BOOK I. VIII. 1-4 



who are physically attractive, and certainly not from 

 that class which has busied itself with the voluptuous 

 occupations of the city. This lazy and sleepy- 

 headed class of servants, accustomed to idling, to the 

 Campus, the Circus, and the theatres, to gambHng, 

 to cookshops, to bawdy-houses, never ceases to 

 dream of these folHes ; and when they carry them 

 over into their farming, the master suffers not so 

 much loss in the slave himself as in his whole estate. 

 A man should be chosen who has been hardened by 

 fai-m work from his infancy, one who has been tested 

 by experience." If, however, such a person is not 

 available, let one be put in charge out of the number 

 of those who have slaved patiently at hard labour ; 

 and he should already have passed beyond the time of 

 young manhood but not yet have arrived at that of 

 old age, that youth may not lessen his authority to 

 command, seeing that older men think it beneath 

 them to take orders from a mere stripling, and that 

 old age may not break down under the heaviest 

 labour. He should be, then, of middle age and of 

 strong physique, skilled in farm operations or at 

 least very painstaking, so that he may learn the 

 more readily ; for it is not in keeping with this 

 business of ours for one man to give orders and 

 another to give instructions, nor can a man properly 

 exact work when he is being tutored by an underling 

 as to what is to be done and in what way. Even an 

 illiterate person, if only he have a retentive mind, 

 can manage affairs well enough. Cornelius Celsus 

 says that an overseer of this sort brings money to 

 his master oftener than he does his book, because, 

 not knowing his letters, he is either less able to 

 falsify accounts or is afraid to do so through a second 



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