[Footnote 73:  It will be recalled that Aristotle described slaves as living tools.  In Roman law a slave was not a persona but a res.  Cf.  Gaius II, 15.]

[Footnote 74:  One of the most interesting of these freemen labourers of whom we know is that Ofellus whom Horace (Satire II, 2) tells us was working with cheerful philosophy as a hired hand upon his own ancestral property from which he had been turned out in the confiscations following the battle of Philippi.  This might have been the fate of Virgil also had he not chanced to have powerful friends.]

[Footnote 75:  “Mais lorsque, malgre le degout de la chaine domestique, nous voyons naitre entre les males et les femelles ces sentiments que la nature a partout fondes sur un libre choix:  lorsque l’amour a commence a unir ces couples captifs, alors leur esclavage, devenu pour eux aussi doux que la douce liberte, leur fait oublier peu a peu leur droits de franchise naturelle et les prerogatives de leur etat sauvage; et ces lieux des premiers plaisirs, des premieres amours, ces lieux si chers a tout etre sensible, deviennent leur demeure de predilection et leur habitation de choix:  l’education de la famille rend encore cette affection plus profonde et la communique en meme temps aux petits, qui s’etant trouves citoyens par naissance d’un sejour adopte par leur parents, ne cherchent point a en changer:  car ne pouvant avoir que pen ou point d’idee d’un etat different ni d’un autre sejour ils s’attachent au lieu ou ils sont nes comme a leur patrie; et l’on sait que la terre natale est chere a ceux meme qui l’habitent en esclaves.”

One might assume that this eloquent and comfortable essay on contentment in slavery had been written to illustrate Varro’s text at this point, but, as a matter of fact, it is Buffon’s observation (VIII, 460) on the domestication of wild ducks!]

[Footnote 76:  Saserna’s rule would be the equivalent of one hand to every five acres cultivated.  With slave labour, certainly with negro slave labour, the experience of American cotton planters in the nineteenth century very nearly confirmed this requirement, but one of the economic advantages of the abolition of slavery is illustrated by this very point.  In Latimer’s First Sermon before King Edward VI, animadverting on the advance in farm rents in his day, he says that his father, a typical substantial English yeoman of the time of the discovery of America, was able to employ profitably six labourers in cultivating 120 acres, or, say, one hand for each twenty acres, which was precisely what Arthur Young recommended as necessary for high farming at the end of the eighteenth century.  At the beginning of the twentieth century the American farmer seldom employs more than one hand for every eighty acres cultivated, but this is partly due to the use of improved machinery and partly to the fact that his land is not thoroughly cultivated.]

[Footnote 77:  This example of Roman cost accounting is matched by Walter of Henley in thirteenth century England.