The fragility of family ties is a well-known evil of more recent forms of slavery, but there are also significant differences between the Roman era and later times. The Romans did not justify slavery through a racist ideology, nor did they dehumanize enslaved people on the basis of race, as happened so many hundreds of years later in the transatlantic slave trade, and then in the domestic slave trade in the Americas. In Rome, in was not always possible to tell if a person was enslaved or free on the street, and while a freed person would retain the stigma of past slavery, children born after their parents’ liberation would be counted as freeborn.

Even so, it would be wrong to minimize the difficult experiences of Roman women and enslaved people or to imply they were content with their lot. They did not have access to belief systems—such as feminism or an emancipation movement—that would have allowed them to challenge their treatment in a systematic way. But we do have ample evidence that the Romans fully understood the horror of having your agency denied. Seneca, writing in the decade before Vesuvius erupted, describes the humiliating treatment of enslaved people with some empathy, and enslaved people themselves resisted their oppression in myriad individual ways. The most rebellious (or desperate) might run away, but we can also sense enslaved peoples’ covert resistance through their owners’ complaints about surly servants who disobey orders or shirk tasks. Amara recognizes this subtle form of hostility from Martha, in her maid’s refusal to give anything of herself away.

Most written accounts of Roman enslaved people come from those who owned them, but there are rare occasions when society allowed them to speak for themselves. One of the few places we can hear their voices are in their epitaphs. Even though grave inscriptions are largely formulaic, the memorials of current and former slaves show a focus on family relationships that arguably go beyond that shown on the tombs of freeborn people. Enslaved people also used official terms such as spouse or wife to describe one another, even though these ties were not legally recognized. Instead, all family bonds existed purely at the whim of an owner, including that between parent and child, and the constant threat of separation would have been hugely debilitating. Every slave knew that even if you gained your freedom, you might lose your family if you could not save enough money to buy them.