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Further, the term for black people generically was "Ethiopian", and likely would be used instead. It is possible the writers mistook Numidians for Nubians, who actually are black Africans. Every character played by an actor of sub-saharan African descent is referred to as a "Numidian", who were an olive-skinned Berber people from North Africa (think modern day Algerians).In reality, Roman statues were brightly painted, but that paint faded long ago and now modern audiences are only familiar with Roman statues as white. One scene features a party in Capua where slaves are painted white to look like statues, emphasizing their status as things.Besides, with her father still alive, anything given to her would legally belong to him. She also receives an allowance from her husband, but this was also forbidden by law a man couldn't give any gifts to his wife, including allowances. Patria potestus stated that a son or daughter could only own property once their father died. Illithyia buys a gladiator for herself when her father is still alive.Since understating the prices doesn't help the story, this is probably a genuine mistake. In the slave market scenes, the prices mentioned are a fraction of what any slave - let alone a gladiator - would actually have cost at the time.After all, slaves were valued as property, if nothing else, and losing one was still an important economic loss. While runaways were sometimes killed, usually the punishment was "just" branding and/or a flogging.There is no mention of the fact that high-level slaves (such as household ones and gladiators) often earned their freedom, or that slaves commonly were allowed to, which instead gets treated as exceptional.
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As a consequence, the percentage of non-Roman and non-white slaves in the show is much higher than reality (and watch out also for this whiteness - Roman characters are played by actors that in many cases are fairer than most Romans were, vice versa for Gauls and so on). Furthermore, the majority of slaves that weren't Italian were Greek, who looked similar enough to them to make it hard to distinguish. The Romans did not base slavery on race, and happily enslaved their own. While slaves were indeed drawn sometimes from foreign peoples, either captured in war with the Romans or sold to them, in most cases they were Romans themselves or at least from Italy.