My People

If you've read the author's previous A Fatal Thing happened on the Way to the Forum and remember all the passages therein dealing with slavery and enslaved people, you have a pretty good idea of what this book is like. Servus: How Slavery made the Roman Empire is still written in Emma Southon's characteristic breezy, casual tone (while being very well researched and annotated), but despite previous books incluidng a whole lot of murder (one even devoted to it), this is definitely the darkest one by far, and she doesn't let the chatty tone interfere with it. Slavery in Ancient Rome: did not depend on race, was no less gruesome, brutal and dehumanizing for it. On every level. This said, Southon does use her trademark humor to great effect when telling the stories of individuals who did not perish, like this gem about Cicero's librarian: Prepare for a lengthy quote, because the passage illustrates what her writing style is like very well, and it's one of the few with a happy ending:

One name we do know is that of a librarian named Dionysius. He was ineslaved by Cicero and, in 46 CE, his name appeared in several of Cicero's letters because he had fled from his slavery. Dionysius first appears in a letter aaddressed to the governor of Illyricium, which was the area we now call the Balkans (...). In 46 CE, Cicero was one of the most prominent and famous men in the empire but had largely retired from politics in order to marry a teenager who had once been his ward. Thus, his letter was mostly general chit chat, and it ended with a request for a favour: Dionysius, Cicero's librarian, had disappeared. Somehow (Palpatine returned. No, not that), it had been revealed that Dionysius had stolen a large number of books. Whether he did this to sell for profit or for his own library we don't know but, like many enslaved people, he saw someone with a surfeit and skimmed some off the top, and got caught.
Realising a punishment was coming and it might be appalling, Dionysius decided to get out of certian danger. He travelled from either Rome or Tusculum to a port and managed to talk himself onto a boat out of Italy. He crossed the Adriatic Sea and, upon arriving in Narona (in modern-day Croatia), bumped straight into one of Cicero's friends, Marcus Bolanus. Recognising Dionysius, Bolanus got chatting to him. Dionysius held his nerve with extraordinary presence of mind, convinced Bolanus that Cicero had freed him and onctinued on his way. When Cicero found out from Bolanus about the sighting, he immediately wrote the surviving letter to the governor of the province asking him to send soldiers to search for Dionysius and return him to Rome for punishment. Nine months later Cicero was still writing to everyone he knew in Illyricum demanding that they use imperial and military resources to "sourch by land and sea" through the Balkans for his missing librarian. When Caesar sent an army to the province to crush some locals in 45 CE, Cicero added "the affair of Dionysius" onto their mission, offering to allow the commander to lead the librarian in his Triumph as a prisoner of war.
It seems that Dionysius was smarter than Cicero and had got as far away from Illyricum as he could the seocnd he saw Bolanus because he was never caught. I hope he lived a happy life somewhere beyond the reach of Rome.

There is a source problem if you want to focus on slaves in the ancient world, i.e. 99% of the surviving literary texts hail from the rich senatorial class who usually only bother to mention slaves when they have a complaint, and while many graffiti and also enscriptions on tomb stones by freedmen - and freedwomen ensure we also have direct testimony by the enslaved, it still isn't nearly as much compared to the 1%. So you have to be grateful for mentions in someone else's biography (like, say, Caenis the freedwoman in Vespasian's, or Asiaticus in that of Vtellius), while still aware that mammunited slaves successful enough for Roman historians to complain about their influence are very much not the rule of how the majority of enslaved people ended up. Given my recent reading of The Four Emperors quadrology, i.e. four novels which despite the title do not focus on the Emperors themselves in the Year of the Four Emperors but on the staff on the Palatine who kept the Empire running in the year between Nero's death and Vespasian's final victory, I nodded along to the emphasis about how most of the the work in practically every branch, but especially bureaucratic administration, ended up being done by slaves or freedmen, and flinched whenever the book got to the sexual exploitation of slavery (which started at an incredibly early age). On a lighter note, I was amused but not surprised to discover Emma Southon did like Spartacus: Blood and Sand ("That show contains bizarre, over the top aesthetics, but is one of the few Roman-themed TV shows to take the dynamics of slavery seriously.")

As with "A Fatal Thing happened on the way to the Forum", some of the most touching passages do hail from tombstone enscriptions by grieving parents commemorating their children (and thus illustrating, if it needs to be done, that living in an era of high chlid mortality and in an incredibly brutal system does not stop you from loving your child and wanting people to know about its sweetness or cheerful ways). And the constant snark about every Roman celebrity ever never gets old, either. In conclusion: a very dark book, but worth reading. Dionysius the escaped librarian needs his own novel!