98 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF ROME 



Their finest orator, Dio Chrysostom, has the honour 

 of being the first moralist in history to denounce 

 slavery in principle. 



During the first century, and later, slavery was cur- 

 tailed by economic causes. It was discovered that 

 a free and willing worker was better than a slave, 

 and slaves were encouraged to buy their freedom. 

 In the normal course of development the institution 

 was doomed. But Rome passed into a period of 

 confusion and demoralization, and the progress was 

 suspended. The Christian Church acquiesced in slavery 

 without protest. 1 Not a single voice was raised in 

 the Western world against it. But when Rome fell, 

 in the fifth century, and the German barbarians 

 destroyed all the capitalism of Rome, the slaves 

 became ownerless, and they generally dispersed. The 

 institution, however, still lingered in places (as in 

 England) until the eighth century ; but in Europe 

 generally slavery had by this time passed, from sheer 

 economic causes, into serfdom — which was little better. 

 It hardly becomes English and American writers to 

 cast slavery into the teeth of the ancient Romans — 

 who knew little of the past and were only a few 

 centuries out of barbarism — in view of the horrors 

 of black slavery in Christendom right down to the 

 nineteenth century. 



The reader will not misunderstand. Rome was an 

 imperfect civilization, with streaks of the earlier 



1 I am sorry to have to point out here two very large and very 

 positive errors in Mr. Wells's Outline. He says that Christians 

 presented " a united front against slavery " (p. 292) and gave the 

 Roman world education. Both these statements are extraordinarily 

 opposed to the facts. There is only one Christian condemnation of 

 slavery (doubtfully attributed to Gregory of Nyssa) in the whole of the 

 first eight centuries, and that is rather a condemnation of the luxury 

 of ownership. To education we return later. 



