elius, and, though destined to be a kind of military
guarantee for the permanence of the Sullan institutions, only became
a source of serious peril to the State at the time of Catiline's
conspiracy. Caesar, who was probably more alive to this kind of
social danger than his contemporaries, sent out a great number of
libertini,--the majority, says Strabo, of his colonists,--to his new
foundation at Corinth[362]. But Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing
in the time of Augustus, when he stayed some time in Rome, draws a
terrible picture of the evil effects of indiscriminate manumission,
unchecked by the law[363].

"Many," he says, "are indignant when they see unworthy men manumitted,
and condemn a usage which gives such men the citizenship of a
sovereign state whose destiny is to govern the world. As for me, I
doubt if the practice should be stopped altogether, lest greater evil
should be the result; I would rather that it should be checked as far
as possible, so that the state may no longer be invaded by men of such
villainous character. The censors, or at least the consuls, should
examine all whom it is proposed to manumit, inquiring into their
origin and the reasons and mode of their enfranchisement, as in their
examination of the equites. Those whom they find worthy of citizenship
should have their names inscribed on tables, distributed among the
tribes, with leave to reside in the city. As to the crowd of villains
and criminals, they should be sent far away, under pretext of founding
some colony."

These judicious remarks of a foreigner only expressed what was
probably a common feeling among the best men of that time. Augustus
made some attempt to limit the enfranchising power of the owner; but
the Leges Aelia Sentia and Furia Caninia do not lie within the compass
of this book. No great success could attend these efforts; the
abnormal circumstances which had brought to Rome the great familiae
of slaves reacted inevitably upon the citizen body itself through the
process of manumission. Rome had to pay heavily in this, as in so many
other ways, for her advancement to the sovereignty of the civilised
world. I may be allowed to translate the eloquent words in which
the French historian of slavery, in whose great work the history of
ancient slavery is treated as only a scholar-statesman can treat it,
sums up this aspect of the subject:

"Emancipation, prevalent as it might appear to be towards the
beginning of the Empire