Excerpt from History of Rome, and of the Roman People, From Its Origin to the Invasion of the Barbarians, Vol. 6

Homer shows us, in the palace of Ulysses, twelve women employed night and day in grinding corn for the house, i.e., for perhaps two hundred persons. We now have flour-mills in which twenty-four workmen can grind every day by machinery as much corn as will furnish bread for a hundred thousand men. In ancient societies an enormous amount of manual labor was required to supply the simplest wants of life; so that slavery was then a necessity, as, for other reasons, it so long seemed to be in European colonies within the tropics.

In the Roman Empire a person was born a slave or became so; slavery was kept up by birth, commerce, and war. Anciently the creditor sold the insolvent debtor; magistrates, the citizen who refused military service; and the father, his own son. These sources of slavery became less abundant as manners became milder, but without entirely disappearing: not until the time of Caracalla and Diocletian do we find rescripts which protect the child and the insolvent debtor against servitude imposed by the father and the creditor.

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