These judicious remarks of a foreigner only expressed what was probably a common feeling among the best men of that time.  Augustus made some attempt to limit the enfranchising power of the owner; but the Leges Aelia Sentia and Furia Caninia do not lie within the compass of this book.  No great success could attend these efforts; the abnormal circumstances which had brought to Rome the great familiae of slaves reacted inevitably upon the citizen body itself through the process of manumission.  Rome had to pay heavily in this, as in so many other ways, for her advancement to the sovereignty of the civilised world.  I may be allowed to translate the eloquent words in which the French historian of slavery, in whose great work the history of ancient slavery is treated as only a scholar-statesman can treat it, sums up this aspect of the subject: 

“Emancipation, prevalent as it might appear to be towards the beginning of the Empire, was not a step towards the suppression of slavery, but a natural and inevitable sequence of the institution itself,—­an outlet for excess in an epoch overabundant in slaves:  a means of renewing the mass, corrupted by the deleterious influence of its own condition, before it should be totally ruined.  As water, diverted from its free course, becomes impure in the basin which imprisons it, and when released, will still retain its impurity; so it is not to be thought that instincts perverted by slavery, habits depraved from childhood, could be reformed and redressed in the slave by a tardy liberation.  Thrust into the midst of a society itself vitiated by the admixture of slavery, he only became more unrestrainedly, more dangerously bad.  Manumission was thus no remedy for the deterioration of the citizens:  it was powerless even to better the condition of the slave."[364]

3.  The ethical aspect of Roman slavery.  What were the moral effects of the system (1) on the slaves themselves; (2) on the freemen who owned them?

First, as regards the slaves themselves, there are two facts to be fully realised; when this is done, the inferences will be sufficiently obvious.  Let us remember that by far the greater number of the slaves, both in the city and on the land, were brought from countries bordering on the Mediterranean, where they had been living in some kind of elementary civilisation, in which the germs of further development were present in the form of the natural ties of race and kinship and locality, of tribe or family or village community, and with their own religion, customs, and government.  Permanent captivity in a foreign land and in a servile condition snapped these ties once and for all.  To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported out of their own country—­and these were probably the vast majority,—­were thereby deprived for the rest of their lives of all social