Let us apply these two leading facts to the conditions
of Roman life as we have already sketched them. We shall find that
they have political results of no small importance.

First, we must try to realise that the city of Rome contained at
least 200,000 human beings over whom the State had no direct control
whatever. All such crimes, serious or petty, as are now tried and
disposed of in our criminal courts, were then, if committed by a
slave, punishable only by the master; and in the majority of cases, if
the familia were a large one, they probably never reached his ears.
The jurisdiction to which the slave was responsible was a private one,
like that of the great feudal lord of the Middle Ages, who had his own
prison and his own gallows. The political result was much the same in
each case. Just as the feudal lord, with his private jurisdiction and
his hosts of retainers, became a peril to good government and national
unity until he was brought to order by a strong king like our Henry
II. or Henry VII., so the owner of a large familia of many hundreds
of slaves may almost be said to have been outside of the State;
undoubtedly he became a serious peril to the good order of the
capital. The part played by the slaves in the political disturbances
of Cicero's time was no mean one. One or two instances will show this.
Saturninus, in the year 100, when attacked by Marius under orders
from the senate, had hoisted a pilleus, or cap of liberty which the
emancipated slave wore, as a signal to the slaves of the city that
they might expect their liberty if they supported him;[356] and Marius
a few years later took the same step when himself attacked by Sulla.
Catiline, in 63, Sallust assures us, believed it possible to raise the
slaves of the city in aid of his revolutionary plans, and they flocked
to him in great numbers; but he afterwards abandoned his intention,
thinking that to mix up the cause of citizens with that of slaves
would not be judicious.[357] It is here too that the gladiator slaves
first meet us as a political arm; Cicero had the next spring to defend
P. Sulla on the charge, among others, of having bought gladiators
during the conspiracy with seditious views, and the senate had to
direct that the bands of these dangerous men should be dispersed to
Capua and other municipal towns at a distance. Later on we frequently
hear of their being used as private soldiery, and the government in
the last years of the Republic c