=Urban Slaves.=—­The Roman nobles, like the Orientals of our day, delighted in surrounding themselves with a crowd of servants.  In a great Roman house lived hundreds of slaves, organized for different services.  There were slaves to care for the furniture, for the silver plate, for the objects of art; slaves of the wardrobe, valets and chambermaids, the troop of cooks, the slaves of the bath, the master of the house and his aids, the slaves to escort the master and mistress on the street, the litter-carriers, coachmen and grooms, secretaries, readers, copyists, physicians, teachers, actors, musicians, artisans of every kind, for in every great house grain was ground, flax was spun, and garments were woven.  Others, gathered in workshops, manufactured objects which the master sold to his profit.  Others were hired out as masons or as sailors; Crassus had 500 carpenter-slaves.  These classes of slaves were called “slaves of the city.”

=Rural Slaves.=—­Every great domain was tilled by a band of slaves.  They were the laborers, the shepherds, the vine-dressers, the gardeners, the fishermen, grouped together in squads of ten.  An overseer, himself a slave, superintended them.  The proprietor made it a matter to produce everything on his lands:  “He buys nothing; everything that he consumes he raises at home,” this is the compliment paid to the rich.  The Roman, therefore, kept a great number of country-slaves, as they were called.  A Roman domain had a strong resemblance to a village; indeed it was called a “villa.”  The name has been preserved:  what the French call “ville” since the Middle Ages is only the old Roman domain increased in size.

=Treatment of Slaves.=—­The kind of treatment the slaves received depended entirely on the character of the master.  Some enlightened and humane masters may be enumerated, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny, who fed their slaves well, talked with them, sometimes had them sit at table with them, and permitted them to have families and small fortunes (the peculium).

But other masters are mentioned who treated their slaves as animals, punished them cruelly, and even had them put to death for a whim.  Examples of these are not lacking.  Vedius Pollio, a freedman of Augustus, used to keep some lampreys in his fish-pond:  when one of his slaves carelessly broke a vase, he had him thrown into the fish-pond as food for the lampreys.  The philosopher Seneca paints in the following words the violent cruelty of the masters:  “If a slave coughs or sneezes during a meal, if he pursues the flies too slowly, if he lets a key fall noisily lo the floor, we fall into a great rage.  If he replies with too much spirit, if his countenance shows ill humor, have we any right to have him flogged?  Often we strike too hard and shatter a limb or break a tooth.”  The philosopher Epictetus, who was a slave, had had his ankle fractured in this way by his master.  Women were no more humane.  Ovid, in a compliment paid to a woman, says, “Many times she had her hair dressed in my presence, but never did she thrust her needle into the arm of the serving-woman.”