#i mean i want to be clear rome wasn't like EXCEPTIONALLY brutal or bad to slaves compared to its neighbours | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stackslip · 4 months

Text

i think a lot about how the roman thermae and bathing culture is presented as a sign of how Civilized and Advanced the romans were but one of the essential parts of the thermae was the caldarium, essentially a sauna, which was heated up through the floor.... under which slaves constantly had to toil to feed the fire while suffocating in the heat and steam that would rise through the floor to make free romans and the slaves' masters get a nice sweat, free to move on to the cold baths in the next room whenever they wanted.

#'roman citizenship was given to every free man in the empire' sure! but not only was that very late #but a very considerable portion of the population of the empire at any given point was a slave. most slaves lived horrific lives.#i mean i want to be clear rome wasn't like EXCEPTIONALLY brutal or bad to slaves compared to its neighbours #by which i mean that it was just as callous as most ancient mediterranean civilizations when it came to the treatment of slaves #and the scale of roman's brutality towards slaves matches the scale of its size and timeframe.#athenians were a much smaller population of the ancient world but slaves in the silver mines of laureion had a life expectancy of five year #that's still thousands upon thousands of people who suffered horrific deaths and lived the rest of their lives in miserable conditions #all to make the city rich #anyhow i don't think rome is like a particularly evil empire in the sense that all empires are evil #people love to imagine themselves ancient roman aristocrats but you would not have been one. you would be lucky to be a /domestic/ slave.#who still had shit lives tbc but exponentially better than working on the latifundiae #eli talks

107 notes · View notes