ne on an island in the
Tiber; the old and helpless were left to die, unpitied and unconsoled.
Suicide was so common that it attracted no attention.

Superstition culminated at Rome, for there were seen the priests and
devotees of all the countries that it governed,--"the dark-skinned
daughters of Isis, with drum and timbrel and wanton mien; devotees of
the Persian Mithras; emasculated Asiatics; priests of Cybele, with their
wild dances and discordant cries; worshippers of the great goddess
Diana; barbarian captives with the rites of Teuton priests; Syrians,
Jews, Chaldaean astrologers, and Thessalian sorcerers.... The crowds
which flocked to Rome from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean
brought with them practices extremely demoralizing. The awful rites of
initiation, the tricks of magicians, the pretended virtues of amulets
and charms, the riddles of emblematical idolatry with which the
superstition of the East abounded, amused the languid voluptuaries who
had neither the energy for a moral belief nor the boldness requisite for
logical scepticism."

We cannot pass by, in this enumeration of the different classes of Roman
society, the number and condition of slaves. A large part of the
population belonged to this servile class. Originally brought in by
foreign conquest, it was increased by those who could not pay their
debts. The single campaign of Regulus introduced as many captives as
made up a fifth part of the whole population. Four hundred were
maintained in a single palace, at a comparatively early period; a
freedman in the time of Augustus left behind him forty-one hundred and
sixteen; Horace regarded two hundred as the suitable establishment for a
gentleman; some senators owned twenty thousand. Gibbon estimates the
number of slaves at about sixty millions,--one-half of the whole
population. One hundred thousand captives were taken in the Jewish war,
who were sold as slaves, and sold as cheap as horses. William Blair
supposes that there were three slaves to one freeman, from the conquest
of Greece to the reign of Alexander Severus. Slaves often cost two
hundred thousand sesterces, yet everybody was eager to possess a slave.
At one time the slave's life was at the absolute control of his master;
he could be treated at all times with brutal severity. Fettered and
branded, he toiled to cultivate the lands of an imperious master, and at
night was shut up in a subterranean cell. The laws hardly recognized his
cl