Millions of tourists visit the old site of Pompeii every year to explore enchanting frescoes, lush villas and a seemingly frozen snapshot of a prosperous Roman city. But how did Pompeii come to achieve such levels of success and wealth? A new study argues that this was largely due to the work of people made to slave, who were indispensable for the growth of the city until the fall in 79 CE. The study also provides further evidence that the widespread economic abundance of the early Roman Empire as a whole was predicted less on the single genius of emperors, generals of aristocrats, and instead heavier dependent on the collective contributions of the millions of slaves who work on the Mediterranean.
Economic prosperity is nowadays often measured in terms of statistics such as the gross domestic product (GDP), family income and income inequality within a certain population. And yet it is only recently that scholars of the old economic history, such as Walter Scheidelhave started using more modern economic tools to model the Roman economy and to speak in conversation with researchers.
The new article in the magazine Past and present By old historian Seth Bernard At the University of Toronto, many of these modern economic statistics and tools apply to the old world to model and then calculate the impact of slavery on the local economy of Roman Pompeii. In the study, Bernard uses statistical and quantitative analyzes to statistically claim that a slave was not only part of the economy of Pompeii, but also the primary source of prosperity.
By economists Unpleasant Popular mediaThe prosperity of the Roman Empire during the early imperial period (31 BC Pax Romana. And yet, as Bernard indicates, a focus on market expansion and models of long -distance trade or surplus does not take into account the immense amount of work that persons made by slaves in this period, which in turn allocated such extensions and surpluses. About 20% of the population of areas such as the Italian peninsula were made a slave and reached up to 30% in cities such as Pompeii. In Pompeii and other urban areas, Romans made slaved, from turning earthenware and money laundering to working in the many brothels of the city.
A conservative estimate for the urban population of Pompeii is 15,000 people, although it has been perhaps 30,000 people, including nearby rural areas. Low estimates would then place the number of people made to slave at around 3,000 to 4,500 within the city walls. As Bernard indicates in his economic modeling, there was extreme economic inequality within the city that greatly benefited to Slavelweg. In the end, this population made a slave was “responsible for half or even more than half of Pompeii’s economy.” Quantifying the specific monetary contributions of people made as a whole then offers a numerical means to indicate how they have increased the Roman economy. It also underlines that, as Bernard states, “slave ownership has probably formed the largest source of income for the urban economy [within Pompeii]. “With the help of economic modeling, Bernard provides solid evidence that the income that flowed to Slavelweg was through the exploitation of people made to slave what Pompeii made, and a large part of the Roman Empire, so economically powerful.
Bernard’s study has been working with various other findings in recent years, which have renewed scientific focus on not only the lives, but also the contributions of people made in Pompeii. Excavations have discovered since 2020 what the Sleeping and bed from a slave and a slave and a bakery Where employees and donkeys were probably limited. Recent museum exhibitions have focused on non-elites within Pompeii, in particular craftsmen, slaved persons and previously slaved persons who are known as ‘Freedpersons’. In 2024, archaeologist Silvia Martina Bertenago and Archaeological Park or Pompeii Director -General Gabriel Sighriegel a catalog published At the exhibition L’Altra Pompei – Vite Comuni All’ombra del Vesuvio ((The other Pompeii: ordinary lives in the shadow of Vesuvius), that ran on Pompeii from December 2023 to January 2025. This show acts in particular as a reminder that changing public dialogue around slavery both accessible academic research and public outreach required by spaces such as museums and archaeological sites.
The pressure to include slaved persons in the larger historical story of the Roman Empire is underway. In his article, Bernard notes the importance of understanding the contributions of work made to slave to shifting this worn story of Roman history in general and changing more recent movements to write the macro-economic history of the Mediterranean rich. “Recent slave labor in the economic history of a paradigmatic Roman city such as Pompeii offers potential to tackle recent criticism that Roman historians do not” absorb lives of working people as an important part of economic history, “he writes.
The names of the millions of invisible employees in Pompeii and elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea have largely been lost due to history. Old economic and labor historians such as Bernard, however, Dan-El Padilla Peralta” Sarah Levin-Richardson” Miko Flohrand many others work on demonstrating that both individual life and economic contributions of people made to slave are essential to rewrite the story of the Roman Empire for the public. Accounts all over the world are populated by parts that only focus on one percent of Roman men who ruled the empire as Caesars and emperors during the alleged tranquility of the Pax Romana. But it was the violent profitability of slavery as an exploiting work system that Rome allowed to flourish in terms of the way most rich Americans still measure “success”: money.
