[Sidenote:  Whence the slaves came.  Their treatment.] A vast impetus had been given to the slave-trade at the time of the conquest of Macedonia, about thirty-five years before our period.  The great slave-producing countries were those bordering on the Mediterranean—­Africa, Asia, Spain, &c.  An organized system of man-hunting supplied the Roman markets, and slave-dealers were part of the ordinary retinue of a Roman army.  When a batch of slaves reached its destination they were kept in a pen till bought.  Those bought for domestic service would no doubt be best off, and the cunning, mischievous rogue, the ally of the young against the old master of whom we read in Roman comedy, if he does not come up to our ideal of what a man should be, does not seem to have been physically very wretched.  Even here, however, we see how degraded a thing a slave was, and the frequent threats of torture prove how utterly he was at the mercy of a cruel master’s caprice.  We know, too, that when a master was arraigned on a criminal charge, the first thing done to prove his guilt was to torture his slaves.  But just as in America the popular figure of the oily, lazy, jocular negro, brimming over with grotesque good-humour and screening himself in the weakness of an indulgent master, merely served to brighten a picture of which the horrible plantation system was the dark background; so at Rome no instances of individual indulgence were a set-off against the monstrous barbarities which in the end brought about their own punishment, and the ruin of the Republic. [Sidenote:  Dread inspired by the prospect of Roman slavery.] Frequent stories attest the horrors of Roman slavery felt by conquered nations.  We read often of individuals, and sometimes of whole towns, committing suicide sooner than fall into the conquerors’ hands.  Sometimes slaves slew their dealers, sometimes one another.  A boy in Spain killed his three sisters and starved himself to avoid slavery.  Women killed their children with the same object.  If, as it is asserted, the plantation-system was not yet introduced into Italy, such stories, and the desperate out-breaks, and almost incredibly merciless suppression of slave revolts, prove that the condition of the Roman slave was sufficiently miserable. [Sidenote:  The horrors of slavery culminated in Sicily.] But doubtless misery reached its climax in Sicily, where that system was in full swing.  Slaves not sold for domestic service were there branded and often made to work in chains, the strongest serving as shepherds.  Badly fed and clothed, these shepherds plundered whenever they found the chance.  Such brigandage was winked at, and sometimes positively encouraged, by the owners, while the governors shrank from punishing the brigands for fear of offending their masters.  As the demand for slaves grew, slave-breeding as well as slave-importation was practised.  No doubt there were as various theories as to the most profitable management of slaves then as in America lately.  Damophilus had the