state of society that we are dealing. But it in no way authorizes a Christian to sell his daughter as a slave.
Among the Romans the master had absolute power of life and death over the slave. Still more had he the power of punishing him to any extent, and doing him any bodily injury he pleased. It was not till the time of Seneca, when influences closely connected with Christianity, if not Christianity itself, had begun to work on Roman Jurisprudence, that the power of the master was in any way limited, or that the person of the slave received any protection from the law. Vedius Pollio, a wealthy Roman, and a friend of Augustus, used, when his slaves displeased him, to throw them alive into his fishpond to feed his lampreys. One day a slave who had broken a crystal goblet, flung himself at the feet of the Emperor, who was supping with Pollio, praying, not that his life might be spared, but that he might not be given as food to the fishes. Augustus rebuked, but did not punish or even discard, his friend.[1] “If,” says Horace, “a man is thought mad who crucifies his slave for having filched something from a dish which he has taken off the table, how much more mad must he be who cuts his friend for a trifling offence.”[2] The Roman lady in Juvenal orders a cross to be set up for a slave, and when her husband asks the reason of the punishment, and desires her to pause before she takes away a man’s life, she ridicules the notion that a slave is a man, and says that her will is reason enough.
