the circus was their peculiar joy,—­here they sought to drown the consciousness of their squalid degradation; they were sold into slavery for trifling debts; they had no homes.  The poor man had no ambition or hope; his wife was a slave; his children were precocious demons, whose prattle was the cry for bread, whose laughter was the howl of pandemonium, whose sports were the tricks of premature iniquity, whose beauty was the squalor of disease and filth; he fled from a wife in whom he had no trust, from children in whom he had no hope, from brothers for whom he felt no sympathy, from parents for whom he felt no reverence; the circus was his home, the fights of wild beasts were his consolation; the future was a blank, death was the release from suffering.  There were no hospitals for the sick and the old, except one on an island in the Tiber; the old and helpless were left to die, unpitied and unconsoled.  Suicide was so common that it attracted no attention.

Superstition culminated at Rome, for there were seen the priests and devotees of all the countries that it governed,—­“the dark-skinned daughters of Isis, with drum and timbrel and wanton mien; devotees of the Persian Mithras; emasculated Asiatics; priests of Cybele, with their wild dances and discordant cries; worshippers of the great goddess Diana; barbarian captives with the rites of Teuton priests; Syrians, Jews, Chaldaean astrologers, and Thessalian sorcerers....  The crowds which flocked to Rome from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean brought with them practices extremely demoralizing.  The awful rites of initiation, the tricks of magicians, the pretended virtues of amulets and charms, the riddles of emblematical idolatry with which the superstition of the East abounded, amused the languid voluptuaries who had neither the energy for a moral belief nor the boldness requisite for logical scepticism.”

We cannot pass by, in this enumeration of the different classes of Roman society, the number and condition of slaves.  A large part of the population belonged to this servile class.  Originally brought in by foreign conquest, it was increased by those who could not pay their debts.  The single campaign of Regulus introduced as many captives as made up a fifth part of the whole population.  Four hundred were maintained in a single palace, at a comparatively early period; a freedman in the time of Augustus left behind him forty-one hundred and sixteen; Horace regarded two hundred as the suitable establishment for a gentleman; some senators owned twenty thousand.  Gibbon estimates the number of slaves at about sixty millions,—­one-half of the whole population.  One hundred thousand captives were taken in the Jewish war, who were sold as slaves, and sold as cheap as horses.  William Blair supposes that there were three slaves to one freeman, from the conquest of Greece to the reign of Alexander Severus.  Slaves often cost two hundred thousand sesterces, yet everybody was eager to possess