ancient Thebes, but a city in which an important part of the world's cash was actually collected. It may be taken that in Cæsar's time much more than half of the Classical world's gold was in Rome.
But when, from about Hannibal's time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men's eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person[1] and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. The properties of the coin were extended to apply to living objects, and the stock of men in the regions "opened up" to the plunderings of proconsuls and tax-farmers became as interesting as the stock of metal. A curious sort of double valuation developed. The slave had a market price, although ground and soil had not. He served for the accumulation of great uninvested fortunes, and hence the enormous slave-masses of the Roman period, which are entirely inexplicable by any other sort of necessity. So long as man needed only as many slaves as he could gainfully employ, their number was small and easily covered by the prisoners of war and judgment-debtors.[2] It was in the sixth century that Chios made a beginning with the importation of bought slaves (Argyronetes). The difference between these and the far more numerous paid labourers was originally of a political and legal, not an economic kind. As the Classical economy was static and not dynamic, and was ignorant of the systematic opening-up of energy-sources, the slaves of the Roman age did not exist to be exploited in work, but were employed — more or less — so that the greatest possible number of them could be maintained. Specially presentable slaves possessing particular qualifications of one sort or another were preferred, because for equal cost of maintenance they represented a better asset; they were loaned as cash was loaned; and they were allowed to have businesses on their account, so that they could become rich;[3] free labour was undersold — all this so as to cover at any rate the upkeep of this capital.[4] The bulk of them cannot have been employed at all. They answered their purpose by simply existing, as a stock of money in hand which was not bound up to a natural limit
- ↑ P. 600.
- ↑ The belief that slaves ever constituted, even in Athens or Ægina, as much as a third of the population is'a complete delusion. On the contrary, the revolutions of the period after 400 presuppose an enormous surplus of free paupers.
- ↑ P. 480.
- ↑ Herein lies the difference between this slavery and the sugar-slavery of our own Baroque. The latter represents a threshold phase of our machine industry, an organization of "living" energy, which began with man-fuel, but presently passed over to coal-fuel; and slavery came to be considered immoral only when coal had established itself. Looked at from this angle, the victory of the North in the American Civil War (1865) meant the economic victory of the concentrated energy of coal over the simple energy of the muscles.
