V. And it was an age of cruelty. The shows of gladiators, the sanguinary
combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures
and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs
burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and
imbruted the public sensibility. The immense prevalence of slavery
tended still more inevitably to the general corruption. "Lust," as
usual, was "hard by hate." One hears with perfect amazement of the
number of slaves in the wealthy houses. A thousand slaves was no
extravagant number, and the vast majority of them were idle, uneducated
and corrupt. Treated as little better than animals, they lost much of
the dignity of men. Their masters possessed over them the power of life
and death, and it is shocking to read of the cruelty with which they
were often treated. An accidental murmur, a cough, a sneeze, was
punished with rods. Mute, motionless, fasting, the slaves had to stand
by while their masters supped; A brutal and stupid barbarity often
turned a house into the shambles of an executioner, sounding with
scourges, chains, and yells.[20] One evening the Emperor Augustus was
supping at the house of Vedius Pollio, when one of the slaves, who was
carrying a crystal goblet, slipped down, and broke it. Transported with
rage Vedius at once ordered the slave to be seized, and plunged into the
fish-pond as food to the lampreys. The boy escaped from the hands of his
fellow-slaves, and fled to Caesar's feet to implore, not that his life
should be spared--a pardon which he neither expected nor hoped--but that
he might die by a mode of death less horrible than being devoured by
fishes. Common as it was to torment slaves, and to put them to death,
Augustus, to his honor be it spoken, was horrified by the cruelty of
Vedius, and commanded both that the slave should be set free, that every
crystal vase in the house of Vedius should be broken in his presence and
that the fish pond should be filled up. Even women inflicted upon their