to redeem a
slave and register the redemption in one of the temples.

The laws of Justinian, influenced largely by the teaching of
Christianity, did a great deal to relieve the burdens of slavery. "We do
not transfer persons from a free condition into a servile--we have so
much at heart to raise slaves to liberty." In the words of one of the
Early Fathers of the Church, "No Christian is a slave; those born again
are all brothers."

_Gladiatorial Games_ were condemned by the Stoics, but these
philosophers did not influence the common people. Constantine, in the
year before his acceptance of Christianity, gave a multitude of
prisoners as prey to the wild beasts of the arena. In A.D. 325 he
promulgated this law: "Bloody spectacles, in our present state of
tranquillity and domestic peace, do not please us; wherefore we order
that all gladiators be prohibited from carrying on their profession."
Human sacrifices, which at one time took place in Rome, even in the time
of Pliny and Seneca, were abolished under the same influence as checked
gladiatorial sports.

Constantine passed laws against the licentious plays and spectacles
which flourished in Greece and Rome in pagan times.

Seneca wrote: "Monstrous offspring we destroy; children too, if weak and
unnaturally formed from birth, we drown. It is not anger, but reason,
thus to separate the useless from the sound."[34] Julius Paulus, a
Stoic, in the time of the Emperor Severus (A.D. 222), held that the
mother who procured abortion, starved her child, or exposed it to die,
was, in each case, equally guilty of murder. The Christian Fathers, in
opposing these evils, were acting in accordance with the teaching of
their founder, and they incessantly condemned these evil practices, and
with greater and more far-reaching power than the Stoics. Although the
Stoics anticipated many of the reforms of the Christians, Stoicism
never had any penetrating effect on the masses of the people, and
differed in this respect from Christianity. The chief obstacle to the
prevention of the exposure of children was the great amount of pauperism
which prevailed in the Roman Empire, and Christian emperors and councils
had no choice but to allow many of these unfortunate children to be
taken as slaves, rather than that they should perish from cold and
hunger, or be torn by ravenous beasts. The pagan emperors, it is true,
had done something to found orphanages, but these institutions were not
common