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Around two thousand years ago, a Latin poet described a farmer named Simylus making a pesto for his breakfast with fresh garlic, coriander, olive oil, cheese, and the help of a slave. The poem, known as “Moretum” after the name of the recipe, is one of hundreds of ancient descriptions of hard work, this one a modest task undertaken by a poor man and the woman Scybale, whom he owns and who happens to be from Africa.

What can we say about Scybale? She is, we are told, the only slave on the tiny plot. She has thick lips, frizzled hair, slack breasts, and spacious feet, descriptions which, while hardly admiring or imaginative, were necessary in the first century ad for the poet to set his scene. African slaves were then a rarity in the Italian countryside. The presence of a black woman was probably the poet’s most original contribution to his vivid version of the “rustic idyll,” the kind of artful image that had long appealed to urban readers as long as they did not have to live that way themselves.

The unknown author of the poem, once thought to be Virgil, does not tell us where Scybale came from. Old Simylus has the sort of farm, barely more than a vegetable garden, that was often given to retired soldiers. His one black servant might perhaps have been a secondary spoil of war. Any other choice of color for the Moretum masher, a paler German, Syrian, Gaul, or Greek, would have been less exotic. Any greater number of slaves for Simylus would risk the artfully constructed pathos. If, however, there had been no slave at all, the depiction would have lacked the easy realism that bucolic art demands; it would have been a log-cabin plate without logs, a country-cottage teacup without the rosebush by the door.

For thousands of miles around the Roman Mediterranean, foreign slaves were as much a part of the landscape as the fields and farms on which they worked, their presence as undisputed as sea, clouds, and mountains. Anyone might be a slave or might be free. Many in their lifetimes would be both. It was a matter of mutable fortune, part of the conditions of life for rich and poor, black, brown, and white, for Germans, Africans, and Gauls, a status so ubiquitous and little challenged that it leaves a huge challenge now to anyone who wants to comprehend it. Poetry and pottery, theater and history books can all play their variously deceptive parts in our imaginations. None gives a picture that is complete.

It is wrong to say, as some do, that no ancient ever considered a life without slavery. A few well-traveled traders would have heard fantastical stories of slave-free lands—in places too far away even for Romans to check. Awkward issues might occasionally be raised in after-dinner talk among the elites, by followers of the Syrian-Greek philosopher Posidonius, for example, who reminded his readers (very few in number) that the Romans had once themselves been as uncivilized as those at the edges of their world. Slavery, however, was the energy industry of the ancients. No known economy had functioned in any other way. Few people questioned its existence or doubted its necessity as a primary means of production. Even those slaves in Italy who revolted from Roman control, most famously in the Spartacus War of 73-71 BC, did so only for their own freedom, not for the freedom of others or the then unknown natural right to be free.

The peculiarity of Roman slavery lay only in the speed at which it developed. In the 250 years before Scybale helped Simylus make the pesto, millions of slaves had entered Italy as the spoils of Roman military victories in Asia, Greece, and Gaul. Parallel growth in the Italian economy required all those slaves and more. On the ever advancing edges of the empire, local traders worked with Roman generals and international shipowners to assemble an unprecedented mass market in manpower.

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