The mention of the freedmen in this letter may serve to remind us of the political results of manumission, the second fact in the legal aspect of Roman slavery. The most important of these is the rapid importation of foreign blood into the Roman citizen body, which long before the time of Cicero largely consisted of enfranchised slaves or their descendants; it was to this that Scipio Aemilianus alluded in his famous words to the contio he was addressing after his return from Numantia, "Silence, ye to whom Italy is but a stepmother" (Val. Max. 6. 2. 3). Had manumission been held in check or in some way superintended by the State, there would have been more good than harm in it. Many men of note, who had an influence on Roman culture, were libertini, such as Livius Andronicus and Caecilius the poets; Terence, Publilius Syrus, whose acquaintance we made in the last chapter; Tiro and Alexis, and rather later Verrius Flaccus, one of the most learned men who ever wrote in Latin. But the great increase in the number of slaves, and the absence of any real difficulty in effecting their manumission, led to the enfranchisement of crowds of rascals as compared with the few valuable men. The most striking example is the enfranchisement of 10,000 by Sulla, who according to custom took his name Cornelius, and, though destined to be a kind of military guarantee for the permanence of the Sullan institutions, only became a source of serious peril to the State at the time of Catiline's conspiracy. Caesar, who was probably more alive to this kind of social danger than his contemporaries, sent out a great number of libertini,—the majority, says Strabo, of his colonists,—to his new foundation at Corinth[362]. But Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the time of Augustus, when he stayed some time in Rome, draws a terrible picture of the evil effects of indiscriminate manumission, unchecked by the law[363].
"Many," he says, "are indignant when they see unworthy men manumitted, and condemn a usage which gives such men the citizenship of a sovereign state whose destiny is to govern the world. As for me, I doubt if the practice should be stopped altogether, lest greater evil should be the result; I would rather that it should be checked as far as possible, so that the state may no longer be invaded by men of such villainous character. The censors, or at least the consuls, should examine all whom it is proposed to manumit, inquiring into their origin and the reasons and mode of their enfranchisement, as in their examination of the equites. Those whom they find worthy of citizenship should have their names inscribed on tables, distributed among the tribes, with leave to reside in the city. As to the crowd of villains and criminals, they should be sent far away, under pretext of founding some colony."
These judicious remarks of a foreigner only expressed what was probably a common feeling among the best men of that time. Augustus made some attempt to limit the enfranchising power of the owner; but the Leges Aelia Sentia and Furia Caninia do not lie within the compass of this book. No great success could attend these efforts; the abnormal circumstances which had brought to Rome the great familiae of slaves reacted inevitably upon the citizen body itself through the process of manumission. Rome had to pay heavily in this, as in so many other ways, for her advancement to the sovereignty of the civilised world. I may be allowed to translate the eloquent words in which the French historian of slavery, in whose great work the history of ancient slavery is treated as only a scholar-statesman can treat it, sums up this aspect of the subject:
"Emancipation, prevalent as it might appear to be towards the beginning of the Empire, was not a step towards the suppression of slavery, but a natural and inevitable sequence of the institution itself,—an outlet for excess in an epoch overabundant in slaves: a means of renewing the mass, corrupted by the deleterious influence of its own condition, before it should be totally ruined. As water, diverted from its free course, becomes impure in the basin which imprisons it, and when released, will still retain its impurity; so it is not to be thought that instincts perverted by slavery, habits depraved from childhood, could be reformed and redressed in the slave by a tardy liberation. Thrust into the midst of a society itself vitiated by the admixture of slavery, he only became more unrestrainedly, more dangerously bad. Manumission was thus no remedy for the deterioration of the citizens: it was powerless even to better the condition of the slave."[364]
3. The ethical aspect of Roman slavery. What were the moral effects of the system (1) on the slaves themselves; (2) on the freemen who owned them?
First, as regards the slaves themselves, there are two facts to be fully realised; when this is done, the inferences will be sufficiently obvious. Let us remember that by far the greater number of the slaves, both in the city and on the land, were brought from countries bordering on the Mediterranean, where they had been living in some kind of elementary civilisation, in which the germs of further development were present in the form of the natural ties of race and kinship and locality, of tribe or family or village community, and with their own religion, customs, and government. Permanent captivity in a foreign land and in a servile condition snapped these ties once and for all. To take a single appalling instance, the 150,000 human beings who were sold into slavery in Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported out of their own country—and these were probably the vast majority,—were thereby deprived for the rest of their lives of all social and family life, of their ancestral worship, in fact of everything that could act as a moral tie, as a restraining influence upon vicious instincts. With the lamentable effect of this on the regions thus depopulated we are not here concerned, but it was beyond doubt most serious, and must be taken into account in reckoning up the various causes which later on brought about the enfeeblement of the whole Roman Empire.[365] The point for us is that a large proportion of the population of Rome and of Italy was now composed of human beings destitute of all natural means of moral and social development. The ties that had been once broken could never be replaced. There is no need to dwell on the inevitable result,—the introduction into the Roman State of a poisonous element of terrible volume and power.
The second fact that we have to grasp is this. In the old days, when such slaves as there then were came from Italy itself, and worked under the master's own eye upon the farm, they might and did share to some extent in the social life of the family, and even in its religious rites, and so might under favourable circumstances come within the range of its moral influences[366]. But towards the close of the Republican period those moral influences, as we have seen, were fast vanishing in the majority of families which possessed large numbers of slaves. The common kind of slave in the city, who was not attached to his owner as was a man of culture like Tiro, had no moral standard except implicit obedience; the highest virtue was to obey orders diligently, and fear of punishment was the only sanction of his conduct. The typical city slave, as he appears in Plautus, though by no means a miserable being without any enjoyment of life, is a liar and a thief, bent on overreaching, and destitute of a conscience[367]. We need but reflect that the slave must often have had to do vile things in the name of his one virtue, obedience, to realise that the poison was present, and ready to become active, in every Roman household. "Nec turpe est quod dominus iubet."[368]
On the latifundia in the country the master was himself seldom resident, and the slaves were under the control of one or more of their own kind, promoted for good conduct and capacity. The slaves of the great sheep and cattle farms were, as we saw, of the wildest sort, and we may judge of their morality by the story of the Sicilian slave-owner who, when his slaves complained that they were insufficiently clothed, told them that the remedy was to rob the travellers they fell in with.[369] The ergastula, where slaves were habitually chained and treated like beasts, were sowing the seeds of permanent moral contamination in Italy.[370] But on the smaller estates of olive-yard and vineyard their condition was better, and a humane owner who chose his overseers carefully might possibly reproduce something of the old feeling of participation in the life as well as the industry of the economic unit. In an interesting chapter Varro advises that the vilicus should be carefully selected, and should be conciliated by being allowed a wife and the means of accumulating a property (peculium); he even urges that he should enforce obedience rather by words than blows.[371] But of the condition of the ordinary slave on the farm this is the only hint he gives us, and it never seems to have occurred to him, or to any other Roman of his day, that the work to be done would be better performed by men not deprived by their condition of a moral sense; that slave labour is unwillingly and unintelligently rendered, because the labourer has no hope, no sense of dutiful conduct leading him to rejoice in the work of his hands. Nor did any writer recognise the fact that slaves were potentially moral beings, until Christianity gave its sanction to dutiful submission as an act of morality that might be consecrated by a Divine authority.[372]
Lastly, it is not difficult to realise the mischievous effects of such a slave system as the Roman upon the slave-owning class itself. Even those who themselves had no slaves would be affected by it; for though, as we have seen, free labour was by no means ousted by it, it must have helped to create an idle class of freemen, with all its moral worthlessness. Long ago, in his remarkable book on The Slave Power in America before the Civil War, Professor Cairnes drew a striking comparison between the "mean whites" of the Southern States, the result of slave labour on the plantations, and the idle population of the Roman capital, fed on cheap corn and ready for any kind of rowdyism.[373] But in the case of the great slave-owners the mischief was much more serious, though perhaps more difficult to detect. The master of a horde of slaves had half his moral sense paralysed, because he had no feeling of responsibility for so many of those with whom he came in contact every day and hour. When most members of a man's household or estate are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no feeling of any contractual relation with them, his sense of duty and obligation is inevitably deadened, even towards others who are not thus in his power. Can we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice and right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but also towards a man's fellow-citizens, which we have noticed in the two upper sections of society, was due in great part to the constant exercise of arbitrary power at home, to the habit of looking upon the men who ministered to his luxurious ease as absolutely without claim upon his respect or his benevolence? or that the recklessness of human life which was shown in the growing popularity of bloody gladiatorial shows, and in the incredible cruelty of the victors in the Civil Wars, was the result of this unconscious cultivation, from childhood onwards, of the despotic temper?[374] Even the best men of the age, such as Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, show hardly a sign of any sympathy with, or interest in, that vast mass of suffering humanity, both bond and free with which the Roman dominion was populated; to disregard misery, except when they found it among the privileged classes, had become second nature to them. We can better realise this if we reflect that even at the present day, in spite of the absence of slavery and the presence of philanthropical societies, the average man of wealth gives hardly more than a passing thought to the discomfort and distress of the crowded population of our great cities. The ordinary callousness of human nature had, under the baleful influence of slavery, become absolute blindness, nor were men's eyes to be opened until Christianity began to leaven the world with the doctrine of universal love.