ifferent
services. There were slaves to care for the furniture, for the silver
plate, for the objects of art; slaves of the wardrobe, valets and
chambermaids, the troop of cooks, the slaves of the bath, the master
of the house and his aids, the slaves to escort the master and
mistress on the street, the litter-carriers, coachmen and grooms,
secretaries, readers, copyists, physicians, teachers, actors,
musicians, artisans of every kind, for in every great house grain was
ground, flax was spun, and garments were woven. Others, gathered in
workshops, manufactured objects which the master sold to his profit.
Others were hired out as masons or as sailors; Crassus had 500
carpenter-slaves. These classes of slaves were called "slaves of the
city."

=Rural Slaves.=--Every great domain was tilled by a band of slaves.
They were the laborers, the shepherds, the vine-dressers, the
gardeners, the fishermen, grouped together in squads of ten. An
overseer, himself a slave, superintended them. The proprietor made it
a matter to produce everything on his lands: "He buys nothing;
everything that he consumes he raises at home," this is the compliment
paid to the rich. The Roman, therefore, kept a great number of
country-slaves, as they were called. A Roman domain had a strong
resemblance to a village; indeed it was called a "villa." The name has
been preserved: what the French call "ville" since the Middle Ages is
only the old Roman domain increased in size.

=Treatment of Slaves.=--The kind of treatment the slaves received
depended entirely on the character of the master. Some enlightened and
humane masters may be enumerated, such as Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny,
who fed their slaves well, talked with them, sometimes had them sit
at table with them, and permitted them to have families and small
fortunes (the peculium).

But other masters are mentioned who treated their slaves as animals,
punished them cruelly, and even had them put to death for a whim.
Examples of these are not lacking. Vedius Pollio, a freedman of
Augustus, used to keep some lampreys in his fish-pond: when one of his
slaves carelessly broke a vase, he had him thrown into the fish-pond
as food for the lampreys. The philosopher Seneca paints in the
following words the violent cruelty of the masters: "If a slave coughs
or sneezes during a meal, if he pursues the flies too slowly, if he
lets a key fall noisily lo the floor, we fall into a great rage. If he
replies with to