For the citizens of ancient Athens and Rome, a life without slaves would have been unthinkable, literally so. Not only did slaves perform a vast range of work for the majority of the population, but classical thought was permeated by the category of the slave. Ancient Greek and Roman writers made a stark opposition between free and slave, without nuances; when looking at other cultures, they could see only slaves and free – other statuses they ignored or assimilated to slavery. Freedom was a crucial political slogan of both societies, and the freedom of the citizen was sharpened by and contrasted with the servility of the slave, an outsider: in the Twelve Tables it was stipulated that Romans who had been enslaved had to be sold “across the Tiber,” and after Solon's abolition of debt-bondage no Athenian citizen could be enslaved within the community. Within the community of the free, distinctions were made between “liberal”and “illiberal” behavior, demeanor and, most notoriously, means of earning a living, so that physical work performed for others was stigmatized by its association with slaves. The influence of slavery on ancient culture can be traced in everything from Plato's cosmology and the Roman concept of legal ownership (dominium) to the Cupids of Campanian painting.

This book is about the presence of slavery in Roman literature and the title of this introduction, “Living with Slaves,” indicates two things about the scope of the subject: first of all, it is restricted to the perspective of the slave-owners and, secondly, it focuses on the domestic sphere. These are the main biases of the surviving material, worth dwelling on for a moment.