to protect them from cruelty, and gave them the right of being compulsorily sold when they had just cause of complaint against their actual owner.[1] It has already been mentioned that Constantine,[2] although a slave could have no legal relatives, forbade that servile families should be separated by sale to different persons; but, nevertheless, in the sixth century the abolition of slavery was never contemplated as a social possibility. A Roman slave wore no badge of servitude, and when on one occasion it was proposed that they should do so, the proposition was negatived on the grounds that it would be hazardous to provide them with a means of recognizing how very numerous they were.[3]
Such, in general, was the position of slaves within the Empire when Justinian came to the throne; and in many important details they were indebted to him for an increase of their privileges. That emperor was a busy law-giver in every department of the state; and, when not blinded by fanaticism or financial greed, his measures tended to the extension of liberty and the removal of technical restrictions. Obstacles were placed in the way of the manumission of slaves, and in many the freedom bestowed was only partial. Justinian abolished such irksome distinctions, and decreed that all freedmen should enjoy the full rank of Roman citizenship irrespective of their previous status or formalities in the mode of manumission.[4] By a law passed in the time of Augustus a man could not by will confer liberty on all his slaves, but only on a proportion of them;[5] and a youth who was considered to have attained to manhood, that is, to
