flattery of his patron as client? It is the great work of the emperor to feed the Roman people. It may cost him his throne if the fleet from Africa be delayed too long, bearing corn to three hundred thousand idle and starving citizens. For here at least the master of rich and poor, of slave and freeman alike, pays his homage to the universal spirit of servility, and lives in dread of that people as a whole, of whom every single life and fortune are at his mercy. For the lord of a thousand slaves returning some day from his palace-villa on the cool heights of Tusculum, or the lovely shore of Baiæ, may find an order from the emperor granting to him the truly Cæsarean indulgence of choosing his own mode of death. Then will he collect a few chosen friends for the last social feast, discourse on the shortness and uncertainty of life, and order himself to be placed in the warm bath, where the obedient slave-physician, ever at his side, will skilfully open his veins, so that the stream of life may ebb away with the least suffering.*

Thus slave and master, patron and client, senator and emperor, form a graduated hierarchy of slavery, the social and political spirit of which becomes the model, as well as the basis, of society.

(c) Yet all this is as nothing to the fountain of moral corruption opened by slavery in every Roman household. It was not merely that the labour, the time, the health, and strength of

• Vide the death of Seneca.

the slave belonged to the master; not merely that he might be poorly fed, miserably lodged, beaten without mercy, cast out in his sickness or age, crucified in his youth; it was that the common nature of man in him was not recognised; that the last stronghold in which the moral being resides, the stronghold of purity, sanctity, and conscience, was recklessly invaded and violated. There was, be it remembered, according to the Roman law, and what is more, according to universal Roman custom, no such thing as adultery, no such thing as seduction, no such thing as outrage in the case of male as well as female slaves. In this respect, as in all others, they were the prey of the master. The Roman house was a fortress, within which, as concerns the relation of master and slave, the writ of the law did not run. What passed within it was not merely unpunished; it could not be known. The law of man-property was sacrosanct, and had priority over every thing, the law of human nature included. There is an outrage of animals which the English law till lately, as the divine law of old, forbade under pain of death; but that right of outrage itself, if we may so violate all propriety of language to express the utter violation of nature, that right of outrage itself was sacrosanct under the Roman law.

It is needless, then, to dwell on what was the moral character of the male and female slave within the precincts of a Roman palace. "The Roman

law by its distinction between a novitius and a veterator informs us of the effect which servitude exercised on the slaves themselves. A slave who had been a year or more in service was a veterator, a used man, and therefore of much less value; for, says the law-book, it is but too hard to improve a used slave, and adapt him to the service of a new master. The dealers, therefore, often passed off a veterator for a novitius. Thus, a year of service was sufficient so to spoil a man that he sunk considerably in value like any other worn-out ware.”*

But Rome was the centre of the world, and thither from every subject province streamed a host of slaves, the most accomplished and refined, soon to become the most abandoned, of both sexes. In them an inexhaustible supply of fresh victims made up for the rapid waste of life: and a slavemarket, fed by a subject world, was always at the flood. But what was the result to the masters? We find a series of laws passed by Augustus and the succeeding emperors, to encourage, to enjoin marriage, giving rewards and privileges to those who had families, fining and censuring celibacy. But all in vain. Under Augustus the number of unmarried citizens far exceeded that of the married. Poets, historians, philosophers complain that the Roman will not marry, that Roman families decrease in number. But their example is more powerful than their complaint.

* Döllinger, Heid. und Jud. p. 713.

Horace

and Virgil and Catullus and Tibullus, and the very ministers of the monarch who enjoins marriage, remain themselves voluptuous celibates. The utmost tenderness of the most pathetic and inspired of Latin poets is spent on the most profligate of even Roman women, the wife of another, until in the bitterness of his heart he is compelled to denounce her unequalled shame:

"Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,

Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam

Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes."

But few will marry; fewer still claim the privileges granted to the parent of three children: for the unnameable advantages of the childless far exceed any reward, immunity, or honour which imperial power can devise for the married. And if even in compliance with the imperial law they live in marriage, yet their married life is destitute of its natural fruit; and so Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Seneca, the two Plinies, Suetonius, and Tacitus, are married but childless.* By this, far more than by the suspicious cruelty of Tiberius, or by Nero's thirst for blood, the Roman nobility dies out. The old patrician, the newer noble, the newest senatorian families disappear. In vain are they replenished from the class of knights or even freedmen. The knights themselves, the rich middle class, suffer from the same cause. They are hardly kept up by continual suppletions from

• Döllinger, Heid. und Jud. p. 718.

below. And lastly, the very Roman plebs has long ceased to be that sturdy race of freemen which seceded to the Mons Sacer. It has been replenished again and again out of the surging tide of slavery. Already Scipio, the conqueror of Carthage, told the populace to their face that he was not to be daunted by the murmurs of those whom he himself had dragged in chains to Rome.* They were no longer "the dregs of Romulus," but the dregs of all the provinces who lived on the imperial poor-law, and swarmed by myriads all through the summer day to behold the encounter of gladiators and beasts in the Coliseum, and the race of rival charioteers in the Circus Maximus.

Thus, while the moral corruption, engendered by the sensual indulgences which slavery threw into the lap of the Romans, was causing the race of freemen in senate, knights, and people to die out, those classes themselves were continually replenished with slave-blood. For instance, the freedmen of the emperors acquired immense fortunes and armies of slaves; and one of them, Pallas, will have a brother, Antonius Felix, marked by one historian as the husband of three queens, and by another as 66 a monster of blood and lust, who wielded," in Judea, "the power of a king with the mind of a slave." In a short time this slave-blood ran through every vein of Roman society. And thus

• Valerius Maximus, vi. 11; quoted by Döllinger, p. 715. Tacitus, Hist. v. 9.