The Empire's Hidden Hands

„Not Built in a Day

 

By Emma Southon

 

Simon & Schuster, 448 pages, $31

 

In 1779 Edward Gibbon was compelled to respond to critics who alleged that his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was unduly irreverent. Self-defense, the historian wrote, naturally required "the perpetual repetition" of what he called "the vainest and most disgusting of the pronouns": the first-person singular. In the 20th century, the Oxford classicist Ronald Syme referred to this as "the odious pronoun." Not too many years ago, a doctoral student in history gave a lecture. His thesis adviser delicately observed that the student had used the odious pronoun. Reader, the subject of the lecture is long forgotten, but the observation stung.

 

Academic mores have changed in the meantime. Emma Southon's "Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire" is part exploration of what slavery in the Roman world was really like, part running commentary on the author's own feelings about what slavery was like. The former is erudite, thorough and insightful; the latter snarky, unfiltered and frequently vulgar. To be precise, versions of a one-syllable English word for copulation appear more than 50 times.

 

Ms. Southon, a historian of Rome educated at the University of Birmingham, would justify this decision as a substantive strategy and not merely stylistic flair. It is meant as an antidote to what she calls the "irritatingly persistent myth" that Roman slavery was not really so awful after all. She cites Jerome Carcopino's "Daily Life in Ancient Rome" (1941) as representative: "The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive to their peasant hearts, always kept them from showing cruelty toward the servi. . . . Slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable." Carcopino's text was indeed a popular standard, and even if scholars of ancient slavery have long since abandoned this exculpatory view, any living historian of ancient Rome can confirm that the misjudgment lingers.

 

The Romans who wrote the Latin classics worked hard to obscure the humanity of their slaves. Ms. Southon has worked equally hard to find surviving traces that offer us glimpses into what it was like to be living chattel under Roman rule. She shows the reader a "single tibia" found in a Spanish mineshaft, the fetters still clasped around it, and she quotes a chance remark in Ovid -- he praises a girlfriend for not stabbing her stylist with hairpins when displeased -- that betrays how utterly commonplace casual physical abuse was. Ms. Southon explores the essential violence of the master's power, the sheer variety of ways in which enslaved people were used and the efforts at resistance both great (the "servile wars" of the last two centuries B.C.) and small.

 

As an example of small resistance, Ms. Southon describes a single roof tile found at a religious sanctuary in Molise, Italy. Two enslaved women, Amica and Detfri, pressed their feet into the pliant clay and wrote their names. "What we have is two enslaved women somewhere in southern Italy doing the tedious task of making identical tiles over and over," she writes. "They're educated enough to be able to read and write, which means that making tiles was not their destiny at birth . . . So one day, two friends signed their work. They stopped being well behaved for a second and held hands and giggled and pressed their tiny toes into the wet clay. . . . These two educated women would know that they had left a bit of themselves in the world." It was a tiny but poignant act of defiance.

 

Ms. Southon is gifted at extracting maximum value from minimal evidence. An inscription from Rome records the death of a girl named Antestia Glyceria at the age of 3. The text is fewer than 20 words long, but we can tell from the names of the mother and father that the entire family was enslaved and that the deceased girl was separated from her parents in her short life, presumably by sale.

 

"Not Built in a Day" is frank about the limits of our ability to know what life was like for the enslaved. We are presented, for instance, with some of the many graffiti that were etched into the walls of backrooms and stairwells where enslaved people made their lives. "Epaphroditus was here with Thalia," we read. Ms. Southon admits we cannot say what it means. "Maybe they kissed. Maybe they married. Maybe Thalia was like, ew can you not write my name on the wall you creep." Whatever the intent, the scratched words are a hint of a lively world mostly hidden from our view.

 

Nowhere, perhaps, was the pure violence of Roman slavery more systemic than in the realm of sex and marriage. Enslaved people generally had families, but these were not recognized in law. Rather, family relationships were respected so long as it was in the master's interest to do so. Ms. Southon unsparingly confronts us with the reality of sexual abuse. Neither women (often girls) nor men (usually boys) were afforded the least protection. The busy prostitution industry rested on a foundation of slave labor. Ms. Southon captures the banality of systemic exploitation in the Roman world: "Purchasing sex from an enslaved girl," she writes, "felt as normal as buying bread."

 

On this front, too, Ms. Southon's sardonic commentary is deployed against the willful blindness of previous generations. She describes a gold bracelet found on a woman's arm in Pompeii, inscribed with the words: "The master to his very own slave girl." One earlier scholar described this as a "touching" gift. Ms. Southon will have none of it, finding the object "neither loving nor sweet. It's just a statement of ownership! What are these people saying to their spouses? Are they OK?? Blink twice if you need help!"

 

"Not Built in a Day" will not be to everyone's taste, but it is meant to reach an audience that might decline to read a more buttoned-up account. The book is full of observant judgments: on the aggressive response of the legal system to fugitive slaves, for instance, or on the importance of slavery in Rome's extensive mining industry. The author's guided tour of the streets of Rome, which helps us see how ubiquitous and visible slavery must have been, is a marvelous exercise in informed imagination. Other judgments might be questioned. Ms. Southon rightly appreciates that manumission was a tool of slave-owners' power, but she excessively minimizes how common it was. There is little space for how early Christian ideas were variously used both to reinforce and to challenge aspects of the slave system.

 

Most notably, "Not Built in a Day" lacks any deep reckoning with the question of why the Romans built such an exceptionally vast and enduring slave system. It is a question that occupied Karl Marx and Max Weber and many others. In the closest thing to an actual hypothesis, Ms. Southon tells us that "it took the Romans a long time to f -- this situation up into something truly appalling, but if they had a talent it was making things appalling and so they succeeded eventually." The naughty language can't cover up the lack of a more profound explanation.

 

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Mr. Harper is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and the author of "The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction."“ [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Empire's Hidden Hands. Harper, Kyle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 22 Aug 2026: C7.