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#classstruggle

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"Enslaved people generally came from Roman expansion and from captives being taken by the Roman army. But their ranks were also being added to by those who lived within households and had children born into slavery within a Roman domicile. We know that about 60 percent of the enslaved people within this vast empire of about seventy million people at its height were working in a rural context, with the rest working in an urban context.

Looking at those in the cities, nine out of ten would probably be manumitted in the future, but only one out of ten of the rural agricultural slaves will be manumitted. It made a big difference whether you were assigned to work in the fields or in a domestic context, as a teacher of children, for example, or as a stenographer, a librarian, or a nursemaid. All of those jobs had at least a higher possibility of manumission, which doesn’t in any way validate slavery or make it ethically correct, of course. But in an agricultural world where you were constantly working in the fields, that meant in all likelihood you would spend almost your whole life enslaved.

There was tension between enslaved workers within the world of agriculture and a lot of animosity towards enslaved people working in a domestic context. But overall, Rome was a slave society that depended heavily on enslaved labor in order to be successful. The citizens of Rome, especially in Italy and the city of Rome itself, were highly dependent both on slaves and free people to do a lot of the manual labor that they themselves did not want to do."

jacobin.com/2025/07/ancient-ro

jacobin.comThe Hidden History of Class Struggle in the Roman EmpireAncient Rome was a rigidly hierarchical society where the ruling elite stigmatized everyone who had to work with their hands. Yet Roman workers still found ways to resist exploitation through strikes and other forms of collective action.