[140] Ingram, op. cit. p. 27 sq. Wallon, op. cit. i. 335 sq. Richter, op. cit. p. 151.
[141] Richter, op. cit. p. 157. Wallon, op. cit. i. 346 sqq.
[142] Schmidt, op. cit. ii. 212. Richter, op. cit. p. 151.
[143] Plato, Leges, vi. 777 sq.
[144] Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, viii. 11. 6 sq. Idem, Politica, i. 5, p. 1254.
[145] Idem, Politica, i. 3, p. 1253 b.
[146] Ibid. i. 2, 6, pp. 1252 b, 1255 a. See Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulide, 1400 sq.
The Roman jurists held up slavery as a mitigation of the horrors of war: the capture and preservation of enemies, they said, was its sole and exclusive origin in the past.[147] But in Rome as elsewhere, when once established, it contained in itself the germ of extension; all the children of a female slave followed the condition of the mother, according to the principle applicable to the offspring of the lower animals—“Partus sequitur ventrem.” And sooner or later, when these sources proved insufficient to maintain the supply, a regular commerce in slaves was established, which was based on the systematically prosecuted hunting of men in foreign lands.[148] To a much smaller extent the slave class was recruited by Roman citizens—by children sold by their fathers, by insolvent debtors, or by criminals condemned to servitude as a punishment for some heinous offence.[149] The idea of a Roman becoming the slave of a fellow-citizen was never quite agreeable to the Roman mind. According to an ancient law the debtor, after being made over to the creditor, should be sold abroad or trans Tiberim.[150] Subsequently, in 326 B.C., the creditor’s lien was restricted to the goods of his debtor, if the latter was a Roman citizen;[151] and during the Pagan Empire the sale of freeborn children by their fathers was prohibited.[152] The power, originally unlimited, which the master had over his slave was also, in the course of time, subjected to limitations. We have seen that since the days of Claudius and Antoninus Pius legal check was put on the master’s right of killing his slave.[153] The Lex Petronia, A.D. 61, forbade masters to compel their slaves to fight with wild beasts.[154] In the time of Nero an official was appointed to hear complaints of the wrongs done by masters to their slaves.[155] Antoninus Pius directed that slaves treated with excessive cruelty, who had taken refuge at an altar or imperial image, should be sold; and this provision was extended to cases in which the master had employed a slave in a way degrading to him or beneath his character.[156] In public auctions of slaves regard was paid to the claims of relationship,[157] and in the interpretation of testaments it was assumed that members of the same family were not to be separated by the division of the succession.[158] In those days when Roman slavery had lost its original patriarchal and, to speak with Mommsen,[159] “in some measure innocent” character, when the victories of Rome and the increasing slave trade had introduced into the city innumerable slaves, when those simpler habits of life which in early times somewhat mitigated the rigour of the law had changed—the lot of the Roman slave was often extremely hard, and numerous acts of shocking cruelty were committed.[160] But we also hear, from the early days of the Empire, that masters who had been cruel to their slaves were pointed at with disgust in all parts of the city, and were hated and loathed.[161] And with a fervour which can hardly be surpassed Seneca and other Stoics argued that the slave is a being with human dignity and human rights, born of the same race as ourselves, living the same life, and dying the same death—in short, that our slaves “are also men, and friends, and our fellow-servants.”[162] Epictetus even went so far as to condemn altogether the keeping of slaves, a radicalism explicable from the history of his own life. “What you avoid suffering yourself,” he says, “seek not to impose on others. You avoid slavery, for instance; take care not to enslave. For if you can bear to exact slavery from others, you appear to have been yourself a slave.”[163] These teachings could not fail to influence both legislation and public sentiment. Imbued with the Stoic philosophy, the jurists of the classical period declared that all men are originally free by the law of Nature, and that slavery is only “an institution of the Law of Nations, by which one man is made the property of another, in opposition to natural right.”[164]
[147] Hunter, Exposition of Roman Law, p. 160 sq. Institutiones, i. 3. 3:—“Slaves are called servi, because generals are wont to sell their captives, and so to preserve (servare), and not to destroy them. They are also called mancipia, because they are taken from the enemy with the strong hand (manu capiuntur).”
[148] Mommsen, History of Rome, iii. 305 sq. Wallon, op. cit. ii. 46 sqq. Ingram, op. cit. p. 38.