Peer-reviewed
Quantifying the Sources of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire*
The relative importance of different sources of slaves in the Roman Empire during the Principate cannot be gauged from ancient texts. However, simple demographic models show that, for purely statistical reasons, natural reproduction made a greater contribution to the Roman slave supply than child exposure, warfare, and the slave trade taken together and was in all probability several times as important as any other single source. The most plausible projections also suggest that on average the incidence of manumission was rather low. By implication, overall fertility of ex-slaves in general and of freedwomen in particular would be low as well, which must have reduced their chances of acquiring legal privileges that accrued from sexual reproduction
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