As he has no very early call to the imperial court upon the Palatine, he will now proceed to hold his own reception of morning callers.  For this purpose he will come out to the spacious hall, which has been already described as the most essential part of a Roman house, and will there establish himself in the opening of the recess or bay which has also been described as a kind of reception-room or parlour.  Before he arrives, the hall has been swept and polished by the brooms and sponges of the slaves, under the direction of a foreman.  The number of Silius’ household slaves is very great.  Very many Romans of course owned no slave at all; many had but one or two; but it was considered that a person of anything like respectable means could hardly do with less than ten.  Silius will probably employ several times that number.  We have mentioned the valet, the barber, the wardrobe-keeper, and the amanuensis.  We must add to these the cooks, the pastry-makers, the waiters, the room-servants, the doorkeeper, the footmen, messengers, litter-carriers, the butler and pantrymen.  Some of the superior slaves have drudges of their own.  The librarian, accountant, and steward are all slaves.  Even the family physician or architect may be a slave.  Many of these men may be persons of education and talent.  Their one deficiency is that they are not free.  Many of them are in colour and feature indistinguishable from the people outside; most, however, show their origin in their foreign physique.  They are Phrygians, Cappadocians, Syrians, Jews, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Numidians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, Thracians, and Greeks.  Their master either inherited them from his father or friends, or he bought them in the slave-market.  For whatever reason they became slaves—­whether as prisoners of war, by birth, through debt, through condemnation for some offence, by kidnapping like that practised by the Corsairs or the modern Arabs, or through being sold by their own parents—­they had become the Property of slave-dealers, who picked them up in the depots on the Black Sea or at Delos or Alexandria, and brought them to Rome.  There they were stripped and exposed for sale, the choicer specimens in a select part of a fashionable shop, the more ordinary types in the auction mart, where they were placed upon a stand or stone bench, were labelled with their age, nationality, defects, and accomplishments, and were sold either under a guarantee or without one.  For an ordinary room-slave Silius, or his agent for him, has paid perhaps L20; for a servant of more special skill, such as a particularly soft-handed barber, perhaps L50; the price of a muleteer who was “too deaf to overhear private conversation in a carriage” might thereby be enhanced to L150; for a slave with educational or artistic accomplishments—­a good reader, reciter, secretary, musician, or actor—­he may have paid some hundreds.  If he is a man of morbid tastes, and affects a particular kind of dainty favourite, he may go as far as a thousand.  Curly-haired