GOVERNMENTAL POLICY TOWARDS FREEDMEN AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON SOCIETY

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FREEDMEN IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE BY A. M. DUFF, M.A., B.LITT. Sometime Scholar of Oriel College, Oxford; Assistant Lecturer in Greek, University of Aberdeen OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1928

Government policy towards freedmen a blend of conservatism, utilitarianism, and
humanitarianism -- conservative elements -- utilitarian elements -- humanitarian elements.
Parts of the world where freedmen abounded most -- foreign extraction of most of Rome's
citizens -- the decline in the native stock -- freedmen's influence on administration --
on the common mode of life -- on luxury -- on literature -- on art, science, and
philosophy -- on religion -intermixture of race an important cause of Rome's decline --
summary of the effects of manumission -- what manumission might have accomplished.

The reins of government, according to the policy which individual emperors followed towards their own servants, were either held fast by the Princeps or given to imperial freedmen. We have now to examine the government's policy towards freedmen as a whole. It is no longer a question of Pallas and Narcissus and their comrades, but of the general class of libertini. The licence or suppression of imperial freedmen depended on the character of the ruler, and, as has been noticed, their fortunes were subject to momentous changes. But the personal relation of an emperor to his servants did not enter into the question of how to treat the freedmen of ordinary citizens. Accordingly while Claudius was pampering his own freedmen and while Antoninus was keeping them sternly in check, we must be prepared to find a totally different attitude adopted towards the general mass of those who had issued from slavery.

The discussion which follows will contain a great deal of recapitulation. Throughout the earlier chapters several stray suggestions have been made as to the policy of the legislature. These suggestions will now be welded into proper arrangement; from them it may be possible to learn valuable lessons as to the state-craft of the first two centuries of the Empire.

Conservatism is often accused of being utterly unprogressive and of refusing to recognize the needs of the moment. Yet the imperial government in its policy towards freedmen mingled the healthy conservatism of its founder Augustus with practical provision for needs that arose and with a progressive humanitarianism of which any Christian nation could be proud. This sphere of the statesmanship of imperial Rome is a clear example of how respect for great traditions did not prevent her from remedying material evils or from advancing on the path of progress.

Accordingly her policy ran on three distinct lines, the conservative, the utilitarian, and the progressive or humanitarian. At first, as was natural after emerging from the whirlpool of revolution, the government laid especial stress on the conservative element. Augustus strove to uphold the rights of the patron, to preserve the Italian character of the citizen population, and at all costs to save that of the aristocracy. At the beginning of the Empire the dangers against which Augustus struggled were very real. The old relations between patron and freedman, regulated by custom rather than by law, were falling into decay owing to the increasing frequency of manumission and the constant strain of civil war. At the same time the plebs urbana was a cosmopolitan mass, swollen by the influx of Oriental freedmen, and even the aristocracy was not untainted by foreign blood. It could be said in the Senate under Nero that a large proportion of the senatorial and equestrian nobility was of servile extraction. 1 Unlimited manumission of slaves and frequent intermarriage with freedmen had done their work. It was, then, the task of Augustus to repair, as well as might be, the fatal consequences of laissez-faire under the Republic.

To preserve the rights of the patron, the obsequium and officium were legally recognized. If a freedman wronged his patron, his offence was the more heinous because it was against his legal father. Even Claudius, the slave of his own freedmen, was especially severe against those who plotted against their patrons. In the second century, while humanitarian legislation was gradually recognizing the rights of the slave, Hadrian and Antoninus were staunch conservatives in their treatment of ungrateful freedmen. Apart from the measures which followed from the recognition of the obsequium, there were miscellaneous enactments which strengthened or at least preserved the rights of the patron. In Claudius' reign, when women over twenty years of age were exempted from the tutela, freedwomen were excluded. His successor ruled that, when a master had been murdered by his slaves, even those slaves who were to be manumitted by will should be included in the death-penalty. In the case of a Latin obtaining citizenship by imperial grant, the consent of the patron was made necessary by Trajan.

More stringent were the regulations to repress the rapid Orientalization of Rome and Italy. Augustus, as we have seen, put severe restrictions on imprudent manumission. In the Lex Iunia he legalized informal manumission and by so doing discouraged it. In the Lex Fufia Caninia he limited the proportion of a familia which could be freed by testament. In the Lex Aelia Sentia, among other things, he forbade all manumission by masters under twenty years of age, unless special authorization were secured. Similarly efforts were made to prevent the immediate passage of slaves into citizenship by means of manumission. The words of Persius-- "momento turbinis exit Marcus Dama" gave a satiric touch which many an aristocratic Roman heartily endorsed. Augustus, therefore, created two new classes. The Lex Iunia called into being the Latini Iuniani; the Lex Aelia Sentia, the dediticii. In the latter class were placed those whose criminal propensities made them permanently unfit for citizenship. The former comprised the recipients of informal manumission, and after 4 A. D. all liberti freed at an age below thirty; these last were debarred from full citizenship and made Latins by the Lex Aelia Sentia. But, as we have seen, Augustus checked any attempt of the master to take sordid advantage of this system. He opened an avenue by which the slave freed under thirty years of age could obtain citizenship one year after becoming a father; and, if any masters still informally freed slaves solely in order to possess their whole estates when they died, Vespasian finally stopped the practice by allowing such freedmen the same opportunities of enfranchisement as the other Latini Iuniani.

Intermarriage between ingenui and libertini had gone too far to be checked under the Empire. The free-born were already so much tainted with servile blood that it would have been impolitic to legislate generally in the matter. Yet Augustus felt that some particular restriction could be made without endangering his throne. He forbade alliances between freedmen and members of senatorial families. The Senate could not oppose such a measure without implying that they wished to degrade their order. Similarly the government was anxious to preserve the caste division between freedmen and free-born. As already stated, freedmen were excluded from various military, religious and administrative offices, and both they and their sons from the ranks of senators and knights. With very few exceptions these exclusions were maintained throughout the early Empire.

Parallel with these efforts to uphold all that was best in ancient traditions went the recognition of certain needs. The government realized that in supplying these needs freedmen could prove themselves worthy citizens of Rome. They were, therefore, given the utmost encourage ment to engage in social service. The inducements offered, such as liberation from the operae or the privilege of full citizenship, generally deprived patrons of some of their rights; but this arbitrary procedure nevertheless fitted in well with the policy of restricting manumission. Masters who curtailed the gift of freedom by imposing heavy obligations in the form of operae, or by manumitting in such a way that their slaves became Latins, were now warned that these half-measures might be of no avail. An avenue was opened through which the freedman could by public service be excused the operae; many more were opened by which the Latin could become a Roman and thereby gain the right of making his own will. It was, therefore, made almost impossible to give freedom with one hand and take away a great part of it with the other. Masters had to regard manumission, even if covered by promises of operae or with reservations of citizenship, as a leap in the dark. They could not be certain that it would not deprive them of all the economic advantages of ownership and leave them merely with the more sentimental rights of obsequium and officium. Consequently greater forethought was exercised before taking a step which was now an irrevocable alienation of possession, and manumissions therefore tended to be less frequent.

One of the most serious evils with which the imperial government was called upon to contend was the decline in the population. Not only had the Italian stock almost disappeared from the towns, but the descendants of freedmen had not been born in sufficient numbers to take its place. Accordingly, while the Lex Papia Poppaea offered privileges to free-born citizens for the possession of three children, it used the whole question of the inheritances of freedmen and freedwomen for the encouragement of procreation. Two sides had claims on the estate of a dead freedman--his heirs and the patron or the patron's descendants. On the side of the freedman, the children's rights tend to increase as they are more in number; on the patron's side, the claimants have a better chance if they have children. For instance, while his patron or a male descendant of his patron is alive, a freedman can obtain control over an estate of above 100,000 sesterces if he has three children. In the case of a freedwoman the patron or his male descendant has rights over the whole estate unless she has four children. At the same time procreation is encouraged on the other side. It was only by the possession of three children that a patroness could be admitted to the same rights as a patron, or the female descendants of a patron to the rights of male descendants.

Reasons have already been stated for holding that the grant of Roman citizenship to the Latin father of one child is to be referred rather to the conservative policy of restricting manumission than to the utilitarian object of raising the birth-rate; and, on the same grounds mutatis mutandis, the liberation of the father of two sons from the operae is to be ascribed more to the former than the latter, though probably in this case both reasons prompted the legislator.

Marriage also, as the first condition of legitimate procreation, received the attention of the reformer. All unnecessary bars to marriage were swept away. Thus, in the case of freedmen, the oath of celibacy that masters sometimes exacted at manumission was declared by the Lex Aelia Sentia to be not binding; and it was enacted that a freedwoman when once married should be freed from the operae, provided the patron had consented to her marriage. Yet, although the promotion of marriage seems to be the main object, it may fairly be questioned whether the legislator was not in both these measures influenced by mixed motives. The latter enactment may be partly due to the recognition that a married woman had sufficient duties in that capacity, without being burdened further by obligations towards her patron. The former provision was probably prompted by two sub sidiary motives. Firstly, the oath of celibacy was regarded as an unjust extortion; and, secondly, so long as such an oath was valid, masters could prevent slaves whom they had freed before the age of thirty from obtaining full citizenship by means of one child. But undoubtedly the primary purpose of these laws was to encourage marriage and thereby the production of children.

The other needs of a material nature which the government tried to supply are quickly enumerated. Firstly, Latins were encouraged to join the fire-brigade. After six years' service they could obtain citizenship. Secondly, the co-operation of freedmen was invited in supplying Rome with her daily bread. Those who built at their own expense a ship to hold 10,000 modii, and continued in the corn-trade for six years, were granted certain privileges by Claudius; a citizen was freed from any disabilities that the Lex Papia Poppaea might impose upon him; a woman was granted the ius quattuor liberorum; and a Latin obtained the full franchise. Thus a freedman gained the whole control over his inheritance; a freedwoman was liberated from the operae and her patron had only an equal share with each of her children in a legacy; a semiprivileged freedman became a Roman citizen. With the same object of providing food, Trajan gave Roman citizenship to any Latin who set up a large bake-house in the capital. Thirdly, when the fire of Rome made housing an acute problem, the help of the Latin was again invited. He was given immediate citizenship if he spent half a fortune of at least 200,000 sesterces in the construction of houses. Fourthly, utilitarian considerations directed the institution of the seviri Augustales. Rich freedmen were employed to give games in honour of the Emperor. Loyalty was thus fostered both among the great men who were proud to serve the sovereign and among the proletariat who came as spectators. But there was a stronger motive behind the institution. The capital of the wealthy freedman class was in this way applied to the all-important task of keeping the populace amused.

The humanitarian element in the imperial policy was slow in evolving itself. In antiquity the slave was legally regarded as a piece of property towards which there could be no obligations. For a long period of her history Rome was a conspicuous example of this rule. Augustus, as we have seen, was prejudiced against slaves by the turmoil of the civil wars. He made strenuous efforts to restrict manumission. Yet even his political programme contained some humanitarian elements. The establishment of the Council of Manumission under the Lex Aelia Sentia of 4 A. D. came from a recognition that certain classes of slaves, in virtue of faithful service, deserved both liberty and citizenship, even though they themselves might be under thirty years of age or their masters under twenty. Moreover this council gave facilities to a freedman under twenty years of age to redeem his relatives from servitude. By the same law masters were forbidden to exact at manumission the promise of an impossibly large sum of money, simply in order to render their freedmen debtors for life. Similarly, their duty of supporting their freedmen, if they fell in need, was confirmed. Of course, all cases where the claims of freedmen were recognized, or patrons' rights were limited, may have been part of the policy of restricting manumission. The confirmation of patrons' burdens necessarily tended to make manumission less popular among the selfish. But there can be little doubt that at least a prominent motive was consideration for the welfare of the freedman.

One clear and undoubted example of humanitarian legislation was the edict of Claudius that a sick slave exposed or abandoned by his master should be free. A generation later Vespasian directed that in certain circumstances a slave prostituted by her master should be given her liberty.

Then comes a pause in the history of slavery reform. During this pause, however, the philosophy of the Stoics was acquiring a greater and greater ascendancy over the minds of the nobility. The more puritanical elements of this system were gradually modified, and in the latter half of the first century Seneca and Epictetus made Stoicism a living force in the upper classes of Roman society. For our present purpose we need only mention two of the great Stoical doctrines--the brotherhood of mankind and its corollary, the duty towards slaves. Stoics adopted as their watchword the line of Terence derived from Menander, 'I am a man; nothing human do I deem foreign to myself. Seneca announces dearly 'Man is a sacred thing to man'. Applying these principles to slavery, he is careful to warn masters that the essential dignity of manhood is unchanged by the accident of condition; that the slave may be free by virtue while the master may be slave by vice; and that not only cruelty but even contempt towards his slaves should be avoided by the good man.

As these ideas had permeated the aristocracy by the end of the first century, it was necessary that sooner or later they should affect the legislature. Thus Hadrian and his two successors, under the influence of the Stoics, began an energetic campaign for the amelioration of slavery. Masters who killed their slaves were made guilty of murder. The practice of selling unsatisfactory slaves to gladiatorial companies was suppressed. The ergastula or rural slave-prisons were destroyed. When a slave murdered his master, only the slaves within hearing at the time of the act could be tortured or in any way held responsible. Officers were appointed to hear the complaints of slaves, and, if excessive severity was proved, the master was compelled to sell the slave he had maltreated. It was inevitable that such a triumph of humanity should be manifested also in the sphere of manumission. Hadrian put an end to the anomaly that provincial towns were not, like the state, allowed to free their slaves; in the reign of Marcus Aurelius the right of manumission was granted to collegia. But one of the most striking evidences of the humanitarian movement is the history of fideicommissary manumission which evolved itself into legal form between Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. About twenty senatusconsulta and imperial constitutiones are known to us with reference to fideicommissa. Some are of great importance, such as the first recognition that a fideicommissum was legally as well as morally binding on the heir. Others are merely answers to exceptional questions which probably did not arise more than once in a generation. Still, they all serve to illustrate the attitude of the Antonine government. Of those twenty rescripts and decisions all are in favour of the slave. If it was quite clear that the testator wanted a certain slave to be freed, then he had to be freed, and no legal forms or theories could prevent it. If a slave had earned the gratitude of a citizen so much that the latter wanted him to be free, then the heir, if he accepted the legacy, was formally bound to carry out the deceased man's wishes. When the process of legal clarification is finished, the man who agrees to be heir may in certain conceivable circumstances be compelled to free one of his own slaves or even buy the slave of another in order to free him.

It may be asked whether Christianity had anything to do with the progress of the humanitarian movement. In legislation, it had no influence; to the most enlightened government of the second century Christians were still an obstinate and traitorous sect that clung to a ridiculous Eastern superstition. Their teaching was not noticed at all; if any conceptions were formed of the Gospel in official circles, they would be that it inculcated cannibalism and immoral rites. Nor can any influence on imperial policy be traced through Stoicism to a Christian source. The debt of second-century Stoicism to Christianity is negligible. Seneca never mentions the new religion. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius content themselves with a scornful reference to the obstinacy of martyrs. The alleged correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul is a manifest forgery. The truth is that Stoicism and Christianity were parallel and independent revelations. The latter, founded upon the belief in a personal God and a personal manifestation of His love, was a priori assured of its triumph. But the former, though immeasurably inferior, must nevertheless be accorded the full credit for the benevolent legislation of the second century.

Yet it must not be denied that Christianity helped to promote manumission. It did not guide the rulers in their policy, but as its influence grew in society it undoubtedly made its converts feel that their slaves were 'brothers in Christ', and that the charity which their religion enjoined was best displayed in manumission. Stoicism had never made an effective appeal to the masses, but Christianity fulfilled the task in which its great predecessor had failed. The religion of Jesus, carrying the doctrine of the brotherhood of mankind into the life of the lower classes and more slowly superseding other religions and philosophies among the aristocracy, gradually became one of the most potent causes of manumission.

Such was the policy of the government towards Roman freedmen: before we can say whether it succeeded or not, we must estimate the influence the freedman exercised on the social and economic history. In the first place it may be asked what was the proportion of freedmen to the whole population. Unfortunately, sufficient evidence has not yet come to hand even for an approximate estimate. So many questions on which there are little or insecure data have first to be answered that to determine the freedman population is impossible under present conditions. One cannot tell, for instance, what proportion of his life a freedman ordinarily enjoyed in liberty. This would involve deciding what was the average age at which manumission was performed, and what was the average duration of life among freedmen and among citizens.

Obviously, if one finds a hundred inscriptions in a town of which fifty refer to freedmen and fifty to free-born, one cannot therefore say that in the population of the city the two classes are equally balanced. The freedman has only been free a certain period of his life; the free-born citizen has been a citizen from birth.

One may, however, be allowed to record where especially inscriptions of freedmen are to be found. Some typical towns and districts of the Roman Empire have been examined in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and below is given the percentage of freedmen among the persons mentioned. In all cases honorary inscriptions and epitaphs of magistrates, priests, and soldiers are omitted.

These results are not altogether satisfactory. It is difficult to see why Narbo differed so fundamentally from Arelate. Both were important harbours of Southern Gaul, and we should have expected the percentages of freedmen in each to be similar. Corduba and Hispalis, too, were towns whose economic features must have been very much alike. Yet the proportion of freedmen in the former is three times that in the latter. But the number of inscriptions available from these Spanish cities is very small, and therefore percentages must not be too confidently relied upon.

Ostia has a surprisingly small proportion. She was one of the greatest ports in imperial times and we should have expected to find a large number of freedmen playing their busy role in the trade of Rome's harbour. Perhaps some portion of the explanation may lie in the hypothesis that the town was full of imperial freedmen who were buried with other servants of Caesar at Rome and therefore do not figure among the Ostian inscriptions.

The most valuable information which these figures yield concerns the country districts. Some rural parts, it will have been noticed, were almost as full of freedmen as Capua was. Inscriptions from the Ager Amiterninus, whose principal industry was probably olive-growing, mention 190 persons of whom 89 are freedmen. Picenum, the home of tillage, gives 31 freedmen out of every 100 persons. The percentage is noticeably less in the small towns of South Italy where pastoral farming was the order of the day. But the high proportions met with in Picenum and among the Sabini are surprising. Probably freedmen captured the retail trade of the rural districts as much as they did that of the large towns. Moreover, it was a frequent custom for landed proprietors to give their freedmen small farms on their estates. In view of the statistics from corn and olive regions, it is likely that this custom was followed far more extensively than has been hitherto supposed.

With this somewhat bare statement of figures, which are only relative in value, we must leave the question of the freedman population. But, although it cannot be said with any certainty what proportion the number of freedmen bore to that of the whole citizen body, an estimate has been made of the extent to which men of servile descent dominated Rome. Prof. Tenney Frank, after an examination of some 13,000 urban inscriptions, has conjectured that, among the ordinary citizens of Rome, little over ten per cent. were able to boast pure Italian descent. Of the remainder very few, he thinks, were free peregrini or their descendants; an overwhelming proportion therefore--about five-sixths--of Rome's citizens were freedmen and their posterity. This conjecture based on the evidence of 13,000 inscriptions cannot be far wrong; but in other parts of Italy the ratio must have varied, and it is hardly likely that it anywhere exceeded the high percentage in the capital. It may be asked in this connexion what became of the Latin and Italian stock. Reasons may be given for the coming of the foreigner, but at the same time some explanation may be demanded for the disappearance of the native. In the first place there was a marked decline in the birth-rate among the aristocratic classes. These latter were the chief sufferers from the proscriptions of the Republic and the capricious tyranny of early emperors. But it was the increase of luxury that was most effective in deleting old Roman families from the records. As society grew more and more pleasureloving, as convention raised artificially the standard of living, the voluntary choice of celibacy and childlessness became a common feature among the upper classes. Of forty-five patrician families in Caesar's day, all save one were extinct by the reign of Hadrian. Augustus and Claudius found it necessary to reinforce the patrician order with twenty-five plebeian houses. Of these only six survived till Nerva's reign.

But what of the lower-class Romans of the old stock? They were practically untouched by revolution and tyranny, and the growth of luxury cannot have affected them to the same extent as it did the nobility. Yet even here the native stock declined. The decay of agriculture, brought about by the establishment of latifundia and intensified by confiscations and veteran settlements, drove numbers of farmers into the towns, where, unwilling to engage in trade, they sank into unemployment and poverty, and where, in their endeavours to maintain a high standard of living, they were not able to support the cost of rearing children. At the same time many were tempted to emigrate to the colonies across the sea which Julius Caesar and Augustus founded. Many went away to Romanize the provinces, while society was becoming Orientalized at home. Of course freedmen must have shared in those colonies also; we know they participated very freely in the restoration of Corinth; and they robably did so in many other colonies of the Dictator; but, often past the prime of life at manumission, frequently held by obligations towards their patrons, and more often than not comfortably settled in employment, for the most part they could not or would not leave the land of their slavery. Thus it was the free-born Italian, anxious for land to till and live upon, who displayed the keenest colonizing activity.

Among all the causes of the change of race (apart from manumission) war was the most important. The armies of the late Republic and civil wars had consisted largely of Italians, who, if they were not killed off, were at least deprived of domestic life during their prime. Meanwhile the freedmen, usually excluded from the army, and the freedman's descendant, never a keen solder, were allowed an uninterrupted family life and produced offspring with greater freedom. Moreover, after his twenty years' service, it was frequently the case that the legionary never returned home, but joined with his fellow-veterans to found a colony in the province where he had served.

The Roman thus gave way to the Easterner in Italy, while he made a place for himself in the provinces. Meanwhile what was the influence of the Oriental, and especially the freedman, on history?

The imperial freedman in administration has already been treated. Many offices of the utmost imperial importance were nevertheless attached too closely to Caesar's person to be given to senators and knights, who, though anxious to serve the state, would not show the same keenness to serve the Princeps. Accordingly, unless he openly declared 'L'état c'est moi', Augustus could not offer the great secretariates to these two orders. Freedmen solved the difficulty for the early emperors; they bridged the theoretical gap between the republic and the monarchy. As the freedmen's offices by degrees went to the knights, so the principate gradually came to be recognized as a despotism.

So the freedman satisfied the logical minds of the first emperors. We have seen his actual record in government, and it is only necessary to reiterate our conclusion, that, though under the Empire his official career was stained with greater corruption than that of senator and knight, yet his business ability and the many unknown cases of honest lives force us to accord him a large share in the credit for the sound administration of the Empire.

Under the Republic those freedmen who had not been born in slavery, but had come into the market through capture, brought the habits and ideas of their native land into Italy. For instance, freedmen probably helped to revolutionize Italian horticulture. They showed their masters how to grow the fruit-trees which they had tended in their youth and in their freedom. Lucullus may have first introduced the cherry into Italy. 1 It was his Asiatic captives who made it an Italian fruit.

But some of the innovations which freedmen effected were not so harmless as the cherry. Oriental luxury destroyed the sterling simplicity of the early Roman. Freedmen of course were not the only avenue by which luxury gained access to the Roman Republic. The pretentious ideas of the wealthy East no doubt were to some extent adopted by Romans themselves when they went thither to fight or to govern. They saw the gorgeous city palaces, the magnificent country mansions, the collections of gold and silver plate. They tasted gastronomic wonders yet unknown to Italy. Still, slaves and freedmen helped greatly to introduce these ideas into the land of their slavery. They must have directed their masters' minds to luxuries which Roman simplicity had never dreamed of. Then, too, when freed, they must have introduced into a wider society than that of the house such of the less expensive refinements as their means could afford.

New luxuries created new trades. When Romans and Italians found their wants vastly multiplied, and when they intensified their prejudice against banausic crafts, freedmen and their descendants stepped into the breach, supplying all the labour and much of the capital to industry. They made a bold bid to develop Italy into a manufacturing country and to save her from becoming wholly dependent on foreign lands for her needs and luxuries.

If slaves and freedmen developed Roman industry, the were largely instrumental in the very start of Roman literature. They brought the Greek influence which awoke the native talent of the Romans and inspired them to emulate their Hellenic predecessors. Further, freedmen are among the significant names of literature. Under the Republic we have Livius Andronicus, the first Latin poet known; Caecilius Statius, a dramatist of no mean ability; Terence, whose name stands second only to that of Plautus in Roman comedy; and Publilius Syrus, a distinguished writer of mimes. To represent the imperial age may be mentioned Phaedrus, the greatest Roman fabulist, and Epictetus who was perhaps the ablest postChristian Stoic and whose Greek teaching has been handed down by Arrian. Moreover many a freedman whose works are now lost must have figured prominently in his day. For instance, every imperial freedman who held the office a studiis was probably a man of some literary attainments. C. Iulius Hyginus, who occupied a literary post under Augustus, wrote commentaries on Cinna and Virgil, treatises on theology, agriculture, bees, and eminent personages in Roman history, as well as a topographical work entitled De Situ Urbium Italicarum. Polybius, the literary adviser of Claudius, had translated Homer and Virgil, apparently into prose. Sextus was probably responsible for Domitian's poem on the revolutions of 69, on which Martial bestows such flattery.

In art, science and philosophy freedmen played their rôle. Though the greatest names in the imperial period are those of Greek peregrini, yet slaves and freedmen must have in countless cases inspired their masters with a taste for art, and, after manumission, brought the same influence to bear upon the society in which they mingled. It was slaves and freedmen pre-eminently who spread the principles of Greek scientists around the Roman hearth, and who disseminated the thought of Academy and Stoa.

The same holds good in religion. Soldiers learnt of alien religions in the East, but they would never have introduced them permanently into Italy if it had not been for the Eastern slaves who brought them into their masters' homes, and, after obtaining freedom, impressed them upon society in general. Finding Romans dissatisfied with their own beliefs, they preached religions which seemed to offer a wider and more certain promise, or which made a more living appeal through the character of their ceremonies. Some of these cults were low and degrading and were celebrated by means of the most immoral rites. As early as 186 B.C. the profligacy of Bacchanalian orgies was unmasked, and it was found that some thousands of citizens were involved. Under the late Republic the religion of Isis was several times suppressed because of suspicions cast upon its ceremonial, but such was the power it exercised over society that in the early years of the Empire the government was forced to surrender, and Isis was recognized as a Roman deity. The prejudice against Christianity was largely due to the general opinion held of obscure Eastern religions.

Yet by no means all the religious innovations which freedmen effected were for the worse. Freedmen may have been among the first in Italy to listen to Christian missionaries and to carry the glad tidings throughout society. Quite a number of those unknown men with Greek names whom St. Paul mentions in the last chapter of his Epistle to the Romans may have been freedmen; Judaism in all probability owed its introduction primarily to Hebrew and proselyte slaves. Mithraism, the worthiest of Christianity's rivals, must perhaps ascribe its popularity not so much to slaves and freedmen as to the soldiers on the Eastern frontier.

The cumulative effect of these Oriental religions helped to break the old Roman character. Another more powerful solvent was also inherited from slavery and manumission. The profuse intermixture of race, continuing without interruption from 200 B.C. far into the history of the Empire, produced a type utterly different from that which characterized the heroes of the early Republic. Instead of the hardy and patriotic Roman with his proud indifference to pecuniary gain, we find too often under the Empire an idle pleasure-loving cosmopolitan whose patriotism goes no further than applying for the dole and swelling the crowds in the amphitheatre. The question whether foreign blood benefits a nation or not cannot yet be answered dogmatically. The Anglo-Saxon race has not suffered from its Celtic, Danish and Norman elements, to say nothing of Flemish and Huguenot immigrants. On the other hand race-mixture hastened the decline of the Persian Empire, and American statesmen to-day are justifiably alarmed by alien immigration. Now as a class the freedmen had sharp wits and abundant enterprise. Many were honest, industrious folk who had earned their freedom by loyal service or by legitimate additions to their peculium. Others, however, during their slavery had been thieves on every opportunity, and doubtless were prepared to continue this career after they had purchased manumission with their ill-gotten gains. Others again were men who had for a long time past left all their arduous duties to vicarii, or who had spent several years performing specialized functions which occupied about half an hour per diem; these on passing into society were not likely to be its most energetic members. Such were the men whom indiscriminate manumission kept thrusting into the citizen body. Good points many of them had; but at best they were a motley throng. Moreover, one is tempted to believe that the Italian and Eastern characters were so diverse that satisfactory amalgamation was impossible. The virtues of each disappeared and the vices predominated. The cross-bred descendant of a Hellenistic freedman and a Roman citizen often lacked the enterprise and intellect of the one and the simplicity and hardihood of the other, while the defects of both stocks remained unabated.

This race-degeneration which manumission had set afoot was accelerated in the third century by another factor. Constant warfare, whether between claimants to the throne or against barbarians, killed off the hardiest and ablest of the citizens and left the poorest stocks to reproduce themselves. The fact that the Romans who resisted Hannibal and those who succumbed to the Goths were totally different peoples is one of the main explanations of the great decline and fall. Laughing to scorn the simplicity of the early Italians, the citizens of the Empire exported most of their capital beyond the frontiers to ray for their luxuries. Protected by a standing army, they lost energy and enterprise and the power of defending themselves. Of course it would be absurd to say that racial decay was the sole cause of Rome's deterioration. Other factors operated simultaneously. The less fertile provinces whose tribute did not repay the expense of their administration made for heavy taxation which effectively obliterated the few vestiges that remained of a middle class. Mechanical progress was barred by the benumbing influence of slavery. No strong unifying religion inspired the exhausted Empire. The general decay had gone too far when Christianity triumphed, and even the conversion of Constantine did not imply at once a universal religion. But these features in the situation would not have wrought such havoc among the Decii, Fabii, Cornelii, and the other great houses of Republican Rome. It was because the giants of the past had given place to a bastard brood that the final catastrophe came.

It seems, then, that freedmen and their descendants in a great measure ruined Rome. The progressive and the utilitarian elements in the government's policy succeeded only too well in promoting slaves to Roman citizenship, while, as far as restrictions on manumission are concerned, the conservative element failed to achieve its object. In modification of this view one word must be said. Even in Augustus' day the process of Orientalization had gone too far. The great emperor saw the clouds, but he did not know they had actually burst. His legislation would have been prudent and not a whit excessive a century earlier; but in his time Rome was a cosmopolitan city, and the doom of the Empire was already sealed.

Must it then be concluded that manumission bore nothing but evil fruit? Certainly in its developments at Rome it had fatal consequences. The grant of liberty to a slave, so full of charity in the abstract, was in practice the ruin of an empire. Yet it had its good points. In the first place, it benefited the individual slave. During slavery it offered him a hope and an ambition which alleviated his lot. After a slave had obtained freedom, it gave him opportunity of developing his capabilities which servitude had naturally cramped. It opened to the foreign captive and the home-born slave a new and a higher civilization to which he might adapt himself. Yet in some cases one slave freed meant another needed. Thus the slave-trade was indirectly encouraged by manumission. But, as we have pointed out, manumission often made no difference to a slave's employment, and, whether bond or free, he remained in his master's service. Any objection, therefore, that the slave trade varied exactly with manumission would have to be seriously modified.

At the same time, manumission, if performed through benevolence or gratitude, was a moral benefit to the individual master. Similarly the charity which may produce dire results in society never fails, if actuated by the correct motive, to benefit the character of the giver. Manumission enabled the master to perform a good act; it enabled him to set on his feet a man in whom he took a charitable interest. Perhaps it was bad for the slave; perhaps it was bad for the state; but it broadened the master's sympathies and it quickened a right spirit within him.

Finally, manumission, if it had been directed aright, need not have worked with such deplorable effects upon the population. If Cato the Censor had been the author of Augustus' reforms, there would not have been such an influx of foreigners into society. If the Romans had conquered their lamentable tendency towards celibacy and childlessness, their stock would have held its own. If masters had not indulged their vanity to such an extent, fewer and worthier slaves would have passed into the citizen body. Nay, if state legislation and private prudence had guided manumission in the right path, it would assuredly have benefited not merely slave and master but also the whole population. If, instead of indulging their vanity and lavishing promiscuous manumission, slave owners had exercised a wise and just discrimination, they could have effected that only the better type of slave should enter the citizen body. How different would Roman society have appeared if masters had only given freedom in gratitude for good service and only sold it to those who had increased their peculium by honest means! The influx of Oriental blood would not have been so overwhelming, and further, the slaves freed in such circumstances would on the whole have been men of good character, who had loyally served their masters and who might be expected to prove good citizens. No jest could then have been made by the satirist about Tiber and Orontes. The vast throngs of idle and worthless freedmen that left their curse upon Rome would never have issued from the bonds of servitude. The indigenous stock would not have been ousted from its predominance; at the same time a small body of conscientious Orientals, probably marrying among themselves rather than with Italians, would have contributed art, science and industry to Republic and Empire, without destroying the native character. Something of the brilliance and versatility of Periclean Athens might have existed alongside of the simple dignity and steadfast patriotism of Republican Rome.