Roman Slavery
...fountains, clean bathhouses, give massages, etc. Countries need workers to run their land and do other work that is meaningless. This is either done by paid city workers or slaves. If you were going to use slaves, there had to be a source in which you would get them from. For the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians, war captives were the majority source (Dembar 26). There were also other sources in which small amounts of slaves would be acquired such as people in credit debt and pirates (Simpson 151). Hundreds of thousands of captives from Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, and other parts of the Near East flowed back toward Italy after various wars (Dembar 14). When the Romans conquered the Mediterranean, they took millions of slaves to Italy, where they toiled on the large plantations or in the houses and workplaces of wealthy citizens (Pomery 96). The Italian economy depended on abundant slave labor, with slaves constituting 40 percent of the population (Zvi 55). Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors (Zvi 41). Before this style of capturing slaves, there were other means of doing the job. Credit debt was a way to gain slaves. If a person couldn’t pay you back the amount you loaned them plus interest, then they were your slaves until the debt was worn off (Dembar 39). However, this wouldn’t gain long-term slaves that have families. Thus, there was a new way. Pirates would capture ships that were on their way to a port somewhere. Sometimes they were filled with goods. Sometimes they were filled with people. Pirates would board these boats and claim them as their own (...