Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #16

I'm still reading that SPQR book (yes I'm a slow reader, mostly because I only read for a couple hours each week). Chronologically the period I'm reading about now is the beginning of the empire with Augustus.

But the previous chapter about home life in the late Republic was pretty interesting. Apparently slaves made up some estimated ~20% of the population. It also wasn't really a racial thing - unlike slavery in ie the US where it was justified as "those black people are just subhuman anyways", slaves in ancient Rome seem to have mostly been prisoners of war, presumably the option was basically "we're gonna kill every last one of you but might make you a slave instead", so there were slaves of more or less every race. It was also extremely common for slaves to be freed, particularly as they got older, and there was even an expectation that they'd stick around and keep working for their ex master, just as a free person (presumably also therefore responsible for their own food and lodging). Anyways because communication was obviously slow (ancient world) and freeing slaves was common, many ran away and had no trouble fading away into greater society, they would just tell people their master had freed them, and how would some official 200 miles away have any way to verify?

But more interesting is that there was apparently some proposal in the Senate to do something about this by mandating that slaves wear some kind of uniform to make runaways easier to find. Kinda like prisoner uniforms. But the Senate quickly realized if they did this then it would be readily apparent just how many slaves there were which would only lead to a slave revolt, so they quickly shelved the idea.