Not Built in a Day
How Slavery Made the Roman Empire
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 30, 2026
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
From acclaimed author of A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and historian Emma Southon, a groundbreaking history of Ancient Rome that explores how the empire was built, fueled, and shaped by its enslaved people.
When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he boasted that he killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. This is the truth about the Roman empire: Rome could not function without slavery as it underpinned every single part of their economy. Without the millions of people snatched from their homes in the aftermath of war, kidnapped from the streets, sold into slavery as punishment, or born into it as “home bred slaves”, the Roman empire’s great aqueducts and temples could never have been built. There would be no coins or tiles to find in fields, no limitless manpower for the army and navy that conquered the Mediterranean, no marble palaces or underfloor heating, and certainly no life of unimaginable luxury for the one percent who didn’t even tie their own shoes. For the first time, Not Built in a Day tells their stories.
Not Built in a Day takes readers into the invisible spaces of the Roman empire, where the millions of enslaved lives perpetuated the excesses of the empire that owned them. From the fields of wheat required to give every Roman his daily bread, to the actors and gladiators who provided their circuses; from the guards who kept the streets of Rome safe and the mines which kept Rome a city of gold and marble, to the builders who placed every brick in the Colosseum. It traces how people entered, experienced, and left slavery, covering the little known story of slave revolts and the complex realities of enslaved people who themselves owned enslaved people. Not Built in a Day also explores the lives of those freed from slavery, finally able to choose their own destinies.
With humor, wit, and expertise, Emma Southon invites us into the absurdity of Roman life and completely upends our idea of the Roman empire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Southon (A Rome of One's Own) offers a revelatory portrait of ancient Rome from the point of view of the enslaved. Rome was "a gargantuan imperial economy based entirely on slaver"; yet, despite their ubiquity, the lives and contributions of the enslaved are often overlooked in histories. Describing the book as "an act of remembrance," Southon seeks to right this wrong. From slaves who "ran bureaucracies" to those who "toiled... in fields," there was no one "universal experience" for the enslaved, Southon notes, "except that in the eyes of the law, none was a person." Many attempted to make "small assertions of individuality" in the face of "the totalizing process of enslavement"—as evidenced by the many texts, from laws to comedies, that note slaves' propensity to "idle" and "lie." While some were high-status, most slaves were trapped in the brutal conditions of the farms and mines that powered the empire, including those "agonizingly treading over and over to keep enormous water wheels turning." Southon also doesn't shy away from harrowing details of the "nightmare" lives of the "men, women, and children" who were "trafficked for sex." The Roman slave system, she concludes, "crush human will through terror and instill crippling shame into as many... people as possible." It amounts to a bracing and important corrective to more naive visions of the ancient world.
