Abstract
It is a commonplace that slaves in upper-class Roman households of the imperial period were numerous and specialised. The elaborate entourage of the slave civil servant Musicus (5197=EJ 158) implies the far greater luxury of his imperial master, Tiberius. But detailed discussions of Roman domestic arrangements tend to generalise, to take examples from widely separated areas and from any epoch between Augustus and the Severi, and thus to obscure chronological development and class differences. Freedmen in charge of bejewelled gold plate are attested in the imperial house in the Flavian period and later: we cannot infer that they existed before, or in other houses. Conversely, the earliest inscription known to us does not give us the date for the introduction of a post, only a terminus a quo. Some posts are confined to the imperial house. Numbers of slaves and the variety of their functions are dictated by the rank, wealth, family connections, requirements, sex and age of their owner.
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