own labour, but even his master's will cannot make it his property. How far this "thing" possessed a potential personality we do not know—how far, that is, the personality inherent in him could be realised by subsequent emancipation. Liberation could at best have raised the slave to the condition of the client at this early period—a slight ascent in the scale of actual rights, but one that might have been valued for the greater personal freedom and the surer guarantee of religious protection which it gave. But the fact that the slave is a part of the homestead, and at the same time an intelligent being, makes him in the truest sense a member of the family. The owner is said to have power (potestas) over him, a word which is used only of rule over reasonable beings; and this dominica potestas does not differ essentially from the patria potestas which is exercised over the son. The treatment of the two was doubtless different, for the one would some day be a lord, the other would remain a slave, but their legal relation to the dominus was the same.
But the legal status of the slave is no true index of his condition. This will depend on two factors, his origin and his social relations to his master; and on both these grounds the early slavery of Rome must have compared favourably with that of later times. The slave trade was probably unknown, and the condition must have been mainly the result of capture in war from neighbouring states. Slavery is not altogether degrading when it is wholly the consequence of the laws of war. The slave was an Italian, perhaps of as noble birth as his master, and this, though it may have aggravated the bitterness of the lot, must have rendered possible an intimate social intercourse which would not have been possible with the barbarian, and must have forced on the master's mind the conviction that a sudden turn in fortune's wheel might place him in the same position in the city of his serf. Again, the servitude was domestic; whether employed in the home, or on the common lands of the clan, or on the petty plot of ground that the master called his own, the slave was never severed from his master or his master's kindred. We hear in early times of his sitting at his master's table,[1] and of his being the tutor and playmate of his lord's children.[2] He may in some cases have been better off than the client or the unattached Plebeian engaged in some petty trade. Certainly the opportunities for the primitive culture
