Slaves to Rome

This book examines how the experience of living with slavery shaped the way that the Roman elite thought about empire.

This book provides a provocative new perspective on the ideology of Roman imperialism. The analysis of metaphors drawn from the domains of slavery and patronage makes this an important work of reference for researchers and students working on both the history of Roman imperialism and the politics of Latin literature.This study in the language of Roman imperialism provides a provocative new perspective on the Roman imperial project. It highlights the prominence of the language of mastery and slavery in Roman descriptions of the conquest and subjection of the provinces. More broadly, it explores how Roman writers turn to paradigmatic modes of dependency familiar from everyday life - not just slavery but also clientage and childhood - in order to describe their authority over, and responsibilities to, the subject population of the provinces. It traces the relative importance of these different models for the imperial project across almost three centuries of Latin literature, from the middle of the first century BCE to the beginning of the third century CE.