led a life that was merely mechanical. "The slave," said
Cato the Elder, "ought always to work or to sleep." The majority of
them lost all sense of honor. And so they used to call a mean act
"servile," that is, like a slave.

=Slave Revolts.=--The slaves did not write and so we do not know from
their own accounts what they thought of their masters. But the masters
felt themselves surrounded by hate. Pliny the Younger, learning that a
master was to be assassinated at the bath by his slaves, made this
reflection, "This is the peril under which we all live." "More
Romans," says another writer, "have fallen victims to the hate of
their slaves than to that of tyrants."

At different times slave revolts flamed up (the servile wars), almost
always in Sicily and south Italy where slaves were armed to guard the
herds. The most noted of these wars was the one under Spartacus. A
band of seventy gladiators, escaping from Capua, plundered a chariot
loaded with arms, and set themselves to hold the country. The slaves
escaped to them in crowds to unite their fortunes with theirs, and
soon they became an army.

The slaves defeated three Roman armies sent in succession against
them.

Their chief Spartacus wished to traverse the whole peninsula of Italy
in order to return to Thrace, from which country he had been brought
as a prisoner of war to serve as a gladiator. But at last these
ill-disciplined bands were shattered by the army of Crassus. The
revolutionists were all put to death. Rome now prohibited the slaves
from carrying arms thereafter, and it is reported that a shepherd was
once executed for having killed a boar with a spear.

=Admission to Citizenship.=--Rome treated its subjects and its slaves
brutally, but it did not drive them out, as the Greek cities did.

The alien could become a Roman citizen by the will of the Roman
people, and the people often accorded this favor, sometimes they even
bestowed it upon a whole people at once. They created the Latins
citizens at one stroke; in 89 it was the turn of the Italians; in 46
the people of Cisalpine Gaul entered the body of citizens. All the
inhabitants of Italy thus became the equals of the Romans.

The slave could be manumitted by his master and soon became a citizen.

This is the reason why the Roman people, gradually exhausting
themselves, were renewed by accessions from the subjects and the
slaves. The number of the citizens was increased at every census; it
rose