INTRODUCTION

The slave society of Roman Italy, characterised by the presence of large numbers of slaves (forming perhaps as much as 35 per cent of the population) in all kinds of activity from personal service to crafts to business to education, and in all regions and all levels of society from the depths of the countryside to the houses of the urban elite, developed over the course of the last two centuries bc. Over this same period, slave labour maintained a central role in agricultural production, in the market-orientated villa system of central Italy described by Cato and Varro; slaves were by no means the only people involved in productive activity, or even the majority, but they played a vital role in accumulating the marketable surpluses that sustained the lifestyles and ambitions of many of the elite. Their role in ensuring the social reproduction of the elite, both through apparently unproductive' personal services (which in fact were vital for their owners' participation in the competition for status and the display of an ‘appropriate’ lifestyle) and through their dominant position in the process of educating and socialising the next generation of aristocrats, should also not be underestimated. Indeed, in a family environment that was characterised, as Bradley (1991a: 125–55) has argued, by a high risk of emotional uncertainty and dislocation, slave tutors and nurses offered some degree of continuity in personal relationships for young aristocrats, and so, perhaps, shaped the behaviour of generations of elite Romans.