bour was far more available
than we are apt to think. We hear of no outbreak of feeling against
slave labour, which might suggest a rivalry between the two.
Slave labour, we may think, had filled a gap, created by abnormal
circumstances, and did not oust free labour entirely; but it tended
constantly to cramp it, and doubtless started notions of work in
general which helped to degrade it[334]. Those immense _familiae
urbanae_, of which the historian of slavery has given a detailed
account in his second volume[335], belong rather to the early Empire
than to the last years of the Republic--the evidence for them is
drawn chiefly from Seneca, Juvenal, Tacitus, Martial, etc.; but such
evidence as we have for the age of Cicero seems to suggest that the
vast palaces of the capitalists, which Sallust describes as being
almost like cities[336], were already beginning to be served by a
familia urbana which rendered them almost independent of any aid from
without by labour or purchase. Not only the ordinary domestic helpers
of all kinds, but copyists, librarians, paedagogi as tutors for the
children, and even doctors might all be found in such households in
a servile condition, without reckoning the great numbers who seem
to have been always available as escorts when the great man was
travelling in Italy or in the provinces. Valerius Maximus tells
us[337] that Cato the censor as proconsul of Spain took only three
slaves with him, and that his descendant Cato of Utica during the
Civil Wars had twelve; as both these men were extremely frugal, we can
form an idea from this passage both of the increasing supply of slaves
and of the far larger escorts which accompanied the ordinary wealthy
traveller.

As regards the familia rustica, the working population of the farm,
the evidence is much more definite. The old Roman farm, in which the
paterfamilias lived with his wife, children, and slaves, was, no
doubt, like the old English holding in a manor, for the most part
self-sufficing, doing little in the way of sale or purchase, and
worked by all the members of the familia, bond and free. In the middle
of the second century B.C., when Cato wrote his treatise on husbandry,
we find that a change has taken place; the master can only pay the
farm an occasional visit, to see that it is being properly managed by
the slave steward[338] (vilicus), and the business is being run upon
capitalistic lines, i.e. with a view to realising the utmost possi