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Level one. The slave. You wake before dawn in a windowless room beneath the kitchen.
Explore life in the Roman Empire through the eyes of slaves, freedmen, soldiers, and merchants, revealing social roles and struggles.
Key Takeaways
- Slavery in Rome was harsh and dehumanizing, but manumission offered a slim hope for freedom.
- Freedmen gained legal rights but remained socially stigmatized and dependent on patrons.
- Roman soldiers endured brutal training and long service, forming close bonds and facing personal sacrifices.
- Merchants could achieve wealth and social mobility through trade, contrasting with lower social ranks.
- Roman society was highly stratified, with complex social roles and limited upward mobility.
Summary
- Level one depicts the harsh, brutal life of a slave in Rome, including daily chores, lack of rights, and the hope for manumission.
- Level two covers the freedman’s new legal status, social limitations, patron-client relationships, and aspirations for future generations.
- Level three follows a soldier’s experience, from recruitment and training to combat and personal sacrifices, highlighting military discipline and camaraderie.
- Level four describes the merchant’s rise from humble origins to wealth through trade, emphasizing economic opportunities and social mobility.
- The video illustrates the rigid social hierarchy and the limited but significant changes in status across different ranks.
- It highlights the personal and emotional struggles behind each role, such as loss of identity, social stigma, and uncertain futures.
- The narrative includes vivid details about daily life, work conditions, family, and social customs in the Roman Empire.
- It shows the interconnectedness of social roles, such as the freedman’s continued ties to former masters and the soldier’s unofficial family life.
- The video uses first-person perspective to immerse viewers in the historical context and humanize ancient Roman society.
- It touches on legal, economic, and cultural aspects shaping the lives of people in different social strata.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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The floor is stone. The walls sweat in summer and freeze in winter. You share this space with four other slaves.
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None of you chose to be here. You were born into it because your mother was a slave.
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Your father was either a slave or a master who never acknowledged you. Your name is not your name.
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Your master gave you a Greek name because Greek slaves are fashionable in Rome right now.
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The name you were born with has been forgotten by everyone, including you. You start fires in the kitchen hearth before anyone else is awake. You haul water from the public fountain six blocks away.
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You carry it back in heavy clay jars that bruise your shoulders. You empty chamber pots into the Cloaca, the great sewer that runs beneath the city.
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You scrub floors. You wash linens. You work until your hands crack and bleed. You eat what the family doesn't finish.
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Bread crusts, cold porridge, the bones of fish with bits of flesh still clinging to them.
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You sleep 4 hours if you are lucky. You have no money. You have no possessions. The clothes on your back belong to your master. Your body belongs to your master.
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If he wants to beat you, he beats you. If he wants to sell you, he sells you.
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If he wants to kill you, he can do that, too. Though killing slaves became technically illegal under Hadrian, the law is rarely enforced. A dead slave is just lost property.
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There are no investigators. There is no justice. You watched a fellow slave die last year. He stole a loaf of bread. The master had him crucified in the back garden as a warning to the rest of us.
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He took 3 days to die. We were forced to watch. You have a small hope buried deep inside your chest. Manumission.
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If you serve faithfully for many years, your master might free you in his will.
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Some masters do this. Most do not. You work. You wait. You try not to be noticed.
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Being noticed by a powerful man is rarely a good thing for someone like you.
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You have a fellow slave who became your friend. Her name is Kasia. She works in the kitchen with you.
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You whisper to her at night sometimes. You do not whisper anything dangerous. You whisper about small things.
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The shape of clouds. The taste of an apple stolen from the master's pantry. These small whispers are the only thing in your life that belongs to you.
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Level two. The freedman. Your master died last spring. His will included a clause that surprised everyone, including you.
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You were granted your freedom. You are now a libertus. A freedman. And the legal world treats you differently overnight.
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You can own property. You can earn wages. You can marry a woman who is not a slave.
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You can wear the cap of liberty during religious festivals. Your sons, if you have any, will be born as full Roman citizens.
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The transformation is profound and incomplete at the same time. You are still bound to your former master's family.
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They are now your patrons. And the bond between patron and client is one of the deepest social structures in Rome.
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Every morning before dawn, you walk to the family's home and stand in the atrium with other clients waiting to pay respects.
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You bow when the patron emerges. You greet him formally. He gives you a small basket of food or a few coins. The sportula.
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You take it gratefully. You return at evening if he is hosting a dinner and needs his clients to fill the table.
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You vote the way he tells you to vote. You attend his funeral when the time comes and weep loudly enough for the neighbors to hear.
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You opened a small shop near the Forum Boarium selling lamps and oil. You learned the trade as a slave running errands for your master's business interests.
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You work 14 hours a day. You sleep above the shop on a thin mattress.
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Your wife is a freedwoman from another household. You met her at a religious festival for the goddess Bona Dea.
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She is younger than you. She works alongside you in the shop. Together you save every coin you can.
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You will never be considered the social equal of someone born free. The stain of slavery follows you forever.
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Free Romans use a particular tone when they speak to you. Not cruel exactly, just measured.
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You hear it. You pretend not to hear it. You focus on your sons. They will be different. They will sit at the same tables as senators' children.
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They will not flinch when someone asks where their father came from. Level three, the soldier.
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You enlisted at 17 because the alternative was starvation. Your family farms a tiny plot in the hills of Samnium.
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The land barely produces enough to feed your parents and your six siblings. The recruiter came through your village offering 25 years of service in exchange for citizenship, regular pay, and three meals a day.
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You signed without hesitation. The legion is now your family. You serve in the Legio VI Ferrata stationed in Judaea.
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The journey from Italy took 4 months. You walked most of it. You crossed the Adriatic in a transport ship that nearly capsized in a storm.
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You arrived at the fortress at Capernaum sunburned, blistered, and skinnier than when you started.
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Your training was brutal. You drilled with weighted wooden swords until your arms shook. You marched 20 miles with full kit, 60 lb of equipment strapped to your body.
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You learn to build a fortified camp in 3 hours, dig latrines, lay roads. The Roman legion is not just a fighting force. It is a mobile city of engineers who happen to also kill people exceptionally well.
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Your daily life is structured down to the minute. Reveille at first light, inspection, drill, construction work on the new aqueduct the legate has commissioned, midday meal of bread, olives, and sour wine, more drill, weapons maintenance, evening meal, guard duty rotation.
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Sleep on a wooden bunk in a barracks shared with seven other men. You are part of a contubernium, a tent group of eight men who eat together, fight together, and die together.
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You have killed three men. The first one was a Parthian raider during a skirmish near the eastern frontier.
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He was younger than you. He had a beard that hadn't quite filled in yet.
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You thrust your gladius into his chest and watched his face change. You think about him sometimes. He visits your dreams. He never speaks. He just stands there.
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The other two were quicker. You don't remember their faces as clearly. You have 18 years left on your contract.
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You count the days some nights. Other nights you don't because the counting makes time move slower.
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You have a woman in the village outside the fort. The army officially forbids marriage for active soldiers.
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The army unofficially looks the other way. Her name is Miriam. She is local. She does not speak much Latin. You speak no Aramaic.
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Somehow you understand each other anyway. She has a son. The boy might be yours. You are not sure.
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You give her money when you can. You bring her bread and oil from your rations.
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You don't know what will happen when the legion is reassigned. You don't think about it most days.
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The thought hurts in a way you cannot afford while you still have 18 years to serve.
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Level four, the merchant. You came to Rome from Gaul 15 years ago with nothing but a wagon and a small bag of silver.
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You started by selling Gallic wool in the markets near the Tiber. You learned which merchants could be trusted and which ones would cheat you.
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You learned which dockworkers would unload your goods quickly for a small bribe. You learned which port officials would inspect your cargo and which would wave you through if you knew the right phrase.
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You now own three warehouses in Ostia, Rome's port city, 16 miles down the Tiber.
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Your ships, four of them, sail to Alexandria, Carthage, and Massalia. They return loaded with grain, papyrus, glass, garum, the fermented fish sauce that wealthy Romans cannot live without.
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You make more money in a single shipment of Egyptian grain than your father made his entire life raising sheep.
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You wear a tunic of fine wool. Your sandals are made by a craftsman in the Suburra who...
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You have rings on three fingers. You eat dormice stuffed with honey and pine nuts at dinner parties hosted by men who would not have spoken to you 10 years ago.
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Money opens doors that birth keeps closed sometimes. You are not a citizen, technically. You are a peregrinus, a foreigner with limited legal rights.
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You have applied for citizenship through a patron who promised to push your case in exchange for financial considerations.
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The considerations were substantial. The promise has not yet been fulfilled. You suspect it never will be.
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You keep paying anyway, because is alternative is to admit you have been swindled. Admitting weakness in your business is the fastest way to lose everything you have built.
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You have a wife and two children. Your wife was born into a respectable but impoverished Roman family.
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Her father needed money. You needed legitimacy. The marriage was a transaction that has slowly become something resembling affection.
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Your son will be a citizen because his mother is. He will go to school. He will study rhetoric. He will not have to hide his accent.
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You watch him sometimes when he doesn't know and you feel something so large you have no word for it.
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You came across the Alps with nothing. He will inherit warehouses. The arc of one life containing both is something you cannot fully believe.
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Level five, the equestrian. Your family has been in the equestrian order for four generations. Your great-grandfather was awarded the rank by Augustus for service during the civil wars.
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The equestrians, the equities, are the second highest social class in Rome. Beneath the senators, above everyone else.
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You wear a tunic with narrow purple stripes called the angusticlavia. You have a gold ring on your finger that marks your status to anyone who knows what to look for. Everyone in Rome knows what to look for. Your wealth is
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substantial but not vulgar. You own a townhouse on the Caelian Hill. You own a country estate in Tusculum, 20 miles from the city.
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You own a vineyard in Campania that produces a wine your friends compliment and you suspect is mediocre. You own slaves. You don't think about them much.
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They are part of the household the way the furniture is part of the household.
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They serve, you eat. The relationship works as long as nobody examines it too closely. Your career is in the imperial administration. You serve as a procurator, a financial officer managing tax collection in a frontier province.
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You spent three years in Mauretania overseeing the collection of grain tribute. You spent four years in Pannonia auditing the accounts of the legions along the Danube. You are competent, careful, and quietly ambitious. You take a percentage of what
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you collect. This is legal. This is expected. The line between legal compensation and outright corruption is one everyone in your position learns to walk. You have walked it carefully. You have not been investigated. Your patron is a former consul who has taken
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interest in your career. He invites you to dinners at his estate. You discuss politics carefully. You never criticize the emperor. You never praise him too enthusiastically, either. Both extremes can be misread. The current emperor is suspicious of his own shadow. People who
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praise him too much are sometimes seen as mocking him. People who praise him too little are sometimes seen as plotting against him. You have learned to make observations about the weather, chariot races, the writings of Seneca.
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You have a wife from another equestrian family. The marriage was arranged by your fathers. She manages the household with quiet competence. Your daughter is 15 and will marry next year. The husband has been selected. He is a senator's
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son. The connection will elevate your family one more rung up the ladder. That is how it works at this level. Marriages are alliances. Alliances are investments. Every generation moves the family slightly forward or slightly back. Level six, the senator.
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You wear the toga praetexta with the broad purple stripe, the laticlavia. Your family has held a seat in the senate for two centuries. Your ancestors include three consuls, two praetors, and a man who served as governor of Hispania
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during the reign of Tiberius. Their imagines, the wax death masks, line the atrium of your home.
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They watch you when you walk past, and on certain nights, when the lamps flicker, you almost feel them judging you.
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You attended the senate this morning at the Curia Julia. The session began at dawn.
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The presiding consul opened with the auspices, the reading of bird signs to determine whether the day was favorable.
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The augurs declared it favorable. Sessions are almost always declared favorable when there is business that needs doing.
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You sat on your bench in the order of seniority. You listened to debates about an aqueduct extension, complaints from the governor of Bithynia, and an embassy from Armenia. You spoke twice, briefly, carefully.
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You have learned that a senator who speaks too often is dismissed as ambitious. A senator who never speaks is dismissed as irrelevant. The middle path is the only path.
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Your real work happens outside the Senate chamber. The Senate has been gradually losing power to the emperor for over a century now.
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The body that once governed an empire now mostly ratifies decisions made elsewhere. The real influence comes from your relationships. Who dines at your house?
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Who you dine with? What letters you write? What favors you owe and are owed?
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You have a network of clients that numbers in the hundreds. You receive them every morning in your atrium.
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They bring you information from across the empire. A merchant from Antioch tells you about grain prices in Egypt. A freedman who works in the Imperial Palace tells you about the emperor's mood.
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A young equestrian whose career you guide tells you about military movements on the German frontier.
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You synthesize. You analyze. You decide who to share what with and who to withhold from.
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Information is the currency of the senatorial class and you have grown wealthy in it.
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Your wife is from one of the oldest patrician families in Rome. Your sons attend lectures by the most respected rhetoricians in the city.
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Your daughters will marry into families whose names appear on monuments. You are exactly where your ancestors hoped you would be.
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Some nights you wonder if that is enough. Most nights you don't allow yourself to question.
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The question is dangerous. The question is what destroys men in your position. You shut it down before it forms fully and you go to sleep. Level seven, the consul.
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You have reached the highest elected office in Rome. Two consuls are appointed each year.
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The position is largely ceremonial under the empire, but the prestige is immense. Your name will be inscribed in the official records as one of the two consuls of this year.
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Romans will date documents by your name. 2,000 years from now, scholars will reconstruct the chronology of the empire by referring to consular lists.
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Your name will be among them. You preside over Senate sessions. You officiate at major religious ceremonies.
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You walk through the forum accompanied by 12 lictors carrying the fasces, the bundled rods of Roman authority.
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People part to make way for you. Senators acknowledge you with formal bows. The emperor receives you in private audience to discuss matters of state.
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Your colleague, the other consul, was selected by the emperor because he is older and less ambitious.
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This was not an accident. The emperor prefers a senior consul who will defer to imperial wishes.
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You are the junior consul in age, but the more energetic of the two. You handle most of the actual work.
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You sponsor games at the Circus Maximus to mark your consulship. The games last 7 days.
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40,000 Romans watch chariots race and gladiators fight while shouting your name. The expense was enormous.
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You sold a vineyard and borrowed against your townhouse to fund them. The investment was necessary.
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A consul who fails to provide spectacular games is remembered as cheap. Being remembered as cheap is worse than being remembered as cruel.
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You receive embassies from foreign kingdoms. A delegation from Parthia sat in your reception hall last week. Men with curled beards speaking Greek with precision.
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They brought gifts and complaints in equal measure. You listened to both. You promised nothing.
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You sent them to the emperor who would make any actual decisions. Your wife hosts dinners three nights a week.
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The guest lists are political documents. Who is invited and who is not invited reflects every important relationship in Rome.
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She manages this with the precision of a general planning a campaign. You appreciate her more every year.
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You did not expect to. The marriage was arranged when you were both very young.
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You were strangers at your wedding. You are partners now in the strange professional way that political marriages can become partnerships.
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Level eight, the provincial governor. After your consulship ended, the emperor appointed you governor of Asia, the wealthiest province in the empire. You sailed from Brundisium with an entourage of 200. Your wife came with you. Your two youngest children came with you.
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Your three oldest sons remained in Rome to continue their careers. You arrived in Ephesus to a welcome that felt like a coronation. The provincial assembly had erected a triumphal arch in your honor.
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The local elite competed to host you at banquets that lasted until dawn. They presented you with gifts, gold, silver, ivory, perfumes, slaves trained in music and dance. The bribery was elaborate, formalized, and deniable.
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You accepted what you could accept without becoming infamous. You declined what would have crossed even the empire's generous lines.
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You govern a province of perhaps 8 million people. You administer justice in cases appealed from local courts.
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You command two legions stationed in your territory. You set the rate of tax collection within parameters established in Rome.
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You build roads and aqueducts when the budget permits. You suppress local unrest when it occurs, which it does regularly. The mountain tribes in the interior periodically rebel against tax collectors. You send a cohort to remind them that Roman patience has limits.
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You attend religious ceremonies for gods you do not worship. You make sacrifices to local deities and to the emperor's genius and to eternal Roma.
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The performance of piety is part of the job. You have stopped distinguishing between performance and belief. They have blended together over the years.
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Your court, the cohors amicorum, includes legal advisers, secretaries, and military aides. You hold court 3 days a week. You hear cases. You render judgments.
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People appeal your decisions to the emperor in Rome. Most appeals fail. Your reputation in your province is mixed.
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The wealthy elite consider you fair, meaning you have not taxed them excessively. The rural poor consider you indifferent, meaning you have not addressed any of their concerns. The local Greek intellectuals write essays about your love of culture. You are not
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sure if these essays are sincere or strategic. You suspect both. You will return to Rome in a year. You will be wealthier than you were when you arrived, significantly so.
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You will also be slightly different. Something happens to a man who governs 8 million people. The scale changes him.
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The decisions made and unmade leave residue inside him that he carries home. Level nine, the Praetorian Prefect.
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The emperor has chosen you to command the Praetorian Guard. The guard is the only military force permitted within Rome.
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9,000 soldiers under your direct command. You report only to the emperor himself. Your power is enormous, second only to his.
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Your danger is also enormous, also second only to his. Praetorian Prefects have made and unmade emperors.
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Sejanus served Tiberius and then plotted to replace him. Sejanus was executed and his body was torn apart by a mob in the streets.
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Macro replaced Sejanus and was forced to commit suicide by Caligula. Burrus served Nero faithfully and may or may not have been poisoned.
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The history of your office is written in blood. You have read all of it carefully.
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You live in the Castra Praetoria, the great fortress on the eastern edge of the city.
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You sleep in the same building as your soldiers. You eat the same food, mostly.
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You drill with them. You inspect them. You know your senior officers by name and history.
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You know which centurions are ambitious and which are loyal and which are both. You watch all of them.
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You arrange the imperial schedule. The emperor wakes at dawn. You are there. He receives morning visitors. You are there.
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He attends the Senate. Your guards line the route. He goes to the games. Your men surround his box.
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He sleeps with his current favorite. Your guards stand outside the door. The emperor's life is in your hands every minute of every day.
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You could end him in an hour if you decided to. The emperor knows this.
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The emperor sometimes looks at you with an expression that calculates how much longer he can keep you alive.
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You have a network of informers throughout the city. Senators report on their colleagues. Servants report on their masters.
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Prostitutes report on their clients. You read summaries each evening. You look for patterns. Conspiracies in Rome are rarely sudden.
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They develop over months. They show up in small details. A senator who skips three sessions.
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An equestrian who comes into unexplained wealth. A general writing more letters than usual. You catch the patterns or you don't.
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If you catch them, you survive. If you don't catch them, the emperor falls and you fall with him.
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The arithmetic is brutal and clear. You have a wife. You have children. They live in a villa outside the city for their protection.
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You see them rarely. You miss them in a way you no longer have time to feel.
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Level 10, the emperor. You are the master of the Roman world. From the cold forests of Britannia to the deserts of Arabia, your name is cursed and prayed to.
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Coins bear your image. Statues stand in every forum. Children in distant provinces are taught your name before they learn the names of their grandparents.
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You wear a simple toga most days. The simplicity is itself a statement. The emperor who demands too much display is the emperor who is overcompensating.
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You sit in the Domus Augustana on the Palatine Hill. The palace sprawls across the entire crown of the hill.
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You can stand at certain windows and see almost the whole of Rome below. You rarely go down into it.
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The emperor who walks among his people too often becomes the emperor whose face becomes too familiar.
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Familiarity is not what you want. You want awe. Your morning begins with letters. They come from every corner of the empire.
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A general in Britannia reports on a tribal uprising. A governor in Egypt reports on the grain harvest. A prefect in Mauretania reports on the price of olive oil.
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You read them. You dictate responses. Your secretaries are slaves and freedmen of extraordinary education.
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They can write in Latin, Greek, and several other languages. They are constantly afraid of you and their fear keeps them efficient.
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You receive senators and equestrians in formal audience. You allow them to kiss your ring.
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You discuss their petitions briefly. You decide their fates. A senator wants permission to rebuild his ancestral home.
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You grant it. An equestrian wants a procuratorship in Hispania. You consider his connections, his loyalty, the rumors you have heard.
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You decide. He learns of your decision through a clerk hours later. You eat your midday meal alone or with a small group of intimates.
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The food is tested for poison before it reaches your plate. The wine is tested.
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The bread is tested. The taster is a slave whose entire purpose in life is to die in your place if necessary.
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You have known three tasters. The first one died. The current one has been with you for 2 years.
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He has a family. You have made provisions for them. Small kindnesses are sometimes possible even at this height.
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You spend afternoons with your advisers. You discuss military deployments. The empire has 28 legions.
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You know where each of them is stationed. You know the name of every legate who commands them.
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You know which legates are ambitious and which are content. The ambitious ones get watched. The content ones get rewarded modestly so they remain content.
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You have executed people. You don't keep an exact count. The number is not small.
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Some deserved it by any standard. Some merely became inconvenient. The line between justice and convenience blurs at this altitude.
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You stopped pretending the line was clear during your second year. Your wife is somewhere in the palace.
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You see her at official functions. You see her sometimes in private. The marriage was political.
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It remains political. Your children study with the finest tutors in the empire. You see them on scheduled days.
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You love them in the careful, distant way that emperors love. You sleep poorly. You always sleep poorly.
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The bed is comfortable beyond imagination. Silk sheets, feather pillows, perfumed air. Sleep refuses to come.
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You think about the senators who smile at you. Which ones are sincere? None of them.
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You think about the prefect who guards you. Whether he has been counting how long you have ruled.
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Whether he has been thinking about the Praetorians who killed Caligula and Galba. You think about your own ancestors, the deified ones. Augustus, Vespasian.
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They achieved godhood through death. Yours waits somewhere ahead of you. You don't know how many years away.
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Somewhere in a windowless room beneath a kitchen, a slave is waking in the dark.
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The slave will haul water and empty chamber pots and survive another day. That slave will never know your name.
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You will never know that slave's name. And yet, you are bound together by a system that needs both of you exactly where you are.
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The empire stretches across three continents. It feeds on grain from Egypt and silver from Hispania.
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It will outlast you. It will outlast your sons. It will not outlast forever, though you cannot know that.
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From your window, the city glows in the evening light. A million people. Your people.
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You rule them and you fear them in equal measure. The torches in the streets below flicker like distant stars.
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Somewhere a child cries. Somewhere a man is dying. Somewhere a slave is being beaten in a room you will never see. In a city you supposedly own.
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The cycle continues.
Topics:Roman EmpireRoman slaveryfreedmenRoman soldiersRoman merchantsancient Rome daily lifeRoman social hierarchymanumissionRoman economyRoman military
