Why do you insist on putting your ignorance on display?
Agricultural, quarry, and mining slaves have always been very badly treated, whether Roman villani or the poor Greek slaves in the silver-mines of Naxos, I think it was, who extended their deep shafts too far and had the Mediterranean Sea break in on them. A recent article in Archaeology about the silver-mines of the Laurion Peninsula showed how narrow those ancient adits were -- a person couldn't stand up in them, nor turn around. Even with the advantages of battery-powered fluorescent lighting and flashlights, the archaeologists who investigate those old mines today assure us it's still a very creepy environment, not at all for the faint of heart. What it must have been like to hear the roar of seawater breaking into shafts that were above and behind you must have been just unimaginable.
The Romans kept their villani in tiger cages and worked them like road gangs. Men who weren't savages when they went into the fields, became savages -- hence the stock medieval morality-play character, the villain. It was slaves like these that Spartacus raised during the Servile War in 71 B.C.
Greek and Roman mining slaves had an expected lifespan of about two years. Most were captured soldiers who would have enslaved the Romans had they won instead. At least this is what the tour guides in Italy claimed.
If you insist on misunderstanding everything discussion is difficult.
What I was referring to was the nature of slavery in ancient times not the work that was done. In those days there was no hereditary slavery based upon race as in the American South. When cities were taken in war often the inhabitants were enslaved which, as I mentioned, frequently led to slaves more educated than their masters. Aesop, for example, was such. Greek slaves were often the teachers of Roman youth. This was totally different than the degraded condition Southern slaves were kept in partially through laws which made teaching them to read a crime. Does this mean there weren't gulag-like conditions in the mines? No, of course not but it also did not prevent you from trying to exculpate the Slavers from their guilt.
Besides you wouldn't recognize ignorance if it bit you in the ass.