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chief of those who introduced the mimus into Latin literature towards the close of the republican period. He seems to have been a man of learning and culture, but his pieces did not escape the coarseness inherent to the class of literature to which they belonged; and Aulus Gellius (xvi. 7, 1) accuses him of extravagance in the coining of new words. The titles of forty-four of his mimi have been preserved; and what fragments remain have been collected by Ribbeck in his Comicorum Latinorum Reliquiæ, 1855, 2d ed. 1873.
LABIENUS, Titus, Julius Cæsar's proprator in Gaul, first attracted his leader's favour in a civil capacity. In 63 B.C. he appeared at Cæsar's instigation as the prosecutor of Rabirius for perduellio; and in the same year, being tribune of the plebs, he carried a plebiscitum that indirectly secured for Cæsar the dignity of pontifex maximus. The military talent of Labienus was respectable, though not brilliant; but of all the officers trained under Cæsar in his Gallic campaigns he was the most trusted. His chief exploits in Gaul were the defeat of the Treviri under Indutiomarus in 54 B.C., his expedition against Lutetia (Paris) in 52 B.C., and his victory over Camologenus and the Ædui in the same year. In 50 B.C. he was left in command of Gallia Cisalpina, while Cæsar returned to the north; but, on the outbreak next year of the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey, Labienus was one of the first to desert Cæsar. His motive is perhaps to be looked for, not so much in a deliberate calculation of chances, as in an overweening sense of his own importance, not adequately recognized by Cæsar. He was rapturously welcomed on the Pompeian side; but he brought no great strength with him. The veterans remained true to Cæsar, and even the town of Cingulum, on which Labienus had lavished much of his wealth, opened its gates to the future dictator. The ill fortune of Labienus under Pompey was as marked as his success had been under Cæsar's auspices. From the defeat at Pharsalia to which he had contributed by affecting to despise his late comrades, he fled to Africa. There, indeed, he was able by mere force of numbers to inflict a slight check upon Cæsar at Ruspina in 45 B.C.; but when the defeat at Thapsus ruined the Pompeian party in Africa, Labienus withdrew to join the younger Pompey in Spain. At Munda, on March 17, 45 B.C., he again met Cæsar, and in the ensuing defeat of his party fell sword in hand.
See the authorities referred to under Cæsar; and Baron Carra de Vaux, Expedition de Labienus contre Lutèce, Paris, 1876.
LABOUR AND LABOUR LAWS. With some excep
tions in the case of labour imposed as a punishment for
crime or as a test or condition of aid to the poor under
the poor laws, the labour here to be spoken of is labour by
freemen, – that is to say, labour by persons having the
primary right to choose whether they will labour or not,
and to choose the terms on which they will consent to
labour, if labour be their choice. Further, although
voluntary labour of men is undertaken from various
motives, – for their own profit, for self-preservation, for
love, from public or private duty apart from the prospect
of immediate gain, the labour now treated of relates
especially to that rendered to others for pecuniary reward,
for money or money's worth, – in other words, for wages.
This class of persons consists of all those who serve their
employers by hand labour, whether rude or skilled, in any
branch of productive industry or manufacture, including
agriculture, mining, and the like, as well as the processes
by which skilled artisans elaborate raw material to its
final destination and use. Purely domestic service and
the service of shopmen and clerks, as well as the work of
contractors for the service of others, who do not work with
their own hands, is excluded from specific notice here.
The labourers falling within the class thus popularly de
scribed comprise upwards of a moiety of the present adult male population of the British Isles.
Although this article deals with free labour, the present position of the free labourer cannot be rightly understood without a glance at past history, and some attention to the distinction between voluntary and forced labour.
In every age and country, until times comparatively recent, compulsory personal servitude appears to have been the lot of a large, perhaps the greater, portion of mankind.[1] The slave was a man who had been captured in war or procured by purchase, or who had surrendered himself to the dominion of another as the alternative of starvation or in discharge of a debt, and it was his hands that tilled the soil, dug the mine, wove the cloth, and built the walls in ancient Greece and Italy. It has been asserted that in the early state of Home the proportion of slaves, who were valued as property, was more considerable than that of hired servants, who could be computed only as an expense. It was thought more for the interest of the merchant or manufacturer to purchase than to hire his workmen, and in the country slaves were employed as the cheapest and most laborious instruments of agriculture. On the other hand, it has been inferred from cur scanty materials that, as the Roman empire extended, the agricultural labourer and the citizen in Spain, Gaul, and Britain, in Syria and Egypt, maintained himself, as in the present day, by his own labour and that of his household, without the aid of any slave; but this is probably too favourable a picture. In the decline of the Roman empire, Roman captives were taken home by the northern conquerors. The useful craftsmen – smiths, carpenters, workmen in the metals, shoemakers, tailors, dyers, and others – employed their skill for the use or profit of their masters; while those who were destitute of art but capable of labour were condemned, without regard to their former rank, to tend the cattle and cultivate the lands of the victors. This, however, was only turning the tables on the Romans, for capture in war forms one of the principal sources of supply of slaves wherever slavery exists.
The Germans, in their primitive settlements, were accustomed to the notion of slavery, incurred, not only by captivity, but by crimes, by debt, and the wager of personal liberty in gaming. In the glimpses we get of the conditions of labour elsewhere the same essential features are discernible. In the changes of time and of geographical area of observation the harsher word slave may disappear; yet the thing not only survived the introduction of Christianity but was long regarded as not inconsistent with it, and was recognized as a national institution in civilized Europe. Whether under the name of slavery or of serfdom, or without either name, north, south, east, and west, an absolute right, apart from contract, to earnings and to the person of the labourer was accepted, if not openly vindicated. In looking at the present day at the vestiges of man's former and most permanent handiwork, it is instructive to regard them with an eye to the distinctions between periods of forced and voluntary labour. The pyramids of Egypt and the wall of China are monuments of slave labour; and the same is the case with the classic remains at Athens and Rome, so far at least as relates to the labour involved in the quarrying and hewing of stone, and the making of bricks and placing them in position. As regards Britain, our knowledge is too slight, and the conjectures as to the origin and objects of such structures as Stonehenge and Avebury are too varied, to allow of positive assertion; but it seems legitimate to conclude that the labour was forced. British and Roman camps
- ↑ "The simple wish to use the bodily powers of another person as a means of ministering to one's own ease or pleasure is doubtless the foundation of slavery, and as old as human nature" (Maine).
