pages and amusing dwarfs are generally dear.  It is the business of the house-steward to see that each slave receives his daily or monthly rations of corn, a trifling sum of money for other needs, and perhaps an allowance of thin wine.  Many a slave also received a considerable number of “tips” from guests, as well as perquisites and presents from his master.  With economy he was thus enabled to purchase his own freedom.  The master might also in some cases provide the slave with the essentials of his dress, to wit, a coarse tunic, a rough cloak, and a pair of shoes or sabots.

Over all these persons, so long as they are slaves, the owner possesses absolute power.  He can box their ears, or condemn them to hard labour—­making them, for instance, work in chains upon his lands in the country or in a sort of prison-factory—­or he may punish them with blows of the rod, the lash, or the knout; he can brand them upon the forehead if they are thieves or runaways, or in the end, if they prove irreclaimable, he can crucify them.  Branded slaves who afterwards became free and rich sought to conceal the marks by wearing patches.  There were inevitably some instances in which masters proved so intolerably cruel that their slaves were driven to murder them.  To prevent any conspiracy of the kind the law ordained that, when a master was so killed, the slaves should one and all be put to death.  It is gratifying to learn that in the reign of Nero the whole populace sided with a body of slaves in this predicament and prevented the law from being carried out.

[Illustration:  FIG. 61.—­SLAVE IN FETTERS.]

But, being a typical Roman, Silius has a strong sense of justice; moreover he values public opinion as well as his own.  Also, being a typical Roman, he behaves with strictness and for the most part with a distinct haughtiness of manner, graduated, no doubt, according to the standing of the individual.  When, as was often the case, he did not even know the name of a slave whom he came across in hall or peristyle, he frequently addressed him as “Sirrah” or “Sir” or “You, Sir.”  To the waiter at table and for ordinary commands, where the master affects no ceremony, the commonest term is “boy,” precisely as that word is used in the East or garcon in French.  If Silius knew the actual appellation assigned to the slave when bought and was disposed to be kindly, he accosted him by it, calling him “Syrian,” or “Thracian,” or “Croesus,” or by his proper Greek or Egyptian name.  The slave, unlike the Roman citizen, owned but one name, and the shorter the better.

We meet, as is only natural, with many examples of great trust and confidence between master and slave, and, in the case of the superior types, no few instances of great kindness and consideration.  Pliny speaks of his “long friendship” for a cultivated slave named Zosimus, whom he set free, and whom, because he was liable to consumption, he sent to Egypt and the Riviera for the good of his health.  A faithful