Not Built in a Day: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire-Emma Southon
Simon & Schuster
Release Date: June 30, 2026
Rating: 📚📚📚📚
Synopsis: 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 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 Dayalso explores the lives of those freed from slavery, finally able to choose their own destinies.___________________________________________________________
I'm a huge fan of historian Emma Southon. She's on my short list of must-buy historians when she has a new book coming out. She questions sources, she gets into the cracks of what archaeology and literature and laws have left us and works out what life would have been like for those who have been left out of so many re-tellings of history with a big H: women (A Rome of One's Own), and in Not Build in a Day, the enslaved population of the Roman Empire. And she does it all with a delightful snarky, irreverent sense of humor.
As horrifying as Roman slavery was, the layers of complexity thanks to frankly weird laws that meant the empire literally could not survive without a massive enslaved population were fascinting. I had no idea about some of the financial and legal hoops Romans built for themselves. While I knew this was a civilization that was focused on status, I'm not sure I had absorbed just what that meant about daily life: your status had status and could change depending on so many things. This included people in slavery. Enslaved people, freed people and citizens, all had so many levels of status depending on who was involved with what that it must have been exhausting.
The book breaks down into where people are enslaved (the imperial house, the city, the country, etc.) and the kind of work they are required to do, because that has massive impacts on the experience of the individual.
I can't tell you how much I think this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Roman history. Read it along side all the other histories that look at the big pictures and the big names and forget to tell you about what a Roman's daily life was like. Because this, this was daily life in Rome. You were on one side of the whip or the other, but every single person experienced this in some form every day.
Wonderfully researched, well written, another triumph for Emma Southon. I can't wait to see where she takes us next.
