Management of Business by Slaves

Business in all these different branches was uniformly carried on by means of slaves.  The money-lenders and bankers instituted, throughout the range of their business, additional counting-houses and branch banks under the direction of their slaves and freedmen.  The company, which had leased the customs-duties from the state, appointed chiefly its slaves and freedmen to levy them at each custom-house.  Every one who took contracts for buildings bought architect-slaves; every one who undertook to provide spectacles or gladiatorial games on account of those giving them purchased or trained a company of slaves skilled in acting, or a band of serfs expert in the trade of fighting.  The merchant imported his wares in vessels of his own under the charge of slaves or freedmen, and disposed of them by the same means in wholesale or retail.  We need hardly add that the working of mines and manufactories was conducted entirely by slaves.  The situation of these slaves was, no doubt, far from enviable, and was throughout less favourable than that of slaves in Greece; but, if we leave out of account the classes last mentioned, the industrial slaves found their position on the whole more tolerable than the rural serfs.  They had more frequently a family and a practically independent household, with no remote prospect of obtaining freedom and property of their own.  Hence such positions formed the true training school of those upstarts from the servile class, who by menial virtues and often by menial vices rose to the rank of Roman citizens and not seldom attained great prosperity, and who morally, economically, and politically contributed at least as much as the slaves themselves to the ruin of the Roman commonwealth.

Extent of Roman Mercantile Transactions
Coins and Moneys

The Roman mercantile transactions of this period fully kept pace with the contemporary development of political power, and were no less grand of their kind.  Any one who wishes to have a clear idea of the activity of the traffic with other lands, needs only to look into the literature, more especially the comedies, of this period, in which the Phoenician merchant is brought on the stage speaking Phoenician, and the dialogue swarms with Greek and half Greek words and phrases.  But the extent and zealous prosecution of Roman business-dealings may be traced most distinctly by means of coins and monetary relations.  The Roman denarius quite kept pace with the Roman legions.  We have already mentioned(19) that the Sicilian mints—­last of all that of Syracuse in 542—­were closed or at any rate restricted to small money in consequence of the Roman conquest, and that in Sicily and Sardinia the -denarius- obtained legal circulation at least side by side with the older silver currency and probably very soon became the exclusive legal tender.  With equal if not greater rapidity the Roman silver coinage penetrated into Spain, where the great silver-mines