there can be no doubt that ordinary slaves
capable of performing only menial offices in town or country were to
be had at this time quite cheap, and the number in the city alone must
have been very great.

It is unfortunately quite impossible to make even a probable estimate
of the total number in Rome; the data are not forthcoming. Beloch[325]
remarks aptly that though some families owned hundreds of slaves, the
number of such families was not large, quoting the words of Philippus,
tribune in 104 B.C., to the effect that there were not more than
two thousand persons of any substance in the State.[326] The great
majority of citizens living in Rome had, he thinks, no slaves. He is
forced to take as a basis of calculation the proportion of bond to
free in the only city of the Empire about which we have certain
information on this point; at Pergamum there was one slave to two free
persons.[327] Assuming the whole free population to have been about
half a million in the time of Augustus, or rather more, including
peregrini, he thus arrives at a slave population of something like
280,000; this may not be far off the mark, but it must be remembered
that it is little more than a guess.

What has been said above will have given the reader some idea of the
conditions of life which created a great demand for labour in the
last two centuries B.C., and of the circumstances which produced an
abundant supply of unfree labour to satisfy that demand. I propose
now to treat the whole question of Roman slavery from three points of
view,--the economic, the legal, and the ethical. In other words, we
have to ask: (1) how the abundance of slave labour affected the social
economy of the free population; (2) what was the position of the slave
in the eye of the law, as regards treatment and chance of manumission;
(3) what were the ethical results of this great slave system, both on
the slaves themselves and on their masters.

1. From an economical point of view the most interesting question is
whether slave labour seriously interfered with the development of free
industry; and unfortunately this question is an extremely difficult
one to answer. We can all guess easily that the opportunities of free
labour must have been limited by the presence of enormous numbers of
slaves; but to get at the facts is another matter. In regard to rural
slavery we have some evidence to go upon, as we shall see directly,
and this has of late been collected and