Bread and Chains: Slavery and the Building of Roman Civilization

At the height of the Roman Republic, perhaps one person in five in Italy was a slave. Rome's roads, its grain, its silver, and its law all ran on people it owned — and the civilization we still admire could not have lasted a day without them. Bread and Chains tells Rome's story from the bottom up. It follows the enslaved into the wheat fields and the silver mines, the kitchens and the bedrooms, th...