292 Lessons of contrasts 



Other slaves are not employed in Roman fashion as an organized staff 

 of domestics. Each has a lodging and home of his own: his lord re- 

 quires of him a fixed rent 1 of so much corn or live-stock or clothing, 

 as of a tenant : and he renders no service beyond this. Housework is 

 done by a man's own wife and family. Slaves are seldom flogged or 

 chained or put to task-work. The German may kill his slave, but it 

 will not be as a penalty for disobedience, but in a fit of rage. Freedmen 

 are of little more account than slaves, and are only of influence at the 

 courts of the kings who rule some of the tribes. There they rise above 

 the freeborn and noble: but in general the inferiority of freedmen 

 serves to mark the superiority of the freeborn. 



Tacitus had held an important official post in Belgic Gaul or one 

 of the so-called 'Germanics' along the Rhine, and had been at pains 

 to learn all he could of the independent barbarians to the East. The 

 Rhine frontier was one of the Roman borders that needed most careful 

 watching, and Roman readers took an uneasy interest in the doings of 

 the warrior tribes whose numbers, in contrast to their own falling birth- 

 rate, were ever renewed and increased by alarming fertility. He was 

 not alone in perceiving the contrasts between Italian and German in- 

 stitutions and habits, or in reading morale therefrom, expressed or 

 implied. Germans had been employed as mercenary soldiers by Julius 

 Caesar, and were destined to become one of the chief elements of the 

 Roman armies. But in Italy they were perhaps more directly known 

 as slaves. We have just seen that Tacitus speaks of a regular selling 

 of slaves over the German border, and another passage 2 incidentally 

 illustrates this fact in a curious manner. In the course of his conquest 

 of Britain, Agricola established military posts on the NW coast over 

 against Ireland. It seems to have been in one of these that a cohort 

 oif Usipi were stationed. They had been raised in the Roman Ger- 

 manies, and apparently sent over in a hurry. Not liking the service, 

 they killed their officer and the old soldiers set to train them, seized 

 three vessels, and put to sea. After various adventures and sufferings 

 in a voyage round the north of Britain, they fell into the hands of some 

 tribes of northern Germany, who took them for pirates those that 

 were left of them. Of the fate reserved for some of these Tacitus remarks 

 'Some were sold as slaves 3 and, passing from purchaser to purchaser, 

 eventually reached the Roman bank (of the Rhine), where their extra- 

 ordinary story aroused much interest.' Such were the strange possibilities 

 in the northern seas and lands where the Roman and the German met. 



1 Germ 25 fntmenti modum dominus aut pecoris aut vestis ut colono iniungit, et servus 

 hactenus paret. The colonus here is clearly a tenant, his German analogue a serf. 



2 Agricola 28. 



3 per commercia venumdatos et in nosttam usque ripam mutatione ementium adductos. 



