A historical examination of one of the Roman Empire’s most overlooked and troubling institutions
When we picture ancient Rome at the height of its power, we tend to imagine marble columns, philosophical debates, aqueducts, and military triumph. We picture senators in white togas and emperors presiding over vast ceremonies. What we picture far less often — what Rome itself preferred not to examine too closely — were the boys standing on auction platforms near the Tiber River, their origins, physical condition, and perceived value written on placards hung around their necks like price tags.
Their story is one that classical scholarship spent a long time avoiding. It is worth examining honestly.
The Marketplace and the Boy
The Forum Boarium, Rome’s ancient cattle market near the Tiber, was also a place where human beings were bought and sold. Public slave auctions were a regular feature of Roman commercial life — neither hidden nor considered shameful by the society that conducted them. Enslaved individuals from across the empire and beyond its borders passed through these markets: men captured in military campaigns, women sold by desperate families in the provinces, and children of both.
Among the most commercially valued were young boys selected for what Roman buyers described as refinement — their physical appearance, their manner, their perceived potential for elegant domestic service. Many came from Greece, Thrace, Syria, and Phrygia. They arrived through multiple routes: as spoils of military conquest, as children sold by impoverished provincial families, or as the offspring of enslaved women already within Roman households.
The Roman satirist Juvenal, writing in the first century CE, captured the absurdity of the market with characteristic sharpness, noting that a physically admired boy could command a price exceeding that of an agricultural estate. Juvenal was mocking elite excess, but his observation also reveals something important: in the Roman luxury economy, a child’s appearance could make him more commercially valuable than land that fed a village.
Once purchased, a boy designated for domestic service in an elite household entered a world of near-total supervision. His days were structured entirely around the needs and preferences of his owner. He was trained, groomed, and displayed as a marker of his owner’s status and taste. The physical comfort of his surroundings — fine rooms, quality food, proximity to wealth — bore no relationship to his freedom or his safety. He was, in legal terms and in practical reality, property.
A Term With Dark Implications
Roman Latin had a specific word for these boys: delicatus, or in its plural form, pueri delicati — literally “refined boys” or “pleasure boys.” The term appeared in literature, poetry, and legal documents with a casualness that reflects how normalized the institution was. Senators mentioned their delicati in passing. Poets wrote about them. The satirists criticized the excesses of their owners while rarely questioning the underlying system that made such boys available for purchase in the first place.
The Roman Empire did not merely permit this trade — it organized and regulated it. The buying and selling of enslaved boys for domestic and personal service was a recognized sector of the imperial luxury economy. Wealth was measured partly in the quality and quantity of one’s enslaved household staff, and boys selected for their appearance and manner occupied a particular niche in this hierarchy.
What made their situation especially stark was the paradox at its center: these boys often lived in close physical proximity to extraordinary wealth and influence while possessing no personal agency whatsoever. They might reside in marble-floored rooms and serve at tables laden with imported delicacies, but they remained under conditions of total control. Their visibility was high; their voice was nonexistent.
The Imperial Household and the Practice of Castration
The practices that surrounded enslaved boys in ordinary elite households became still more extreme within the imperial court itself. Among the most disturbing — and most consistently documented — aspects of Roman imperial slavery was the use of spadones, or eunuchs, within the emperor’s personal sphere.
Roman law, specifically the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis, formally prohibited castration. The contradiction between this legal prohibition and the actual practices of the imperial elite represents one of the more revealing examples of the gap between Roman law and Roman behavior. Enforcement was inconsistent at best, particularly when the households involved belonged to those powerful enough to operate beyond ordinary accountability.
Eunuchs occupied a specific and carefully defined role in the imperial court. Drawn primarily from Eastern provinces — Parthia, Cappadocia, Asia Minor — they were simultaneously objects of cultural condescension and practical indispensability. Roman writers often characterized eunuchs as symbols of Eastern decadence while the same Roman elite continued to employ them in positions of intimate household service. The hypocrisy was visible and frequently noted, even in ancient sources.
The rationale for the practice, insofar as any rationale was offered, combined several elements: the preservation of certain physical characteristics considered desirable in a domestic setting, the creation of individuals with no family attachments or external loyalties, and, most fundamentally, the production of a form of total social dependency. A eunuch within the imperial household had no community outside it, no independent identity, and no future that did not pass through his owner’s favor. This was not an accidental byproduct of the practice — it was its purpose.
Sporus and the Theater of Imperial Power
The most thoroughly documented individual case of an enslaved boy within the Roman imperial system is that of a youth known in the sources as Sporus, who appears in Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars in connection with the Emperor Nero.
According to Suetonius, Nero arranged for Sporus to undergo a physical alteration, subsequently dressed him in women’s clothing, and conducted a public ceremony in which he referred to Sporus as his wife. The emperor reportedly called him Sabina — the name of Nero’s deceased former spouse. Sporus appeared with Nero in public, was present at official events, and lived within the imperial household under conditions that historians have interpreted as an extreme demonstration of imperial theatrical power rather than any form of genuine personal relationship.
Sporus had no meaningful choice in any of this. His situation illustrates precisely the dynamic that made the delicatus institution so troubling: the closer a boy was to the emperor’s personal sphere, the more completely his identity was dissolved into the purposes of his owner. He was not merely deprived of freedom — he was assigned a different identity entirely, one that served as an instrument for the public display of imperial excess and control.
What happened to Sporus after Nero’s death in 68 CE provides a grim coda to this story. He passed between subsequent rulers, his fate determined entirely by the political fortunes of those around him. He had no independent existence to return to. The Roman sources record that he eventually died by suicide, though the circumstances remain disputed. He was likely still a young man.
The Villa at Capri and the Limits of Evidence
Roman historical sources include persistent and troubling accounts of conditions within the private residences of several emperors, most notably the villa maintained by Tiberius on the island of Capri. Suetonius, Tacitus, and other ancient writers recorded detailed rumors about the behavior of Tiberius in this isolated setting, involving enslaved boys in ways that the sources describe with varying levels of explicitness.
Historians approach these accounts with appropriate methodological caution. Roman imperial biography was frequently shaped by political motivations, and accounts that depicted a departed emperor as personally depraved served obvious narrative purposes for writers working under his successors. Some of the more extreme details in Suetonius, in particular, may represent embellishment or political propaganda.
At the same time, the consistency of these reports across multiple independent sources, and the broader context of what is well-documented about the legal status of enslaved boys in imperial households, makes it difficult to dismiss them entirely as fabrication. Boys in these settings had no legal standing to refuse any demand placed on them, no institutional protection, and no recourse against abuse. Whatever actually occurred at Capri, the structural conditions that would have made abuse both possible and consequence-free were unambiguously present.
The Paradox of Visibility Without Voice
What distinguished the situation of enslaved boys in Roman elite households from other forms of ancient slavery was this particular combination: high visibility and complete voicelessness.
These boys were, in a sense, among the most publicly visible enslaved people in the Roman world. They appeared at banquets and public events. They were mentioned in literature and referenced in satirical poetry. Their presence was a recognized marker of elite status. And yet they generated almost no first-person record of any kind.
We know about them almost entirely through the perspectives of their owners, critics of their owners, or writers commenting on Roman social excess. The boys themselves — what they thought, what they feared, whether they formed any sense of personal identity within their constrained circumstances — are almost entirely absent from the historical record. Their voices were not preserved because they were not considered worth preserving.
This absence is itself historically significant. It reflects a society that was willing to display these boys publicly as symbols of refinement and wealth while simultaneously denying them any form of human recognition that might complicate the transaction. They were, in the language of Roman property law, res — things. The elaborate cultural apparatus surrounding them, the aesthetic vocabulary of delicatus and refinement, served partly to make this fundamental reality more comfortable to look at.
What This History Asks of Us
The Roman Empire is frequently held up as a foundational reference point for Western civilization — its law, its architecture, its literature, its engineering. This admiration is not without basis. Roman contributions to political philosophy, urban planning, and legal thinking shaped institutions that persist in modified form to the present day.
But civilizational achievement and civilizational cruelty have never been mutually exclusive. The same society that produced Cicero’s philosophical writings and Marcus Aurelius’s meditations on justice ran a sophisticated commercial market in children. The same legal tradition that developed concepts still present in modern contract law formally prohibited castration while providing no enforcement mechanism when emperors chose to ignore that prohibition.
History does not ask us to reject Roman civilization wholesale, but it does ask us to look at it completely. The boys who stood on platforms in the Forum Boarium, whose value was assessed by the crowd the way one might assess livestock, are as much a part of Roman history as the Senate and the aqueducts. Their absence from most popular accounts of ancient Rome is not a reflection of their historical insignificance — it is a reflection of choices made about what history is worth telling.
Juvenal’s famous question — Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — is usually translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” It was a question about power and accountability. In the context of these enslaved boys, it takes on an additional dimension. When those with absolute power operate in private, beyond the reach of law or social accountability, the most vulnerable bear the cost. Ancient Rome understood this dynamic and chose, for the most part, to look away.
We are in a better position now to choose differently.