ntal to its own interests. Had there been no
slave labour there, the small freeman might indeed have had a wider
field of enterprise, and have been better able to accumulate a small
capital by undertaking work for the great families, which was done,
as it was, by their slaves. But he was not aware of this, and the two
kinds of labour, the paid and the unpaid, went on side by side without
active rivalry. No doubt slavery helped to foster idleness, as it did
in the Southern States of America before the Civil War;[79] no doubt
there were plenty of idle ruffians in the city, ready to steal,
to murder, or to hire themselves out as the armed followers of a
political desperado like Clodius; but the simple necessities of the
life of those who had no slaves of their own gave employment, we may
be certain, to a great number of free tradesmen and artisans and
labourers of a more unskilled kind.

To begin with, we may ask the pertinent question, how the corn sold
cheap by the State was made into bread for the small consumer. Pliny
gives us very valuable information, which we may accept as roughly
correct, that until the year 171 B.C. there were no bakers in
Rome.[80] "The Quirites," he says, "made their own bread, which was
the business of the women, as it is still among most peoples." The
demand which was thus supplied by a new trade was no doubt caused by
the increase of the lower population of the city, by the return of old
soldiers, often perhaps unmarried, and by the manumission of slaves,
many of whom would also be inexperienced in domestic life and its
needs; and we may probably connect it with the growth of the system of
insulae, the great lodging-houses in which it would not be convenient
either to grind your corn or to bake your bread. So the bakers, called
_pistores_ from the old practice of pounding the grain in a mortar
(_pingere_), soon became a very important and flourishing section of
the plebs, though never held in high repute; and in connexion with the
distributions of corn some of them probably rose above the level of
the small tradesman, like the _pistor redemptor_, Marcus Vergilius
Eurysaces, whose monument has come down to us.[81] It should be noted
that the trade of the baker included the grinding of the corn; there
were no millers at Rome. This can be well illustrated from the
numerous bakers' shops which have been excavated at Pompeii.[82] In
one of these, for example, we find the four mills in a large apar