Untitled - African American History

1XXXV1 HISTORICAL SKETCH OF SLAVERY.
quadrupedibus." He consequently could not be a party
nor a witness in court, except in extreme cases, and then
under torture. 1 He could acquire no property ; his peculium
being held only at the will of the master. Whatever
he received, by gift or bequest from others, became
immediately the property of his master. He lived,
as it
all his
were, in the shadow of his master. To him,
gains, his acts, and the very current of his life, tended.
From him, he received support and protection. He was,
like the son and all the household of the Roman, swal-
lowed up in the master. The state recognized the
citizen, and addressed its laws and its requirements to
him. The master controlled, as he listed, the household
of which he was the head and representative. Hence,
the power to kill the son and the slave with impunity ;
a power recognized, as to the latter, until the days of
Antoninus, when it was abolished. 2
By the same constitution,
for cruel treatment, the master might be com-
pelled to sell the slave, and the slave was empowered to
make his complaint to the proper authority. 3
Notwithstanding this unlimited power of the master,
and the fact that there are recorded many instances of
its cruel abuse, 4
yet other facts and circumstances impress
1
Dig. xxii, 5, De Testibus ; Terence, Phorm. Act II, Sc. i, 292 ;
Plaut. Curcul. Act V, Sc. ii, 630 ; Juvenal, x, 100. It would seem from
this passage that they testified with a halter around their necks.
2 Wallon, Part II, ch. v, vi ; Gaius, i, 52 ; Smith's Diet. " Servus." A
constitution of Claudius also made the homicide of a slave murder. It
farther provided that the exposure of an infirm slave gave him freedom ;
Sueton. Claud, xxv.
3 Seneca, de Benef. iii, 22. According to Bodin, in commenting on
this passage in Seneca, Nero was the first emperor who required of
magistrates to receive the complaints of slaves against their masters. It
would be a curious fact if the tyrant of the citizen was indeed the defender
of the slave. Troplong, Influence du Christianisme, &c., 148.
4 The cases of Flaminius, who killed a slave to gratify a guest who had
never seen a man killed (Plutarch's Life of Flaminius), and of Polio,
who fed his enormous fish upon the bodies of his slaves (Seneca, de
Ir&, Lib. iii, ch. xl), are familiar to all who have read or heard of Roman
slavery.