If the masters mined their slayes^ the slaves^ on their part^
were the most influential agents in the moral corruption of their
masters. As a consequence of this reciprocity of evil, Bome^
and all the towns^ were thronged with people devoid of all mo-
tives of morality, and whose only duty was xmconditional obedi-
ence to their owners. They were mostly influenced by one fear,
that of corporal punishment; and while accustomed to see them-
selves employed in all that was shameful and degrading to a
human being, they nevertheless came frequently into contact
with the mistress of the house and children of the family, as also
with fireemen out of the house. Being composed of every va-
riety of nations, eastern and western, they formed a company to
which each member contributed, as it were, the failings and
vices of his own country and race, as to a hnge capital of human
depravity, each imparting to the other the species of debauchery
to which he was as yet a stranger. The frequency of manumis-
sion enabled these fellows, who had often grown gray in the
school of every vice common to slaves, to mix without restraint
among free people, and to swell the complement of the half-
extinct citizen body. They brought with them for their portion,
from their former class to their new one, an ingrained propensity
to lying and deceit, that had become a second nature to them ;
and renouncing every spring and rule of moral action, they
became mere blind tools of others^ wills, or rushed as blindly to
the satisfaction of their own lusts, living like parasites upon the
rich, and as indolent consumers of the public exchequer. It was
the lucky and wealthy adventurers of their body who supplanted
the patrician families, decayed in fortune through their vices
and the civil wars. Tacitus puts into the mouth of a speaker in
the time of Claudius the confession that the greater part of the
knights, and very many senators, derived their descent from
freedmen;^ while, by the time of Nero, these liberti formed the
main stock of tribe, curia, and cohort.
