Confining life of working slaves revealed in Pompeian villa
In the ancient world, slaves were meant to serve but to be invisible while doing it. Something of the awfulness of their daily existence has come to light in a sombre room at a villa located just outside Pompeii.
The room is situated not far from the villa’s portico where a parked four-wheeled vehicle was found earlier, and in 2018, two horses were discovered in an adjacent stable. The evidence suggests that the people who maintained and prepared the vehicle and its horses lived here.
Inside the room were three wooden beds. Over time the organic materials decayed, but the cavities they left were filled with plaster of Paris. Brushing away the volcanic deposit, the beds were found to have been constructed of roughly worked wooden planks that could be adjusted according to the height of the user with cords.
Two of the beds are about 1.7 m (5 ft 6 in) long, but one measures just 1.4 m (4 ft 7 in) and may have belonged to a
