Labour, society and late antiquity

Slavery was deeply rooted in the Roman world. In Augustus's time, about 3 million of the 7.5 million people in Italy were slaves. Over time, though, landowners relied more on wage labour and on freed slaves: as fewer war captives were available, some owners even resorted to slave breeding. Slaves and freedmen (freed slaves) were often trusted as business managers, given capital to run a trade for their master.

Workers, slave or free, were tightly controlled:

• The writer Columella advised landowners to keep two of every tool, so no work time was lost when one broke, and to organise workers in squads of ten so it was easy to see who was not working.
• Some farm slaves worked chained together in gangs; the writer Pliny the Elder condemned this as the worst way to organise labour.
• In the frankincense factories of Alexandria, workers wore sealed aprons and were searched before leaving.
• A law of 398 CE allowed workers to be branded, so that runaways could be recognised.
• Many private employers bound workers through debt, making them contract to work off a loan. Some poor parents even sold their children into servitude for 25 years.

Harsh conditions sometimes provoked resistance: whole villages ran away, and in 66 CE the people of Judaea rose in a great revolt against Roman rule. When the emperor Nero's government ordered all the slaves of a murdered city official executed, crowds came out in protest, though the sentence was carried out.

Social classes. The historian Tacitus described the early empire's society as: senators (the 'fathers'); equites (knights, often army officers and businessmen); the 'respectable' people attached to great houses; the lower classes (plebs sordida); and slaves. By the fourth century this had changed:

• Senators and equites merged into a single, enlarged aristocracy, rich mainly in land, with large incomes in gold.
• A middle class of officials in the bureaucracy and army, and merchants and farmers, many of them paid in gold.
• The lower classes, now called humiliores: rural labourers, industrial and mining workers, migrant workers, self-employed craftsmen and casual labourers.
• Slaves at the bottom.
• Writers complained that officials were often corrupt, though Roman law did put some limits on the emperor and protect civil rights.

Late antiquity (fourth to seventh centuries) was a time of great change:

• Diocletian cut back the empire to more defensible frontiers, fortified them, reorganised it into about 100 provinces, and separated civil from military functions, giving more power to military commanders (duces).
• Constantine introduced a new gold coin, the solidus (about 4.5 grams of pure gold), which stayed in use long after the empire. He became a Christian and made Christianity the empire's official religion, and he founded a second capital, Constantinople, on the site of the old Greek town of Byzantium.
• The east grew richer in the fourth to sixth centuries: villages expanded, new oil presses, water mills and glass factories were built, and trade boomed.

Before Christianity, Romans worshipped many gods, such as Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Mars, alongside Greek and local cults, and many Jewish communities lived in the empire. Christianisation was gradual over the fourth and fifth centuries.

The end of the west. In the west the empire broke up as Germanic groups took over: Visigoths in Spain, Franks in Gaul, Vandals in Africa, Ostrogoths in Italy; later the Lombards took much of Italy. These new kingdoms are called post-Roman. The east, under Justinian in the sixth century, was prosperous and recaptured Africa and Italy, but the war ruined Italy. In the seventh century the old war with Iran flared up again; then the Arabs, inspired by Islam, swept across the region, and by 642 had taken large parts of the eastern Roman empire and the whole of the Sasanian empire.