Bread and Chains: Slavery the Building of Roman Civilization

At the height of the Roman Republic, perhaps one person in five in Italy was a slave. Rome's roads, its grain, its silver, and its law all ran on people it owned - and the civilization we still admire could not have lasted a day without them. Bread and Chains tells Rome's story from the bottom up. It follows the enslaved into the wheat fields and the silver mines, the kitchens and the bedrooms, the gladiator schools and the law courts that defined a living person as property to be sold at a word. Here is the child raised in a household that could discard her, the secretary trusted with a fortune he could never own, and Spartacus - the gladiator whose revolt tore through Italy for two years and ended with six thousand crucifixions along a single road. It also traces the longer shadow: how Roman slave law was rediscovered and carried into the colonies of the Atlantic world, and how it differed, crucially, from the racial slavery that followed. Clear-eyed popular history that never looks away. The sixth book in the Price of Civilization series - and a complete story on its own.