worth half that. A man over 60 was worth less than a good mule. Before that peak, you are a gamble. A child slave needs years of food before he can swing a pickaxe. And any fever in any month of any of those years can wipe out the whole investment.
After 25, the work itself begins to eat you. The lifting, the marching, the beatings, the thin diet of grain and bad oil, the lack of sleep. By 30, a field slave moves like a free man of 60. By 35, he is finished. Your value drops every year until it touches the floor. And when it touches the floor, what happens then? What does Rome, the great city of marble and law, do with the tool that no longer cuts? It throws it away.
Many masters, unwilling to feed and shelter a slave who could no longer earn his keep, simply got rid of them. The cheapest way was abandonment. In the middle of the Tiber, in the heart of the city, sat a small island called the Insula Tiberina, sacred to the healing god Aesculapius. The temple had been built there in 291 BC after a plague, and pilgrims still came to sleep on the marble floor, hoping for visions.
By the first century AD, the island had become something else as well. A boatman would row the old slave across, set him on the stone steps near the south end where the temple wall met the water and row back without looking. The slave would sit in the courtyard with no food, no family, no name, and wait for the cold or the fever to take him. At night, the priest stepped over the dying to lock the bronze doors. By morning, the river took most of them.
It became so common that Emperor Claudius finally legislated against it in AD 47. Suetonius preserves the text of the ruling in his Life of Claudius. Read the decree closely though and the truth shows itself. Claudius did not act out of mercy. He acted out of property law. He ruled that any slave abandoned on the island who managed to recover would automatically become free. He also ruled that a master who killed an old slave to avoid the trouble of abandonment could be charged with murder. The point was never the slave’s life. The point was the slave’s status as property. If you threw him away, you forfeited him. That was the law. That was as close to compassion as the Roman state could manage.
The market split the human race into two economies. Men and women were not sold by the same logic. Men were what the scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, writing his treatise on agriculture in 37 BC, called “instrumentum vocale.” Speaking tools. He placed slaves in a category just above oxen which he called semi-speaking tools and just above carts and plows which he called mute tools. The phrase was not a metaphor. It was a chapter heading in a manual on how to run a farm.
A male slave’s price was a calculation of his output. How many baskets of stone could he carry up a ramp before he had to rest? How many rows could he hoe before sundown? How long could he stand in the arena before a sword found him? His mind did not enter the calculation. His grief did not enter the calculation. He was horsepower with a tongue.
For women, the calculation became something else, something darker and more layered. Yes, she would weave. Yes, she would cook, scrub floors, haul water, work fields, but on top of that, labor sat another column in the ledger. A woman’s body carried prices that a man’s did not. Beauty had a number. Virginity had a number. Fertility had a number. In the high markets of the Subura and the elite auctions held in private courtyards on the Esquiline, a beautiful young virgin could be sold for the cost of a small country villa.
Martial, writing in the late 1st century AD, mocked a buyer named Mamurra who spent an entire afternoon at the Saepta inspecting a single girl, kissing her, pinching her, then walking away after lowering her price by haggling about a scar. She would be paraded in fine fabric, her hair combed and oiled, her skin powdered. Her untouched state was advertised like the seal on an amphora of wine. The buyer paid not for a person, but for the certainty that no one had used her before.
But her real long-term value sat lower in her body. A young woman who could bear children was not a single asset. She was a self-replicating one. Under Roman law, specifically under the principle of “partus sequitur ventrem,” any child she gave birth to belonged to her master automatically, without question, without ceremony. She was a factory whose product was more slaves.
A clever master could populate his entire estate over a decade with the children of three or four female slaves, building generational wealth out of rape and forced birth, and the systematic destruction of any family the women tried to build inside their cells. Columella, writing his manual on farming around AD 60, recommends rewarding female slaves who produce three or more children with a reduction in their workload. He records the practice without comment the way a man records the rotation of crops.
So the inspection of a woman on the catasta went further. Her hips were measured by eye. Her teeth and skin were checked for youth. If she had already borne children, those children might be brought out and stood beside her on the platform as proof of her fertility. Then, once the sale was done, the children were sold separately to different buyers and walked away in different directions while she watched. This was not a side effect of the system. This was the system working as designed. It was built to grind the spirit down until nothing recognizable was left.
And yet, even inside that grinder, something refused to be fully crushed. There were always the ones who ran. Now, back to the ones who ran. Rome had an answer ready for them, and the answer was designed to be seen. A runaway who was caught—and most were caught—was returned to the master for a punishment that doubled as advertisement. A whole profession existed to bring them back. They were called fugitivari, slave catchers, and they worked with hounds across the roads of Italy.
Cicero in a letter from 51 BC complains to his friend Atticus about chasing two runaway library slaves all the way to Illyria. The catchers were paid by the head and they were good at what they did. The most common punishment for the captured was the brand. The fugitive, the “fugitivus,” was held down on a bench in the master’s courtyard. An iron heated in a brazier until it glowed white was pressed against his forehead and held there until the skin hissed and the smell of cooked flesh filled the room.
The most common letter burned in was a single “F.” “Fugitivus.” Runaway. The mark never left. It was on him at the market, in the kitchen, in the field, in the grave. It was a label that traveled with the body forever, and it destroyed what little price he had. No buyer wanted a tool that had already proven it could break. The branded slave was now property nobody wanted, owned by a master who had every reason to work him to death quickly and recover what little he could.
For some, the symbol of the system was not the brand. It was the collar. Certain slaves were locked into iron rings around the neck that were riveted shut at the forge. These were not chains a man took off at the end of his shift. They were welded on for life. Many of them carried small bronze tags hanging from the collar like a dog’s medallion inscribed with words that the slave himself was meant to deliver to anyone who found him wandering.
Archaeologists have pulled more than 40 of these collars from Italian soil. One of them survives in the Museo Nazionale Romano. It was dug out near the Basilica of San Clemente and you can read it today. It says: “Ne fugiam ventium in area kalisti.” “Hold me so I do not run and return me to my master Vventius on the estate of Kalistus.”
The man wearing it had no voice of his own. His voice had been replaced by a piece of stamped metal that begged on his behalf to be dragged back into chains. This was the system’s last quiet triumph. It made a human being carry around his own surrender, riveted to his throat and announce it to every stranger he passed.
There was one law that locked the whole machine in place. The Senatus Consultum Silanianum, passed in AD 10 under Augustus, ruled that if a master was murdered in his own home, every single slave under his roof, every cook, every nurse, every child was to be tortured and executed. All of them. No exceptions.
In AD 61 under Nero, the city prefect Lucius Pedanius Secundus was killed by one of his own slaves. He owned 400. Tacitus describes what happened in Book 14 of his Annals. The crowd in Rome rioted in the streets demanding that the innocent be spared. The Senate debated. The jurist Gaius Cassius Longinus rose and argued that mercy would mean the end of every Roman household. The law stood. All 400 were dragged through the city under guard and executed in a single afternoon. Old women, children, house servants who had never met the killer. That was the wall any runaway was running against.
But there were slaves who refused to wear the collar. There were slaves who, even branded, even surrounded by 400 deaths in waiting, would still wait for one hour, one window, one fault in the wall. And in the year 73 BC in a gladiator barracks in Capua, owned by a Lanista named Lentulus Batiatus, a Thracian with a scarred back and 70 companions, was about to find that window. He had a knife stolen from the kitchen. He had a plan. He had nothing left to lose. And when he stepped through that window, he would not step through it alone.
The Roman slave market was not a self-sustaining ecosystem. It was a furnace. And furnaces need fuel. Slave families produced few children. The mines, the quarries, and the great wheat estates burned through bodies faster than wombs could replace them. The agricultural writer Columella, surveying the estates of the 1st century AD, recommended that masters reward only female slaves who bore three or more children because most never reached that number.
A field slave on a Sicilian latifundium had a working life of perhaps 7 years. A silver miner in Hispania two. A galley rower 18 months. The math was simple. Without a constant flood of new captives from outside, the whole system would have ground to a halt inside a single generation. That flood had one source: war.
Roman expansion and Roman slavery were not parallel processes. They were the same process seen from two angles. Every campaign across the Rhine, every winter march into Dacia, every fleet sent to Cyprus was a harvesting operation dressed in the language of glory. The legions did not just conquer, they captured, they sorted, they sold.
Attached to every army was a swarm of merchants the Romans called mangones and mercuries. Civilian dealers who marched with the baggage train, hammered together holding pens at every halt and bought captives directly from the soldiers within hours of a battle. The scale is hard to hold in the mind. When Julius Caesar pushed into Gaul between 58 BC and 50 BC, Plutarch records that he took 1 million people into slavery and killed another million in the field. Appian gives similar numbers.
The captives were marched south in columns that stretched for days, sold in batches at temporary auctions set up behind the moving army. Caesar’s quaestors did the accounting on portable wax tablets while the screaming was still going on at the edge of the camp. After the siege of Alesia in 52 BC, Caesar’s own commentaries record that he sold every survivor, 40,000 men, women, and children, on a single day in the rain. He noted it in two short lines, the way a farmer notes a harvest yield.
The volume crashed the market. Before the wars, a strong adult man from Gaul might fetch 2,000 sesterces. By 52 BC, dealers in Massilia and Aquileia were unloading them at 400. Some were sold at the front lines for 50. Caesar’s centurions, paid partly in human flesh, walked away from a single campaign season with the equivalent of a senator’s annual income. The general himself used the proceeds to pay off the enormous debts he owed to Crassus and to fund his march on Rome. The conquest of Gaul was not financed by selling slaves on the side. The slaves were the financing.
The pattern repeated everywhere the eagles went. After the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, Scipio Aemilianus sold 50,000 survivors into bondage in a single afternoon, then ordered the city burned for 17 days. Polybius, standing beside him on the hill, wrote that the general wept and quoted Homer about the day Troy would fall.
After the sack of Corinth that same year, Lucius Mummius emptied the city of every living Greek and shipped its statues to Rome, the people in chains and the bronze in crates side by side in the same holds. In 167 BC after the Third Macedonian War, the Senate punished the kingdom of Epirus for siding with the wrong side. Lucius Aemilius Paullus marched into 70 Epirus towns on a single morning, having coordinated the timing with his officers the night before and dragged out 150,000 people into slavery. Plutarch describes it in his Life of Aemilius. The towns were left empty. The fields went to weeds for a generation.
In AD 70, after the siege of Jerusalem, the future emperor Titus crushed the great Jewish revolt. Josephus, who watched it from inside the walls before defecting, records that 97,000 Jewish captives were taken alive. The strongest were sent to the quarries of Egypt to cut stone for new harbors. Others were sent to North Africa to be fed to lions in provincial arenas built specifically for the disposal of surplus prisoners.
The most valuable, those young enough to learn skills, were paraded through Rome in the triumph of AD 71. The procession lasted a full day. Josephus saw it himself and devoted 20 paragraphs of the Jewish War to it. 700 chosen prisoners walked in front of the chariot of Titus, scrubbed and oiled and dressed in fresh tunics specifically so the crowd could admire them.
Behind them rolled the seven-branched menorah, the golden table of the showbread and the scrolls of the law itself looted from the holy of holies and carried on Roman shoulders past the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. At the end of the route on the slopes of the Capitoline, the Jewish commander Simon bar Giora was dragged with a noose around his neck, beaten with whips by attendants who had practiced the rhythm for weeks and executed in the Tullianum prison while the cheers of the forum reached him through the stone.
The Arch of Titus still standing today at the eastern end of the forum carries the relief of that procession carved in marble. The menorah is visible. The faces of the bearers have been worn smooth by 16 centuries of rain. The Colosseum, begun under Vespasian in AD 72 and finished under Titus 8 years later, was paid for with the gold looted from the temple in Jerusalem and built by the muscle of the men who had once defended its walls. An inscription rediscovered on a stone block in the amphitheater itself, deciphered by Géza Alföldy in 1995, records that the construction was funded “ex manubiis”—from the spoils of war.
Those spoils had names and faces. Every new frontier produced a new label on the titulus. Tacitus, Strabo, and Cicero preserved the regional stereotypes the markets relied on. Sardinians: rebellious, almost unsellable. The source of the Latin proverb “Sardi venales”—Sardinians for sale—meaning anything cheap and worthless. Britons: slow, suited only for heavy labor in the northern provinces. Cappadocians: docile, obedient, perfect litter-bearers. So prized for that one task that the Latin word for litter-bearer, “lecticarius,” was almost synonymous with “Cappadocian.” Thracians: dangerous in a household but valuable in the arena. Alexandrians: clever, untrustworthy, suited to clerical work under close supervision.
The market did not see human beings. It saw inventory categories on a price list. Auction was theater. It had a script. It had a stage. The main slave market in Rome stood near the temple of Castor and Pollux at the south end of the forum. In the open space between the Basilica Julia and the Vicus Tuscus, excavations under the modern paving have uncovered the foundations of the platforms.
The smell carried for blocks: sweat, urine from the holding pens, the sharp tang of the chalk used to mark new imports, the smoke of charcoal braziers where dealers heated curling irons to fix the hair of girls about to go on the block. Captives brought by ship from the eastern provinces had their feet whitened with pulverized gypsum, a sign that they had arrived overseas. Romans called them “gypsati,” the chalk-footed. Pliny the Elder records the practice in Book 35 of his Natural History.
The catasta turned slowly so every buyer could see every angle. It was mounted on a wooden pivot, oiled at the base, and a low-ranking dealer’s assistant turned it by hand from below. The auctioneer, the “praeco,” worked beside it with a wooden staff he used to point. His voice had to carry across the forum and over the noise of the banker’s stalls of the Vicus Tuscus behind him.
“A young man from Pannonia, 22 winters, strong back, no marks, who opens at 1,000 sesterces?”
The dealer stood on the captive’s other side, ready with a damp sponge to wipe sweat off the brow before the next bidder leaned in. A small boy ran between the bidders with a wax tablet, recording offers and carrying them back to the auctioneer.
The numbers tell a story by themselves. A common field hand: 500 to 2,000 sesterces. A trained baker: 4,000. A skilled scribe with Greek and Latin: 8,000. A cook who could prepare the lavish dinners of a wealthy household: as much as 100,000. Pliny the Elder records that the grammarian Daphnis was sold to Marcus Scaurus for 700,000 sesterces.
The poet Martial in Book Three of his Epigrams mocks a buyer who paid 100,000 for a single beautiful boy to pour wine, then complained at dinner that the wine itself was sour. A field on the Campanian coast with its olive trees and its outbuildings and its own crew of slaves could be had for less than that cupbearer.
The actor Quintus Roscius Gallus, a contemporary of Cicero, earned so much through his stage performances that he bought his own freedom and then earned more on top of it than most senators. Cicero defended him in court in 76 BC and called him the finest actor in Rome. Roscius was the exception that lit up the rule. For every Roscius, there were 100,000 who died with iron at their throats and were buried in unmarked pits outside the Esquiline Gate. The puticuli—mass graves so foul that Augustus eventually had them covered with 20 ft of fill and turned into the Gardens of Maecenas.
The highest prices came for the strangest reasons. Beauty in a child, the promise of a particular skill. Twin boys who matched exactly. Suetonius records that Mark Antony paid 200,000 sesterces for a pair of identical-looking boys sold to him by the dealer Toranius Flaccus, only to discover that they were not twins at all, just two strangers who looked alike, one from Asia and one from across the Alps. He was furious. Toranius answered that the resemblance between strangers was rarer and therefore more valuable than the resemblance between brothers. Antony paid the bill and kept the boys. That was the open market.
Behind it in the smaller streets ran the darker ones. If you wanted a gladiator, you did not go to the forum. You went to a Lanista, a man who owned and trained fighting men. The Lanista Lentulus Batiatus ran a school in Capua on the road that led south past Mount Vesuvius. The Lanista Aurelius Scaurus ran another at Praeneste.
They walked their buyers through training yards where men hit wooden posts called “pali” with weighted swords from dawn until the sand turned dark with sweat while a trainer called the “doctor” walked the rows shouting corrections in Latin and Greek. The price for a fighter was lower than for a household servant. Nobody was buying a long-term asset. They were buying an afternoon’s entertainment for a magistrate’s funeral games. Cicero writing to his friend Atticus in 56 BC casually mentions…
