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 - that is elided, hidden and glossed over in so many histories. Most historians focus on the machinations of a single family in the heart of Rome, but Rome could not function without slavery. Many millions of people were required to ensure that the Roman empire was glorious, and Slave tells some of their stories.

Roman glory was built on the very real and deliberate suffering and mistreatment of other human beings. 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. The story of the Roman empire, for many, is a story of incomprehensible violence and suffering.

SERVUS takes readers into the invisible spaces of the Roman empire, where the millions of enslaved lives were unwillingly dedicated to the perpetuation 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; the guards who kept Rome safe and the mines which kept Rome a city of gold and marble, and the builders who placed every brick in the Colosseum. The book explores every area of Roman life by tracing how people entered, experienced and left slavery, covering domestic, agricultural and industrial slavery, as well as self-emancipation, slave revolts and slave hunters.

Just as the stories of the emperors are sometimes joyful, sometimes horrific, sometimes poignant and sometimes downright weird, so too are the stories of slavery. There is enormous suffering because to be enslaved is to inherently suffer lack of freedom, and sometimes that also involved violence and horror. But enslaved people are people, and they left fragments of themselves behind, so there are also love stories, lifelong friendships, high highs and low lows. Tiny victories abound, and sometimes there are big ones too - especially in the lives of those freed from slavery, able to choose their own destinies.