THE ROMANS AND SLAVERY

Dunstan Times, Issue 2087, 23 July 1901, Page 3

THE ROMANS AND SLAVERY

From earliest times the slave was a factor in the Roman household and the Roman Btate. He had no rights. His master could work him, use him, and kill him, just as he could one of his oxen. At the rise of the Republic the Roman himself lived a life of toil and worked in his fields. Cincinatus was ploughing without his cloak when the messengers from the .Senate came to hail him dictator.. In those days the slave was in a proper sense a fellow-worker. This is, what Mouomsen calls the " old, and in some measure innocent, form of slavery," under which the farmer tilled the land along with his slave, or if he possessed more land than he could manage, placed his slave as a steward over it. No large number were employed in the small Roman holdings of that early 2>eriod. But as the patrician class became more affluent and foreign conquest extended, involving as it did the absence for long periods of the Romans on military service, the demand for slave labor in Italy increased enormously.' This demand was mainly supplied by captives taken in war. In Epirus, for instance, after the victories of iEmilius I'aulus, 150,000 captives were sold. At Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, 150,000 Teutons and Cimbri were taken. Caesar on one single occasion in Gaul sold 63,000 captives. As a result of all this Blair asserts that for some centuries after the conquest of Greece by the Romans (in 146 8.C.), there were three times as many slaves as freemen in Italy. In the reign of Claudius (a.i>. 222-235"), the entire number of slaves in Italy is fixed at 20.832,000,and that of the free 'population at 6.944,000.