Past Lives

On May 24th, 166 AD, a seven-year-old boy was sold for the price of 200 denarii in the city of Seleucia Pieria. How did Abbas get there, and what happened to him afterward? The answers shed a great deal of light on how the Roman slave trade actually worked in practice. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. You'll get access to the Past Lives Discord server and four pieces of bo...

Standing just outside Rome's Porta Maggiore is a unique funeral monument to a successful baking entrepreneur named Eurysaces, who was proud of his occupation and his prosperity. But Eurysaces' wealth rested on the brutalized laborers who worked in his hellish industrial bakery, and through Eurysaces, we can understand them. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. You'll get acces...

The Spartacus Rebellion is one of the most famous events in all of human history, told and retold time and again. But how and why did it happen, and who participated in it aside from Spartacus himself? Here we focus on Crixus, one of Spartacus's lieutenants, and what we can know about the life of an enslaved gladiator who had had enough. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. Yo...

Terence was one of ancient Rome's most popular playwrights and a founder of Latin literature, read by schoolchildren for centuries to come. He had also been enslaved in his youth, and when we look closely, it turns out that early Roman writers were mostly outsiders just like Terence. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. You'll get access to the Past Lives Discord server and fo...

Sex work is work, and it has a long history. In ancient Athens, prostitution was everywhere, but what do we know about the people who chose or were more often forced to engage in it? Neaira is one of the few sex workers whose life story we know, and it tells us more than we could dream about real lives in ancient Greece. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. You'll get access t...

Slavery is often considered a throwback to an older, less efficient way of organizing an economy, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Sosias, a mining overseer from Thrace, was one of the most expensive slaves ever sold in classical Athens. What made him worth so much money? The answer reveals a great deal about classical Athens, its economy, and slavery's place in a sophisticated economi...

Nearly 2,700 years ago, a woman and her daughter were ripped away from their homes in what is now Iran by the soldiers of the Assyrian Empire. Nanaya'ila'i was one of thousands upon thousands of people to experience the violence that accompanied conquest, but she's one of the very few whose name we know and life we can reconstruct. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. You'll g...

Slavery was there at the beginning of recorded history in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, and it's still with us today. But how should we make sense of an institution that has defined the lives of hundreds of millions of people all across the world? Are there better and worse varieties of slavery? How important did slavery have to be before it defined a society? These are the big-picture qu...

Most of the history we're taught revolves around "Great Men," the Napoleons and Alexander the Greats of the world, but they're hardly typical of the human experience. History actually revolves around advisors, merchants, laborers, farmers, and slaves, the common clay of humanity and the raw material for any good story of our shared past. Become a member now at www.patreon.com/cw/PastLivesMedia. Yo...

From Patrick Wyman (host of Fall of Rome and Tides of History) comes Past Lives, a brand new podcast! Every week, we’ll focus on the lived experiences of real people from the past, bringing their stories to life. The first season of Past Lives is available December 3rd! Be sure to subscribe to the feed now so you get our first three episodes delivered straight to you on the same day for our series...