This is the best summary I could come up with:

The brutality of the working conditions in the mills of the time is graphically described in Book IX of “The Golden Ass” by the second-century author Apuleius, the archaeological site noted in a statement issued Friday.

With their feet chained, and dressed in rags, Apuleius describes the workers as having “eyes so bleary from the scorching heat of that smoke-filled darkness they could barely see, and like wrestlers sprinkled with dust before a fight, they were coarsely whitened with floury ash.”

The donkeys were no better off: “Their flanks were cut to the bone from relentless whipping, their hoofs distorted to strange dimensions from the repetitive circling, and their whole hide blotched by mange and hollowed by starvation.”

The iron bars on the window of the bakery were designed to prevent the enslaved workers from fleeing, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said in a telephone interview.

In another room — which contained the lararium, or household shrine — excavation earlier this year uncovered a series of political inscriptions, the ancient equivalent of today’s electoral manifestoes and posters.

For researchers, the discovery of political slogans inside the house was a first for Pompeii, Chiara Scappaticcio, professor of Latin at the University in Naples Federico II, said, and it suggested the possible collusion between elected officials and the owners of bakeries.

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