CHAP. VII. 



ROMAN MINES. 183 



rather than to import them may be inferred 

 from the high price sometimes paid for the pur- 

 chase of slaves of extraordinary endowments. 

 We find in Pliny l that Marcus Scaurus paid for 

 one slave, Daphnes, a grammarian, sestertiis 

 septigentis, or about five thousand six hundred 

 and fifty pounds. We are informed that Ros- 

 cius, the celebrated Roman actor, who was a 

 slave, and who had been the instructor of Cicero 

 in rhetoric and oratory, gained annually more 

 than four thousand pounds sterling. These are 

 solitary instances, and no doubt extraordinary 

 ones j but the chance of producing a single slave 

 of such value, or nearly approaching to it, among 

 hundreds, must have been a powerful reason for 

 rearing rather than importing slaves. 



At the most prosperous periods of the Roman 

 empire, though numerous slaves were employed 

 in all the offices of domestic life, in trades, in 

 fabrics, and in agriculture, from whence the 

 latter, when emancipated, gradually rose to the 

 station of adscripti glebse, there are no instances 

 in the time of the emperors, or in the ages that 

 followed, of their being employed in the de- 

 grading and unproductive labour of the mines. 



This diminution in the number of slaves, to 

 whose labour the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Car- 

 thaginians, and Greeks, were chiefly indebted 



1 Book vii. cap. 39. 



