The great spartacus’ woman is taken away and is now a slave in a mine, they retrieve her but she is obviously very weak and extremely badly treated, almost as if she was not far from death and would be worked to death in the mines.
My question is, I always thought even though Roman slaves were obviously ultimately slaves, they were treated with a certain level of respect and even had the opportunity sometimes to buy their freedom.
Is the portrayal of a slave being worked to death in a mine in the Roman Empire not in keeping, or is this a reality for some slaves, and that simply, some slaves were treated better than others?
For detail specific to the conditions of slaves condemned to the mines - which the Romans regarded as among the worst fates one could suffer even as a slave - you may be interested in this similar question with older answers by u/VagueHorizons and u/dat_underscore.
Speaking broadly about things like respect, or being given freedom outright or offered the opportunity to buy it, in the slave system of ancient Rome: while manumission did play a more prominent role in Roman slavery than in many of history's other well-known slave regimes, with manumission more frequent and manumitted slaves and their descendants afforded more prominence in free society, it is generally true that yes, as you say, some slaves were simply treated better than others. Slave society, like free society, had its internal hierarchies, its own classes of privileged and unprivileged slaves, and the personal secretary to a wealthy aristocrat could lead a life vastly richer in opportunities (though still ultimately dependent on the personality of and subject to the arbitrary whims of the slaveholder) than the hundreds or thousands of slaves toiling on that aristocrat's plantations in the countryside.
Because the wealthy and privileged aristocracy produced much of the literary record, the small upper crust of slaves who personally served and daily interacted with these aristocrats is heavily over-represented in the literary record (in later Roman history, long after Spartacus, the same would come to be true of the class of slaves who personally served the emperors). Elite Roman slaveholders more often recorded the existence of the few personal slaves they were in daily contact with than the mass of more ordinary slaves who toiled out of sight. Thus, even though Roman slavery was a relatively higher-manumission regime in which it was far from unheard-of for a slave to buy or be given their freedom, the skew of literary sources towards recording the most elite slaves of the most elite slaveholders certainly makes manumission (or respect for that matter) seem more ubiquitous than they really were. For the much larger majority, coercion and oppression marked the slave experience, not respect and eventual freedom.
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