DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Historian Reveals Roman Cruelty to Slaves
Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire
Emma Southon (2026)
​Emma Southon’s recent book is about the cruelty of Roman slavery. Southon is a scholar who writes like an indignant advocate of Roman slaves, with the frequent use of expletives such as “Fuck that” in reference to apologetics for Roman slave practices. She despises the Roman Empire, for good reason. The Romans were not just cruel, they gloried in cruelty, joked about it, justified it and were creative in its expression. Southon asserts: “It always shocks me, no matter how long I study and write about the Romans, how much they loved brutalizing people. They loved it! They reveled in it! .... normal Romans also made amulets of prisoners tied up and looking sad and wore them as jewelry and made incredibly expensive jewelry that depicted women being dragged by the hair across the floor and wore it about. ... there is something deeply weird and uncomfortable in how much they wanted to show the suffering of those they conquered and took captive ...”
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Rome was a slave empire. Southon writes: “By the time Julius Caesar was born in 100 BCE, slavery underpinned every facet of Roman social and economic life. Caesar was born into a world that had perhaps the most extensive and socially integrated slave system in history. “ Slaves did all manner of jobs from farming, to working in mines, running bureaucracies and large farms, carrying out household chores and sex work in brothels. Many slaves were captured in war -- Caesar bragged that he took a million slaves in Gaul -- or were born free and condemned to slavery as punishment for crimes or were born into slavery. Infants abandoned by their parents and found by strangers in exposed places were sometimes raised as slaves. Though hard to believe, Southon asserts that some free born persons sold themselves into slavery. Slavery was not associated with race in the Roman world.
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To be a Roman slave was to be subject to violence by the dominus (slave master) for any reason or no reason. Romans used a type of whip called a flagellum "which consisted of two or three thongs of ox hide knotted along the length of each thong with bronze. Sometimes, each thong had a sharp bronze hook attached to the end." The flagellum could break bones, tear skin from muscles and inflict hideous injuries. However, use of the flagellum was only one of many ways of punishing, torturing or killing slaves. Their tongues could be cut off for gossiping. They could be branded with hot irons on the face, stripped naked in public and whipped, or even crucified. Southon states that after the defeat of Spartacus' slave army, a revolt that shook the Roman empire to its core, six thousand slaves were crucified on the road from Capua to Rome, 201 kilometers, "which means that a man was crucified every 3 meters ..." on a journey that took about five days for a traveler to complete.
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However, slaves did not have to participate in a slave revolt to be crucified, a form of torture designed to cause a slow agonizing death. A slave could be crucified for petty ​offenses, or (like lynching in the American South) to terrorize other slaves. There is a reason Christianity found a receptive populace at the peak of the Roman Empire. The aspirations and ideals of early Christianity were the polar opposite of Roman cruelty, though the Catholic Church never spoke out against slavery during the Roman Empire. For early Christians, Christ's crucifixion would have been an embodiment of death through Roman cruelty, a way of dying worse than death.
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Southon comments that the Emperor Constantine issued an edit in 319 CE that prohibited the deliberate murder of slaves. "No longer could they drown them, beat them to death, throw them off a cliff, hang them, poison them, burn them to death, "claw of their sides with metal tracks," or deliberately torture them to death." Rome had been a slave empire for hundreds of years before Constantine made the murder of slaves a crime.
Some Roman slaves became gladiators and most gladiators were slaves. By the time of Cicero and Julius Caesar, "gladiatorial games had become a core part of Roman identity, "Southon states, less common than chariot racing but still wildly popular across the Empire. Many gladiators were condemned criminals, but many were enslaved professionals. Southon asserts that "Gladiators existed in the Roman Empire exactly as tributes exist in the "Hunger Game" novels: as a demonstration of the total power of the empire." And "Rome could take life however it wanted and make great warriors dance for its applause and kill with the turn of a thumb." Gladiators could never become Roman citizens and, like sex workers, were barred from a wide range of legal protections. "The stain of the arena never washed off the soul of the man forced to fight and he would never be respected or have honor," Southon comments. Some gladiators sometimes committed suicide, occasionally in the arena. One author estimates that twenty percent of gladiatorial bouts in the first century CE ended in death, and this percentage increased to fifty percent by the third century, due to public pressure from spectators for gladiators to fight to the death.
Southon claims that Romans demanded "enthusiastic pretend consent" from both gladiators and sex workers. Acquiescence was not sufficient. She writes: "it wasn't enough to take the bodies of these people, they needed their hearts and minds too and they needed to crush them." Every type of physical, mental and emotional domination was highly prized by Roman aristocrats, Southon maintains.
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Southon explains how the Romans combined cruel punishments with rewards and hope of manumission, i.e., a grant of freedom from slavery. Slaves were rewarded through a “peculium,” which could be anything from a small financial reward to significant amounts of cash and land and even the ownership of slaves. Peculium’s sometimes made it possible for slaves to buy their freedom, or infrequently to own huge properties. Most slaves were poor, but a few were well off, or even wealthy, a difference in wealth that divided slaves’ economic interests, and reduced the risk that slaves would join together to challenge or harm a dominus. Slaves were given a choice: willingly obey and please their owners in order to be given rewards and special privileges, or challenge the dominus, run away or rebel and be harshly punished, tortured and/or killed. The Romans were cruel, but they were also smart enough to create positive incentives for obedience. Southon opines: “The peculium didn’t threaten the slave system at all; it reinforced it,” by creating competition among slaves and increasing the cost of rebellion or everyday bad behavior such as laziness or disobedience.
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Slaves could be freed through a verbal statement from the dominus, or by freeing a slave in the presence of a magistrate and a witness, or by a slave purchasing their freedom. Purchase prices varied depending on the price the dominus paid for the slave, which could be enormous for ”beautiful boys castrated for the pleasure of their domini, and the lovely freaks,” Southon states. Thus, “Only those with a profession or a very low price might raise money to purchase themselves.” Personal servants of slave owners were often freed, while cooks, cleaners, herdsman or sex workers were rarely manumitted, Southon asserts. Freedom could be granted for specific acts, e.g., giving birth to a certain number of children, or as part of a family celebration. Slaves who worked in certain jobs, e.g., in mines, were never freed. To work in a Roman mine was a death sentence, widely viewed as a fate worse than death.
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As Southon makes clear, Roman slaves had many different jobs, including (weirdly) administering the empire for some emperors. There were occasional situations in which slaves who had an important administrative role in the Roman state had power over aristocrats, a reversal of fortune the Roman nobility deeply resented.
Roman slaves, including children, were unprotected from sexual predation either by law or custom. Prostitution was legal in the Roman Empire "but the Roman sex industry as a whole was linked to slavery and exploitation more than any other industry in the empire," Southon states. Brothels were attached to hotels, bars and baths "as backrooms where women were offered as part of the general facilities." There were also male sex workers, some of them prepubescent boys. Southon writes: "Roman men had a very clear idea of what made a boy sexy, and puberty very much was not it. Roman men liked smooth, prepubescent boys, preferably of North African or eastern Mediterranean origin," Southon asserts. Young boys forced into prostitution were sometimes castrated to ward off puberty, Southon claims. She asserts: "if we populate ... any tavern in the empire with women and girls and boys of all ages, from the very young to the very old, we will have a more realistic idea of what the Roman sex industry really looked like."
One possible perspective on Roman cruelty is that it was a product of slavery, i.e. all slave societies are cruel. However, the Romans acquired an empire and millions of slaves through constant wars that rewarded cruelty and led to the belief that captives who became slaves were inferior beings. Victory in war, and the empire that grew out victorious wars, provided the Romans with a justification for slavery and for cruel practices developed in warfare and utilized to extract maximum economic benefits from defeated societies.
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Southon comments that when the Roman army defeated an enemy city, soldiers were allowed to engage in a killing rampage for a couple of days before the army began to take captives who could be ransomed or sold into slavery. Roman armies were free to satisfy their bloodlust and take revenge for combat deaths before the spoils of war were counted and divided. Constant war and the dynamics of ruling an empire made the Romans cruel; slavery allowed cruelty’s full expression.
Dee Wilson
8-10-26
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