ouse. Atticus hired his slaves to the
public in the capacity of copyists. Cicero used slaves as amanuenses. The
government employed slaves in the subordinate posts in administration; the
police, the guard of monuments and arsenals, the manufacture of arms and
munitions of war, the building of navies, etc. The priests of the temples
and the colleges of pontiffs had their familiae of slaves.

Thus in the city, plebeians found no employment. Competition was impossible
between fathers of families and slaves who labored _en masse _in the vast
work-shops of their masters, with no return save the scantiest subsistence,
no families, no cares, and most of all no army service. In the country it
was still worse. It would appear that none but slaves were employed in the
cultivation of the land. Doubtless the number of slaves in Italy has been
greatly exaggerated, but it is certain that the substitution of slave
labor for free, was an old fact when Licinius[1] attempted by the formal
disposition of his law to check the evil. In the first centuries of Rome,
slaves must have been scarce. They were still dear in the time of Cato,
and even Plutarch mentions as a proof of the avarice of the illustrious[2]
censor, that he never paid more than 15,000 drachmae for a slave. After the
great conquests of the Romans, in Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, Greece, and the
Orient, the market went down by reason of the multitude of human beings
thrown upon it. An able-bodied, unlettered man could be bought for the
price of an ox. Such were the men of Spain, Thrace, and Sardinia. Educated
slaves from Greece and the East brought a higher price. We learn from
Horace, that his slave Davus whom he has rendered so celebrated, cost him
500 drachmae.[3] Diodorus of Siculus says that the rich caused their slaves
to live by their own exertions. According to him the knights employed great
bands of slaves in Sicily, both for agricultural purposes and for herding
stock, but they furnished them with so little food that they must either
starve or live by brigandage. The governors of the island did not dare to
punish these slaves for fear of the powerful order which owned them.[4]
Slave labor was thus adopted for economic reasons, and, for the same
reasons, agriculture in Italy was abandoned for stock raising.

Says Varro:[5] "Fathers of families rather delight in circuses and theatres
than in farming and grape culture. Therefore, we pay that wheat necessary
for our subsist