Book XV.
Chap. 17, & 18.some sort rendered useless by the disadvantages they had to encounter with in the elections. They had a right to enter into the army; but they were to be registered in a certain class of the census before they could be soldiers. Nothing hindered the[1] freedmen from being united by marriage with the families of the free-born , but they were not permitted to mix with those of the senators. In short their children were free-born, though they were not so themselves.
CHAP. XVIII.
Of Freedmen and Eunuchs.
THUS in a republican government, it is frequently of advantage, for the situation of the freedmen to be but little below that of the free-born, and that the laws be adapted to remove a dislike of their condition. But in a despotic government, where luxury and arbitrary power prevail, they have nothing to do in this respect; the freedmen almost always find themselves above the free-born. They rule in the court of the prince, and in the palaces of the great; and as they study the foibles, and not the virtues of their master, they lead him not by his virtues but by his weakness. Such were the freedmen of Rome in the times of the emperors.
When the principal slaves are eunuchs, let ever so many privileges be granted them, they can hardly be regarded as freedmen. For as they cannot have a family of their own, they are naturally attached to that of another; and it is only by a kind of fiction that they are considered as citizens.
- ↑ Augustus's speech in Dio, 1. 56.
