Even Poor Romans Owned Slaves #shorts

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]But it is incredibly common to see even people who seem to be in like subsistence situations have one enslaved person who is in the household. Or cuz what we have is lots of records from Roman Egypt.

[00:00:17]Lots of like census records and household archives basically that have survived in the sand which are amazing.

[00:00:27]And so you can see families who are certainly not rich or even like middle class but who will have one woman who is an enslaved maid basically.

[00:00:39]And it seems to be expected that everyone will have a lot of people have at least one in urban environments and in rural environments.

[00:00:51]But it seems that it was expected that most people would own at least one person.

[00:01:02]Or that it was common enough for someone to just own one single person who is their like domestic and kind of servant effectively is their dogsbody for everything.