Roman glassworkers were creative, so much so that almost all the techniques of glass manipulation used in the modern industry were highly developed by the end of the 1st century A.D. Roman glassworkers were not independent and entrepreneurial artisans. They were usually slaves held in bondage quite deliberately for their craft skills, as part of an Empire-wide industry reckoned to be producing as many as 100 million items of glassware year-in and year-out, for some five centuries and more.
