290 Outlijies of European History Decreasing number of slaves and their improved condition had already destroyed the small farmer in Italy (p. 264) now blighted the prosperity of the provinces also. Great estates called villas covered not only Italy but also Gaul and Britain. Half of the great province behind Carthage, called "Africa,"'^ was in the hands of six such villa owners. The lord of such kingly do- mains lived like a prince, with a great household of personal attendant slaves who cooked the food, waited on the proprietor, wrote his letters, read to him, and entertained him in other ways. Such houseJwId slaves led a not undesirable life and were often on terms of the greatest intimacy with their owners. Household slavery had never been so great an evil as the industrial and agricultural sla-ery which had brought such social and economic ruin during the last two centuries of the Republic, when the work in the factories and the fields of Italy was done by multi- tudes of slaves (p. 264). The long wars had furnished these vast hordes of slaves ; but after the great wars of conquest were over, this source of supply ceased, for there were no prisoners of war to be sold as slaves. The hosts of foreign slaves who accom- plished the ruin of the Italian farmers and craftsmen after 200 B.C. (p. 264) had therefore greatly decreased under the Empire, when the number of slaves was steadily diminishing, and the villas were worked by the colon i (see p. 292). The condition, even of in- dustrial and agricultural slaves moreover, had much improved. Their owners abandoned the horrible subterranean prisons in which the farm hands had once been miserably huddled at night. The law, moreover, protected the slave from some of the worst forms of abuse ; first and foremost it deprived his master of the right to kill him. Although a villa might be as extensive as a large village, its members were under the absolute control of the proprietor of the estate. Another cause of the decreasing number of slaves was the fact that masters now began to free their slaves on a large scale — 1 This word did not, of course, designate the whole continent of Africa as it does now. Under Rome it applied to a province extending only to the borders of the Sahara.
