was out of accordance with the spirit of the age, and, though not abolished, was evaded by cunningly contrived legal fictions.[1] Never, perhaps, have women been freer from social trammels and legal bonds than they were in the last century and a half of the Republic, and one of the features of their independence was an indirect, but very powerful, influence on politics.
But the greatest change in Roman society was due to the growth of a slave population, which, in the city and that part of Italy which formed the Roman domain, reduced the free citizens to a minority.
The rules of the jus gentium—which in this instance, as in many others, is pure international law—permitted the captive to be enslaved until such time as he set foot again in his native land, if this country of his were an independent state.[2] This principle, applied to the victorious wars of Rome, had flooded Italy with specimens of various nationalities which were applied to various uses. These prisoners of war were, as a rule, immediately transferred from the ownership of the state to that of private individuals. They were sold by the quaestors,[3] often in the camp,[4] and the slave-dealer tracked the footsteps of a successful general.[5] War alone might have provided all that were needed for the most luxurious community, if we may judge from the result of the second conquest of Macedon, which swept 150,000 Epirot captives into Italy,[6] and from the consequences of the campaigns of Caesar and Lucullus. But it was supplemented by a brisk slave trade, which after the fall of Corinth and Carthage (146 B.C.) centred at Delos, and which at the close of the Republic had reached such dimensions that, during the reign of the Cilician pirates, 10,000 slaves are said to have been imported and sold there in the course of a single day.[7] It was chiefly from the latter source that the versatile natives of the East were brought, Phrygians, Mysians, Lydians, Lycians, Paphlagonians, the Hellenised members of the "nations born to slavery," who,.]
- ↑ Cic. pro Mur. 12, 27 "mulieres omnes propter infirmitatem consilii majores in tutorum potestate esse voluerunt; hi invenerunt genera tutorum, quae potestate mulierum continerentur."
- ↑ By the jus postliminii; see p. 140.
- ↑ Plaut. Capt. Prol. 34.
- ↑ Liv. x. 42, 46.
- ↑ Caesar B.G. iii. 16.
- ↑ Polyb. xxx. 15 (Paulus) [Greek: pente de kai deka myriadas anthrôpôn exandrapodisasthai
- ↑ Strabo xiv. p. 668.
