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 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.