Male with no labor skills and no knowledge of Latin is sold on slave market in Rome 1CE. What is his likely fate?

The vast majority of slaves in the Roman world by far worked as agricultural labor in the fields. While films and other elements of popular culture emphasize the use of slaves in the mines or in the arena, such work made up a small part of the total servile labor force. The labor requirements of the mines were dwarfed by the constant need for agricultural slaves in a society whose economy revolved around the harvest, and the slaves butchered in the arena were generally war captives taken in recent victories. An unskilled slave with little knowledge of a "civilized" language (Latin alone need not be the only qualification, Greek-speakers were highly prized and very expensive, even if they knew no Latin) was unlikely to find himself purchased to be a house slave unless he or she was physically attractive or intelligent, and the most common place for such an individual to end up was on a field somewhere.

The horror of the mines and arena are etched into popular imagination by films like Barabbas, but the life of the agricultural slaves that dominated the Roman servile population was harsh and very frequently abruptly short. While house slaves might sometimes be lucky enough to have masters who treated at least some of them as human beings, agricultural slaves were little more than beasts of burden, and were treated as such. Cato's advice on the treatment of one's agricultural slaves is telling: among his advice is a reminder not to feed sick slaves as much. Likewise, Cato sees little difference between his agricultural slaves and livestock:

boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et si quid aliud supersit, vendat

Sell old cattle, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old cart, old tools, an old slave, a sick slave, and whatever else serves no purpose.

Cato goes on to recommend that slaves only receive a single tunic and blanket every other year, and only after their old ones have been reused. Most agricultural slaves lived short lives, being worked to the point of death and then cast aside when they could no longer work--it was cheaper and easier simply to buy a new slave, which could then be worked just as hard until he needed to be replaced like a worn-out tool. Cato refers, but does not feel the need to explain, to the compediti, who regularly receive the least food and the worst treatment. Compediti, or "the shackled ones," were the regular workers of the fields, chained together and confined to an underground prison, the ergastulum. Columella, a comparatively decent farm-owner (he suggests making sure that the fieldhands are fed adequately), remarks that wise farm-owners should inspect their compediti to make sure that they're chained properly and that their overseer is doing a good job of making sure they can't move about freely. Otherwise there is risk of revolt--it is notable that what few almost humane measures he suggests for the field slaves he justifies by pointing out the threat of revolt, as with the inhumane ones. Even Columella thinks of the field slaves as little more than animals, however. He remarks that slave women who produce enough offspring should be exempt from manual tasks or even freed. Theoretically a good deal, except that Roman law enslaved children born of servile mothers, and nowhere does Columella mention freeing the offspring; to Columella these women are breeding stock, and their freedom is a small price to pay for the next generation of slaves they have produced (he recommends freeing women who have had four or more children, a significant gain on his investment).

Also noteworthy is that, despite the popular image of massive latifundia stretching through Italy and staffed almost exclusively by slaves, in fact slaves were probably not a majority of workers on most estates, especially not in the busy harvest and planting seasons, and their treatment often appears proportional to their status as comparatively menial workers. Cato expresses a preference for hiring unskilled free labor to fill in during busy times of the year, and this migration of workers to and from the fields with the season was both an economic and cornerstone of Roman society. Tiberius Gracchus failed in his bid for tribunician reelection because his supporters could not enter the city for the vote, occupied as they were with the harvest (though many of them were landowners and members of the rural tribes), and Vespasian was reputedly descended from a man whose fortune was made transporting free workers from Umbria into Sabine country for the harvest. Slaves bought for the harvest would be nothing but idle mouths during the slower parts of the year, and the Roman farmer could ill afford to keep idle and subversive individuals around, a money-sink which might explode any minute.