2. From it we get a picture of agriculture as an honourable trade, the chief occupation of free citizens, who are in general accustomed to work with their own hands.
3. The Roman citizen as a rule has an allotment of land as his own, and an early classification of citizens (the ‘Servian Constitution’) was originally based on landholding, carrying with it the obligation to military service.
4. The Roman family had a place for the slave, and the slave, a domestic helper, normally an Italian, was not as yet the despised alien chattel of whom we read in a later age.
5. As a domestic he bore a part in all the labours of the family, and therefore as a matter of course in the commonest of all, agriculture.
6. In this there was nothing degrading. Suggestions to that effect are the echoes of later conditions.
7. Under such relations of master and slave it was quite natural that manumission should (as it did) operate to make the slave not only free but a citizen. That this rule led to very troublesome results in a later period was owing to change of circumstances.
8. Slavery then was, from the earliest times of which we have any tradition, an integral part of the social and economic system, as much in Italy as in Greece. It was there, and only needed the stimulus of prospective economic gain for capitalists to organize it on a crudely industrial basis, without regard to considerations of humanity or the general wellbeing of the state.
9. Of wage-earning labour on the part of freemen we have little trace in tradition. The reported complaints of day-labour performed for Patrician nobles in early times are probably not unconnected with the institution of clientship, and in any case highly coloured by rhetoric.