If slaves were able to find individual purpose and common support in the households in which they found themselves, the complaisant slaveowner who believed himself attentive to his slaves’ needs would not have been surprised, for the household was like a miniature state, he would have said, and a sense of Community was thus a natural expectation. But what did it mean to be attentive to slaves’ needs? On the material plane Roman slaveowners were under a strong obligation to provide their slaves with the basic necessities of life – food, clothing and shelter (cibaria, vestitus, habitatio) – and the equation between good treatment and good performance was easily made. But material necessities were one thing, luxuries another, and as the law made clear it was only reasonable that there should be limits to what owners expended on maintaining their complements of slaves. What then were slaves’ living conditions generally like at Rome? Under what sort of material regime did Roman slaves spend their lives? It is with these questions that this chapter is now concerned.

To judge from conventional descriptions, the food rations (cibaria) that slaves were allotted were meant to be functional and little more. The term ‘cibaria’ meant most of all the lower-grade bread that seems to have constituted the principal element of the slave diet, or simply the grain from which the bread was made, if it was not alternatively converted to a form of porridge.