At one point during the short rule of Julius Caesar (49 BCE-44 BCE), he decided that he needed to shore up his support in the Senate by adding a number of new seats. This had been done before, but this time the men coming to Rome were not Roman, they were from Gaul, what is now France, and they had only recently been defeated by Rome. Though we now know that Gaulish society was much more advanced and intricate than was believed for centuries, it was nowhere near advanced as that of the Romans, and the newly appointed senators were, by all accounts, stunned by the city of Rome: the size of it, the buildings of a type that existed nowhere else on the planet, the crowds, the teeming streets, the art and the technology. It was like they were on another planet.
They did recognize one thing right away – Rome was full of slaves. Some of the Gauls captured during Rome's wars with their homeland. Could the Romans have built their great city without slaves? Probably – but that wasn't the way of things in ancient Rome, or most other places in the world at the time. And like most other people that “owned” slaves, the Romans could be brutal. Very, very brutal.
In today's video we look at The Unspeakable Things Masters Did To Slaves in Ancient Rome...Keep watching to see Roman Slaves, Slavery in Rome, Life as a Roman Slave.
