Don't forget that classical slavery isn't american slavery.Originally Posted by Thaatu
Some slaves or freedmen were pretty high in the social strata. Sulla used freedmen like Chrysogonus to run his kelptocracy/dictatorship. Claudius used highly trained freedmen (I think of Polybius) to run the roman bureaucracy.
It was a career move for some greek academics to sell themselves in slavery and working as teacher in roman patrician families.
---I simplify a little bit in this section, I don't wan't to explain the comitias and all that stuff so I took a few shortcuts without altering the big picture!---
It was also a good move for some roman politicians to free a part of their slaves. The freedmen became clients of their tribe. So they had to vote for their ancient masters. It was really important for families like the Graccii, or the Cornelius Sylla. In the late republic, a consul was lame if he didn't have a tribune of the Plebs to back him up. To have a tribune, you needed to have a big tribe to pull one of your clients through the vote. If you were a new man and you didn't float in denarii, you needed people to vote for you. So, you hope you get a good war in your career, get a lot of slave, freed them, give them property so they could vote in the right century, register them in your tribe and tell them to vote for C. Johnus Doeus in the next election if they didn't wan't to have a private meeting with one of your gladiators/veterans.
T. Sempronius Gracchus tried to pull a stunt like that by giving away lot of farmland to beggars, destitutes and slaves, which would have moved a couple hundred thousand people in his tribe and who would have been his clients. He would have been able to rig the elections forever and become a virtual dictator.
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So, to answer you, slaves were an important part of the population level of the classical world. The way they disperse the slaves throughout the cities is a simplified but effective way of simulating their importance.
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