Plantation owners placed male slaves in barracks or housed them in underground dungeons, leaving them separated from their families, which they might never see again. Plantation slaves worked in gangs ordered about by men with lashes. They were chained at night so they could not run away. They could be killed by their master without the master suffering any form of punishment, but, if a slave killed a master, a number of them could be held accountable and any of them put to death.

To appear affluent a Roman family had to have at least ten slaves, and such families had slaves for just about every task. And the power that a master and his family had over their domestic slaves encouraged some slaves to wheedle their way into favor through flattery or sexual favors.

Most Romans saw slavery as a natural part of life, as a result of their being favored by the gods, that defeat and slavery were the fate of inferior peoples. For some Romans slavery was a source of ego enhancement: looking at a creature more wretched than they bolstered their pride, and many Romans made slaves the objects of their ridicule.

Runaway slaves were hunted down, and if they were caught they might be executed. Runaway slaves roamed the countryside, surviving by banditry and making travel dangerous. Slaves sometimes revolted in groups, one of the larger of such revolts coming in 196 BCE, a revolt that ended with the Romans executing seven thousand of them. A generation later the Romans crushed another rebellion, involving around four thousand slaves.

In 135 BC, about four hundred slaves in Sicily revolted after being encouraged to do so by a slave priest from Syria named Eunus, who announced the favor of the gods. The slaves massacred most of their masters, sparing only a few who had been most humane to them. This uprising encouraged other slaves in Sicily, and as many as sixty thousand joined the revolt and seized a number of Sicilian towns, and they defeated the first of the armies that Rome sent against them.