for example, librarians, doctors, or even as body-servants, were in intimate and happy relations with their owners[351], and in the household of a humane man no well-conducted slave need fear bodily degradation.  Cicero and his friend Atticus both had slaves whom they valued, not only for their useful service, but as friends.  Tiro, who edited Cicero’s letters after his death, and to whom we therefore owe an eternal debt of gratitude, was the object of the tenderest affection on the part of his owner, and the letters addressed to him by the latter when he was taken ill at Patrae in 50 B.C. are among the most touching writings that have come down to us from antiquity.  “I miss you,” he writes in one of them[352], “yes, but I also love you.  Love prompts the wish to see you in good health:  the other motive would make me wish to see you as soon as possible,—­and the former one is the best.”  Atticus, too, had his Tiro, Alexis, “imago Tironis,” as Cicero calls him in a letter to his friend,[353] and many others who were engaged in the work of copying and transcribing books, which was one of Atticus’ many pursuits.  All such slaves would sooner or later be manumitted, i.e. transmuted from a res to a persona; and in the ease with which this process of transmutation could be effected we have the one redeeming point of the whole system of bondage.  According to the oldest and most efficient form (vindicta), a legal ceremony had to be gone through in the presence of a praetor; but the praetor could easily be found, and there was no other difficulty.  This was the form usually adopted by an owner wishing to free a slave in his own lifetime; but great numbers were constantly manumitted more irregularly, or by the will of the master after his death.[354]

Thus the leading facts in the legal position of the Roman slave were two:  (1) he was absolutely at the disposal of his owner, the law never interfering to protect him; (2) he had a fair prospect of manumission if valuable and well-behaved, and if manumitted he of course became a Roman citizen (libertus or libertinus) with full civil rights,[355] remaining, however, according to ancient custom, in a certain position of moral subordination to his late master, owing him respect, and aid if necessary.  Let us apply these two leading facts to the conditions of Roman life as we have already sketched them.  We shall find that they have political results of no small importance.

First, we must try to realise that the city of Rome contained at least 200,000 human beings over whom the State had no direct control whatever.  All such crimes, serious or petty, as are now tried and disposed of in our criminal courts, were then, if committed by a slave, punishable only by the master; and in the majority of cases, if the familia were a large one, they probably never reached his ears.  The jurisdiction to which the slave was responsible was a private one, like that of the great feudal lord