decine dans le Latium et a Rome," _Rev. Archeol._, 1885). In Rome
there were consulting-rooms and dispensaries, and houses in which the
sick were received. Hospitals are mentioned by Roman writers in the 1st
century A.D. There were infirmaries--detached buildings--for sick
slaves; and in Rome, as at Athens, there were slaves skilled in
medicine. In Rome also for each _regio_ there was a chief physician who
attended to the poorer people.

Slavery.

Slavery was so large a factor in pre-Christian and early Christian
society that a word should be said on its relation to charity.
Indirectly it was a cause of poverty and social degradation. Thus in the
case of Athens, with the achievement of maritime supremacy the number of
slaves increased greatly. Manual arts were despised as unbecoming to a
citizen, and the slaves carried on the larger part of the agricultural
and industrial work of the community; and for a time--until after the
Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.)--slavery was an economic success. But by
degrees the slave, it would seem, dispossessed the citizen and rendered
him unfit for competition. The position of the free artisan thus became
akin to that of the slave (Arist. _Pol._ 1260 a, &c.), and slavery
became the industrial method of the country. Though Greeks, Romans, Jews
and Christians spent money in ransoming individual slaves and also
enfranchised many, no general abolition of slavery was possible. At
last through economic changes the new status of _coloni_, who paid as
rent part of the produce of the land they tilled, superseded the status
of slavery (cf. above; the system turned to account by Peisistratus).
But this result was only achieved much later, when a new society was
being created, when the slaves from the slave prisons (_ergastula_) of
Italy joined its invaders, and the slave-owner or master, as one may
suppose, unable any longer to work the gangs, let them become _coloni_.

In Greece the feeling towards the slave became constantly more humane.
Real slavery, Aristotle said, was a cast of mind, not a condition of
life. The slave was not to be ordered about, but to be commanded and
persuaded like a child. The master was under the strongest obligation to
promote his welfare. In Rome, on the other hand, slavery continued to
the end a massive, brutal, industrial force--a standing danger to the
state. But alike in Greece and Rome the influence of slavery on the
family was pernicious. The pompous array of