peoples became clients. If any
one did not attach himself as client to a great family he was lost.
Freed women, for this reason, almost always fell into vice.[769]
Clientage became the refuge of loafers. "Romans did not give anything
gratis." All who were outside the social system had to seek the
patronage of a great man. For his protection he took pay in money or
service. The status was a modified slavery.

+289. Manumission. Natural liberty.+ The slave dealers developed tricks
far surpassing those of horse dealers in modern times.[770] By
enfranchisement the owner got rid of the worst worry of slavery, and
tied the freedman to himself by a contract which it was for the interest
of the freedman to fulfill. The owner made a crafty gain.[771]
Tacitus[772] says that, in his time, the Roman people was almost
entirely freedmen. If that is so, we must notice that the "people,"
under the empire, are a different set from what they were under the
republic. When the Romans got an educated artisan as a slave they set
him to teach a number of others. When no more outsiders were conquered
and enslaved the slaves taught each other. The work then became gross
and ran down.[773] This was another of the ways in which Rome consumed
the products and culture of the world. Very few instances, real or
fictitious, of sympathy with slaves can be cited. In the story of
_Trimalchio_, Encolpius and his friends beg off a slave who is to be
whipped for losing the garment of another slave in the bath. At a supper
at which Augustus was present a slave broke a vase. His master ordered
him cast to the _murenae_ in a tank. The slave begged Augustus to obtain
for him an easier death, which Augustus tried to do. The master refused.
Augustus then gave the slave complete grace, broke the host's other
vases himself, and ordered the tank filled up.[774] Under Nero, Pedanius
having been murdered, his slaves, four hundred in number, were all
condemned to death, according to law. The populace rose against this
sentence, which was fulfilled, but it shows that there was a popular
judgment which would respond upon occasion.[775] "Not once, in all
antiquity, does a serious thought about the abolition of slavery
arise."[776] It was the basis of the entire social and political order.
They were in terror of the slaves and despised them, but could not
conceive of a world without them. Probably we could not either, if we
had not machines by means of which we make steam