Pompeii offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate not only the lives of wealthy householders and public figures, but also those of people whose experiences are much less visible in ancient written sources: enslaved people, freedmen, workers and other dependants. Recent excavations have greatly expanded this picture by focusing on service quarters, workshops and modest living spaces that earlier archaeology often overlooked.
It is impossible to establish with precision what proportion of Pompeii's population was enslaved. Ancient census data for the city do not survive, and archaeological remains rarely reveal an individual's legal status with certainty. Slavery was nevertheless deeply embedded in Roman society and labour, and enslaved people were present in households, agriculture, workshops, commerce, transport and public service.
Their origins were equally varied. Roman slavery drew people from warfare, trade, birth into slavery and other forms of dependency across the Mediterranean world. It would therefore be misleading to describe Pompeii's enslaved population simply as a homogeneous group of foreigners. Individual lives, origins and circumstances could differ enormously.
One of the greatest difficulties in studying slavery is that ancient texts were generally written by members of the free and educated classes. Enslaved people rarely speak to us directly. At Pompeii, however, archaeology can partially compensate for this silence. The arrangement of rooms, simple beds, containers, tools, graffiti and traces of work allow researchers to reconstruct aspects of everyday existence that literary sources often ignore.
The most important recent evidence comes from the suburban villa at Civita Giuliana, around 700 metres north-west of the ancient city. Excavations conducted by the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in collaboration with the Public Prosecutor's Office of Torre Annunziata have uncovered a large villa with both luxurious residential spaces and an extensive service and productive sector.
In 2021, archaeologists excavated a room of approximately sixteen square metres that became known as the “slave room”. The exceptional preservation of cavities left by decomposed organic materials made it possible to reconstruct much of its furniture through plaster casting.
The room contained three simple beds, amphorae and a limited number of personal belongings. The evidence suggests that three individuals shared this confined space, perhaps forming a small family group. Their activities may have been connected with the nearby stable and the maintenance of vehicles used by the villa.
The beds themselves provide particularly direct evidence of living conditions. They were extremely simple wooden structures with corded sleeping surfaces rather than elaborate furniture. Their construction shows how inexpensive materials could be adapted according to the age or size of the person using them.
A second servile room excavated in 2023 offered a different arrangement. Archaeological evidence suggests that it was shared by two individuals involved in agricultural work. Even small details, such as containers stored beneath beds and the remains of rodents discovered inside an amphora, contribute to an unusually intimate reconstruction of life in spaces normally absent from elite literary accounts.
The importance of Civita Giuliana goes beyond poverty alone. The service quarters demonstrate how the organisation of a large Roman estate linked living space directly to labour. The people occupying these rooms lived beside the places where they worked, cared for animals, maintained equipment and supported the functioning of the villa.
Further excavation has revealed what has been called the Carpenter's Room. Casts preserved the impressions of beds, a basket, ropes, a frame saw and wooden supports or work equipment. The room combined sleeping accommodation with craft activity, showing once again how domestic and productive functions could occupy the same restricted space.
These discoveries are especially important because the objects involved were largely made from perishable materials. Without the volcanic burial of AD 79 and the casting technique used during excavation, much of this material evidence for ordinary and enslaved lives would have disappeared entirely.
A different form of evidence comes from the House of the Vettii, one of Pompeii's richest residences. Its owners, Aulus Vettius Conviva and Aulus Vettius Restitutus, were themselves freedmen who had achieved considerable wealth and social prominence.
A graffito at the entrance records the name Eutychis, an enslaved woman whose sexual services were advertised for two asses. The Archaeological Park interprets her as probably involved both in domestic work and in sexual exploitation within the household. A small room accessible from the kitchen and decorated with erotic paintings has been associated with her activity, although such reconstructions must necessarily remain cautious.
Eutychis represents an aspect of slavery that archaeological discussions can easily obscure. Enslaved women could be vulnerable not only to compulsory labour but also to sexual exploitation, because Roman law gave slave owners extensive control over enslaved bodies.
Her case also creates a striking contrast with the owners of the house. The Vettii had themselves moved from slavery to freedom and prosperity, yet their household continued to depend on enslaved labour. Roman manumission could transform the legal and economic position of an individual without challenging slavery as an institution.
This possibility of social advancement is one of the distinctive features of Roman slavery. Enslavement was not necessarily permanent: owners could free enslaved people through manumission, creating the legal status of freedman or freedwoman. Former slaves nevertheless maintained obligations and social ties to their former owners, now their patrons.
Pompeii preserves several remarkable examples of freedmen who achieved considerable status. One of the clearest is Marcus Venerius Secundio, whose tomb was discovered in the necropolis of Porta Sarno.
His funerary inscription records an extraordinary social trajectory. He had originally been a public slave of the colony. Before his manumission he served as a minister connected with the Augustales and was associated with the Temple of Venus. After becoming free, he himself became an Augustalis, a position of significant prestige for a freedman.
The inscription also states that Marcus Venerius Secundio personally financed Greek and Latin performances lasting four days. His life illustrates how manumission could allow some former slaves to accumulate wealth, participate in public religious institutions and construct a highly visible identity within Pompeian society.
Such success should not, however, be taken as representative of every freedperson. The archaeological and epigraphic record naturally makes wealthy and successful freedmen easier to identify than the many individuals who remained economically vulnerable after manumission.
Another important context for understanding labour is Regio IX, Insula 10, where recent excavations have revealed a house with a bakery associated with Aulus Rustius Verus. It should not simply be called the “House of the Lararium”: the E-Journal identifies it more precisely as a residence containing both a richly decorated domestic sector and a productive area devoted to bread-making.
The contrast is striking. Rooms decorated with high-quality Fourth Style paintings existed alongside an intensive productive installation. The architecture of the bakery restricted circulation between different parts of the property: the productive sector had limited connections with the outside and movement was channelled through the residential area.
The stone mills preserve physical traces of repetitive labour. Circular wear around the milling installations records the repeated movement of animals and people who powered the machinery. Ancient authors describe milling as exceptionally exhausting work, but archaeology allows us to see the actual spaces in which such labour took place.
It is tempting to identify every worker in a Pompeian bakery as enslaved, but the evidence does not permit this. Roman productive establishments could involve enslaved workers, freedmen and free labourers, sometimes working side by side. Archaeology often allows us to reconstruct working conditions more securely than the legal status of individual workers.
The same caution applies to victims found inside productive spaces. Three people died in one room of the house at IX 10,1, demonstrating that the building remained inhabited during renovation works shortly before the eruption. Their legal status, however, cannot simply be inferred from the fact that they were found near the bakery.
This distinction is important because modern reconstructions can too easily convert poor living conditions into automatic proof of slavery. Poverty, servitude and enslavement overlapped in the Roman world, but they were not identical categories.
Graffiti and informal inscriptions provide another route into the lives of people outside the elite. Pompeii preserves thousands of scratched and painted texts containing names, greetings, jokes, insults, declarations of affection and traces of economic and political activity. Some may have been written by slaves or freedmen, although determining the status of an individual writer is often impossible.
This is why recent archaeological research increasingly studies inscriptions together with the rooms and objects surrounding them. A name scratched on a wall becomes more informative when examined within the workshop, service area or domestic environment in which it was written.
The latest excavations also challenge the traditional image of every Pompeian house as a grand atrium residence. Research in the Insula of the Chaste Lovers has documented smaller residential arrangements without the monumental atrium normally associated with elite Roman domestic architecture. These discoveries broaden our understanding of the social and economic diversity of the city.
Such houses should not automatically be labelled “freedmen's houses”, however. Architectural form alone cannot establish the legal status of their occupants. What they demonstrate is that Pompeian domestic life included a far wider range of residences than the famous houses traditionally presented to visitors.
Slavery also intersected with childhood. Children could be born enslaved and grow up within households, workshops or agricultural estates. Yet childhood status is especially difficult to identify archaeologically unless inscriptions or exceptional contextual evidence survive.
The charcoal drawings made by young children in the House of the Second Colonnaded Cenaculum offer another perspective on non-elite life. The context appears materially modest despite the impressive façade of the building. Researchers have suggested that the children responsible for the drawings may have spent considerable time in a working environment while adults carried out their activities nearby.
These drawings do not prove that the children themselves were enslaved. Their importance lies instead in revealing a childhood very different from that of elite children attended by nurses, tutors and pedagogues.
Religion also provided opportunities for social participation, but the relationship between slavery and individual cults needs to be described carefully. Older scholarship sometimes characterised cults such as that of Isis primarily as religions of slaves and freedmen. Pompeian evidence shows participation by people of different social backgrounds, so the cult should not be reduced to a single social class.
Freedmen nevertheless played prominent roles in several religious institutions. The rebuilding of the Temple of Isis after the earthquake of AD 62, for example, was formally credited to the young Numerius Popidius Celsinus and was closely connected with the ambitions of his family, traditionally associated with freedman status. Religious patronage could therefore become one route through which prosperous families negotiated social advancement.
The Augustales were particularly significant in this respect. Membership could offer wealthy freedmen public visibility and prestige even though former slaves were excluded from the highest municipal magistracies. The career of Marcus Venerius Secundio provides a direct Pompeian example.
For much of the history of Pompeian archaeology, attention concentrated on monumental architecture, paintings, mosaics and luxurious houses. The lives of workers and enslaved people remained much more difficult to reconstruct because their possessions were less valuable, their living spaces less monumental and their voices less frequently recorded in formal inscriptions.
Recent excavations have begun to change this imbalance. Civita Giuliana is particularly significant because complete assemblages of inexpensive furniture, containers and work equipment survive in their original contexts. Such discoveries allow archaeology to investigate social groups that ancient elite authors generally described only from the outside.
The evidence also demonstrates why simple oppositions between “master” and “slave” are sometimes inadequate for reconstructing Roman society. A household might include owners, enslaved workers, freedmen, wage labourers, dependants and relatives whose legal and economic positions differed considerably.
Manumission further complicated these relationships. A person could move from slavery to freedom while remaining economically and socially connected to the former master's household. The children of freedmen could enter Roman society with opportunities unavailable to their parents.
At Pompeii, slavery therefore needs to be understood both as a legal institution and as an everyday system of labour, control and dependency. It shaped productive spaces, household organisation and individual lives, yet the surviving evidence also records pathways from servitude to freedom and, in exceptional cases, considerable wealth.
What archaeology cannot provide is a complete census of the enslaved population or a biography for every person who lived in these rooms. We should therefore avoid describing slaves as a precisely measurable “silent majority” or assuming legal status solely from poverty, occupation or architecture.
Instead, the strongest evidence comes from specific contexts: the austere rooms of Civita Giuliana, the sexually exploited Eutychis in the House of the Vettii, the productive spaces of IX 10,1, and the extraordinary career of the former public slave Marcus Venerius Secundio.
Taken together, these discoveries reveal a Pompeii sustained by forms of labour that are far less visible than its frescoes and temples. They also remind us that behind the prosperity of the city were individuals whose freedom of movement, work and even control over their own bodies could be severely restricted.
The study of slavery in Pompeii is still evolving. Each new excavation of a service room, workshop or modest dwelling can alter our understanding precisely because these environments preserve aspects of ancient society that monumental archaeology often missed.
For this reason, the most important recent contribution of Pompeii may be not simply the discovery of another luxurious house, but the recovery of the beds, tools, containers, inscriptions and working spaces of people whose lives rarely entered the historical record.
Sources and Essential Bibliography
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