1 92 The familiae publicanorum 



this if it had been absurdly incredible. Another glimpse of the utter 

 lawlessness prevalent in the wilds appears in the story 1 of murders 

 committed in Bruttium. Suspicion rested on the slaves employed by 

 the company who were exploiting the pitch-works in the great forest 

 of Sila under lease from the state. Even some of the free agents of the 

 company were suspected. The case, which was dealt with by a special 

 criminal tribunal, belongs to the year 138 BC, and attests the long 

 standing of such disorders. And it is suggestive of guilty complicity 

 on the part of the lessees that, though they eventually secured an 

 acquittal, it was only after extraordinary exertions on the part of their 

 counsel. 



Indeed these great gangs of slaves in the service of publicani were 

 in many parts of Italy and the Provinces a serious nuisance. Wherever 

 the exploitation of state properties or the collection of dues was farmed 

 out to contractors, a number of underlings would be needed. The lower 

 grades were slaves: a few rose to higher posts as freedmen of the various 

 companies. Now some of the enterprises, such as mines quarries 

 woodlands and the collection of grazing dues on the public pastures, 

 were generally in direct contact with rural life, and employed large 

 staffs of slaves. The managers of a company were concerned to produce 

 a high dividend for their shareholders: so long as this resulted from 

 the labours of their men, it was a matter of indifference to them whether 

 neighbouring farmers were robbed or otherwise annoyed. That we hear 

 little or nothing of such annoyances is probably owing to the practice 

 of locking up slave-labourers at night in an ergastulum, for fear of their 

 running away, not to keep them from doing damage. Runaways do 

 not appear singly as a rustic pest. But in bands there was no limit to 

 the harm that fugitivi might do; witness the horrors of the slave-wars. 

 In short, wherever slaves were employed in large numbers, the possibility 

 of violence was never remote. Their masters had always at hand a 

 force of men, selected for bodily strength and hardened by labour, men 

 with nothing but hopeless lives to lose, and nothing loth to exchange 

 dreary toil for the dangers of a fight in which something to their ad- 

 vantage might turn up. No doubt the instances of slaves called to 

 arms in rustic disputes were far more numerous than those referred to 

 by Cicero: he only speaks of those with which he was at the moment 

 concerned. 



Is it then true that in the revolutionary period farming depended 

 on slave-labour while its security was ever menaced by dangers that 

 arose directly out of the slave-system? I fear it is true, absurd though 

 the situation may seem to us. Between the great crises of disturbance 

 were spells of comparative quiet, in which men could and did farm 



1 Brutus 85. 



