The brutality between Romans witnessed in the Sullan civil wars and proscriptions was matched by the daily violence visited upon the enslaved. From time to time, the Roman Republic experienced uprisings by those seeking liberation from the system that kept them in bondage. The enslaved conducted several significant revolts in Sicily, a hotbed of resistance. In 135 BCE, led by Eunus and Cleon, over 70,000 enslaved people revolted and trained themselves into a formidable fighting force; it took several years and several consular armies to subdue them. In 104 BCE, uprisings occurred at Capua in Italy and again in Sicily led by Salvius and Athenion, who successfully held off Roman armies until 101 BCE. As serious as these earlier uprisings were, the most significant revolt of the Late Republic happened in 73–71 BCE under the leadership of Spartacus.

A few brief words are needed regarding Roman slavery. First and foremost, Americans need to know that Roman slavery was not based on race or skin color as is commonly assumed. Roman slavery was an economic system that did not rely on an ideology such as race to sustain it. Indeed, Romans were not enslaved by other Romans, and the Romans did think they were superior to the enslaved, but skin color had nothing to do with who ended up enslaved in ancient Rome, and it should be pointed out that many White Northern Europeans would have been found among the enslaved in Rome. The most common ways to become enslaved in Roman society were either to be born to a parent who was enslaved or to be captured in war or piracy, which suggests there was an element of fortune, not simply nature, bound up in it. Servus, the most common Latin word for an enslaved person, is thought to refer to those preserved from war, that is, those left alive after the battle. Thus, the enslaved could be from Greece, Spain, Northern and Central Europe, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, if not even further afield.

The enslaved in Roman society worked a whole range of activities from being language tutors to digging in the mines. Nearly any work that could be done the enslaved did.