o much spirit, if his countenance shows ill humor, have
we any right to have him flogged? Often we strike too hard and shatter
a limb or break a tooth." The philosopher Epictetus, who was a slave,
had had his ankle fractured in this way by his master. Women were no
more humane. Ovid, in a compliment paid to a woman, says, "Many times
she had her hair dressed in my presence, but never did she thrust her
needle into the arm of the serving-woman."

Public opinion did not condemn these cruelties. Juvenal represents a
woman angry at one of her slaves. "Crucify him," says she. "By what
crime has the slave merited this punishment? Blockhead! Is a slave,
then, a man? It may be that he has done nothing. I wish it, I order
it, my will is reason enough."

The law was no milder than custom. As late as the first century after
Christ, when a master was assassinated in his house, all the slaves
were put to death. When some wished to abolish this law, Thraseas,
one of the philosophers of high repute, rose to address the Senate to
demand that the law be maintained.

=The Ergastulum.=--A subterranean prison, lighted by narrow windows so
high that they could not be reached by the hand, was called the
ergastulum. The slaves who had displeased their master spent the night
there; during the day they were sent to work loaded with heavy chains
of iron. Many were branded with a red-hot iron.

=The Mill.=--The ancients had no mills run by machinery; they had the
grain ground by slaves with hand-mills. It was the most difficult kind
of work and was usually inflicted as a punishment. The mill of
antiquity was like a convict-prison. "There," says Plautus, "moan the
wicked slaves who are fed on polenta; there resound the noise of whips
and the clanking of chains." Three centuries later, in the second
century, Apuleius the novelist, depicts the interior of a mill as
follows: "Gods! what poor shrunken up men! with white skin striped
with blows of the whip, ... they wear only the shreds of a tunic; bent
forward, head shaved, the feet held in a chain, the body deformed by
the heat of the fire, the eyelids eaten away by the fumes, everything
covered with grain-dust."

=Character of the Slaves.=--Subjected to crushing labor or to enforced
idleness, always under the threat of the whip or of torture, slaves
became, according to their nature, either melancholy and savage, or
lazy and subservient. The most energetic of them committed suicide;
the others