As in the Greek States at an earlier period the slaves numbered four or five times as many as the citizens proper, so the projiortion in the Roman Empire must h.ave been similarly great. Thus Plin_y [HX xxxiii. 47) mentions a wealthy Roman, n.amed Claudius Isidorus, of the time of Augustus, who left by will 4116 slaves as part of his posses- sions. When, too, it was proiiosed that slaves should wear a distinctive dress, the iiropo.sal was abandoned lest this should reveal their strength ; and Roman history had already furnished evidence of grim possibilities in the serious slave wars of Sicily which occurred in the latter part of the 2nd cent. B.C. Similar considerations caused the enact- ment of severe laws that supplied ilrastic in terrorcin methods for keeping slaves in subjection. Tacitus mentions the case of Pedanius Sccundus, prefect of the city, who had been murdered by one of his slaves, and under a law requiring that, should a slave kill his master, all the slaves of the same household should forfeit their lives, some 400 of the culprit's fellow-slaves were put to death at Rome A.n. 61 {Ann. xiv. 42).
2. The ' libertini.' — As an outcome of the system of slavery, tlie class of libertini or freedmen, which formed so conspicuous a feature of Roman society, calls for passing notice. These were citizens who either had actually been slaves themselves afore- time or were the immediate desiendants (if freed slaves. Thej' must have far outnumbered the free- born, and po.-isessed overwhelming inlluence in the State. Manumission was of frequent occurrence. The enormous numbers of captives reduceil to slavery after every war, and the frequent lluctua- tions in great Roman establishments, all tended to make manumission easy. Many slaves were per- mitted by their masters to accumulate savings and ])urchase their freedom with the money. Some- liuies the enfranchisement was accomplished by the solenm rite of fictitious purchase on the part of some divinity. The slave first paid the purchase money which he had saved into the treasury of
510
SLAVE, SLAVERY
SLAVE, SLAVERY
some temple : then owner and slave went together to the temple, ami the latter was supposed to be sold to the god, the price being duly paid to the master. The slave became technically tlie property of the god (and was indeed regarded as his prot6g6), but was to all intents and purposes, and especially as regards his former master, a completely free man. In inscriptions and papyri frequent refer- ences are to be found to slaves who had been bought by this or that god for freedom. The practice sheds much light on the argument pursued by St. Paul in Gal 4. 5 (see A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East [Eng. tr., London, 1911, p. 326]). Manumission was often regarded as a normal result of faithful service. A man would emancipate slaves in individual cases during his own life-time, whilst very commonly a master would set a multi- tude at liberty on his death-bed or by will. But such wholesale emancipation was attended with evils of its own. One result was to flood the citizens' roll with crowds of 'undesirables.' On this account Augustus ordained (lex Furia Caninia, A.D. 8) that in no case should more than 100 slaves be emancipated by will.
When a slave was set free not by a legal but by an extra-legal process, i.e. by a simple exercise of authority on the part of his master, a kind of feudal tie still united the two. The freedman was his master's cliens, his master being now known as his patronus. A Roman noble depended very much on the multitude of his 'clients' for his political and social importance. Only in the third generation did these restrictions disappear and the family of the freedman come into the enjoyment of complete liberty. But the power possessed by this class in the early Christian period was very great : emancipated slaves or their descendants occupied all kinds of State offices. The lihcrlini, too, prospered greatly in trade and commerce, being, indeed, as a class notorious for their ambi- tion to amass wealth. The literature of the early Empire exhibits many of them as playing the part of the nouveaux riches and vulgarly emulating the luxury of aristocratic palaces.
3. Evils of slavery. — The evils of slavery were manifold, deep-seated, far-reaching. If, as Matthew Arnold puts it,
' On that hard Pagan world dis^st
And secret loathing fell. Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell'
iObermann once More, line3"93-96),
the evils of slavery contributed materially to that result.
(a) The slave population was necessarily a hot- br.d of vice, contaminating all who came into con- tact with it. Moral excellence was not expected in a slave. He was only ' an animated chattel ' {KTTj/ia iixfvxov) : a tool could similarly be described as ' an inanimate slave ' (fii/'uxos SoSXos). {Ct. Varro's classification of implements, in de lie rust. I. xvii. 1 : (1) those with voice and speech, e.g. slaves; (2) those with voice but not speech, e.g. oxen ; (3) those without voice, e.g. wagons.) The term '.slaves' occurs only once in EVV of the NT, viz. in Rev 18" as a crowning item in Babylon's merchandise : and there it represents ffiifiaTa. ('bodies'). How significant that cQ/ia thus came to denote a slave ! The somewhat similar use of the term 'hands' in modem industrialism — with subtle possibilities of suggestion lurking in the use^has often been re- marked upon. Vast numbers of slaves hailed from Greece, from Western Asia, and from Egypt, whose great cities were the notorious seats of the wildest aljominations ; and their vices flourished with un- impeded growth.