he neither expected nor hoped—­but that he might die by a mode of death less horrible than being devoured by fishes.  Common as it was to torment slaves, and to put them to death, Augustus, to his honor be it spoken, was horrified by the cruelty of Vedius, and commanded both that the slave should be set free, that every crystal vase in the house of Vedius should be broken in his presence and that the fish pond should be filled up.  Even women inflicted upon their female slaves punishments of the most cruel atrocity for faults of the most venial character.  A brooch wrongly placed, a tress of hair ill-arranged, and the enraged matron orders her slave to be lashed and crucified.  If her milder husband interferes, she not only justifies the cruelty, but asks in amazement:  “What! is a slave so much of a human being?” No wonder that there was a proverb, “As many slaves, so many foes.”  No wonder that many masters lived in perpetual fear, and that “the tyrant’s devilish plea, necessity,” might be urged in favor of that odious law which enacted that, if a master was murdered by an unknown hand, the whole body of his slaves should suffer death,—­a law which more than once was carried into effect under the reigns of the Emperors.  Slavery, as we see in the case of Sparta and many other nations, always involves its own retribution.  The class of free peasant proprietors gradually disappears.  Long before this time Tib.  Gracchus, in coming home from Sardinia, had observed that there was scarcely a single freeman to be seen in the fields.  The slaves were infinitely more numerous than their owners.  Hence arose the constant dread of servile insurrections; the constant hatred of a slave population to which any conspirator revolutionist might successfully appeal; and the constant insecurity of life, which must have struck terror into many hearts.

[Footnote 20:  Juv. Sat. i. 219—­222.]

Such is but a faint and broad outline of some of the features of Seneca’s age; and we shall be unjust if we do not admit that much at least of the life he lived, and nearly all the sentiments he uttered, gain much in grandeur and purity from the contrast they offer to the common life of—­

     “That people victor once, now vile and base,
      Deservedly made vassal, who, once just,
      Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquered well,
      But govern ill the nations under yoke,
      Peeling their provinces, exhausted all
      By lust and rapine; first ambitious grown
      Of triumph, that insulting vanity;
      Then cruel, by their sports to blood inured
      Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts exposed,
      Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still,
      And from the daily scene effeminate. 
      What wise and valient men would seek to free
      These thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved;
      Or could of inward slaves make outward free?”
           MILTON, Paradise Regained, iv. 132-145.