Slavery, Prosperity, and Inequality in Roman Pompeii
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Historians of premodern economies, in contrast to modern ones, have only infrequently contemplated the economic contribution of slavery. Here, I suggest that quantitative and statistical tools allow us to evaluate the place of slavery in an early economy, using Roman Pompeii as a case study. At the time of its destruction in 79 ce, Pompeii appears prosperous, having benefitted from the economic development thought to have characterized the Roman world. Recent discoveries, meanwhile, shed new light on the conditions of working classes and slaves throughout the city. These narratives can be seen to form two sides to the same coin, as Pompeii’s prosperity was created in large part thanks to slave labour. The connection is supported by constructing a probabilistic model, which suggests some 6 million sesterces (HS) flowed every year to Pompeii’s masters through their exploitation of slaves. Slave owning probably formed the largest single income source for the urban economy. This scale of income is shown to be consistent with recent reconstructions of wealth and income inequality in the city. The results not only speak to slavery’s profound importance to Pompeii’s prosperity, but they encourage a recentring of labour and slavery in Roman economic history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it