Moses Finley called Roman Italy a ‘slave society’, a society that is pervaded by slavery. Scholars have however debated the size of the enslaved population in Roman Italy for over a century. Estimates vary widely, from 40% to 20% of the total population. The currently most influential estimate is that of Scheidel 2005 at 20%. My research challenges this minimalist view.
In Scheidel’s model, domestic slaves are assigned predominantly to the members of the three socio-political orders. There is however plenty of evidence that slaveholding extended beyond the socio-political elite– the attestations of large slaveholdings of freedmen are a case in point. Considerable domestic slaveholding is to be assigned to the entire top of the wealth distribution (including wealthy freedmen, women, etc.) instead of only to the top of the socio-political ladder. This means the enslaved population in Roman Italy was also much larger.