Free Streams of History: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) by Ellwood W. Kemp

or groups,—the educated and the uneducated. Of course the majority belonged to the uneducated class; we will talk of them first and of the educated last, and this will bring us back to the Greeks.
    Slaves on the great farms were treated more like animals than like human beings. The master had complete control of his slaves and could treat them as cruelly as his passions moved him to do, even to the point of killing them if he liked, and no one could interfere.
    The farmers had come now, at about a hundred years before Christ, to employ slaves almost altogether in cultivating their farms, with the result that the small farmers were obliged to give up farming because they could not raise produce to sell so cheaply as the large farmers. They then went to the cities to make a living, and often became idle, poor and vicious, and spent their lives in stealing, selling their votes to politicians and begging for something to eat. These, you see, are not the self-reliant, plain, common people, free and independent, with homes of their own, like those we saw in the early days of Rome. They have become a class of beggars, depending upon the rich for their living. This then is one thing the wars and slavery have done—they have driven the small farmer out of the country into the city, where he has become poorer and often a pauper in the city of Rome. Thus some of the Roman people are becoming very rich while others grow very poor.
    In the second place, there were so many of these slaves who had once been free that it kept Rome continually watching for fear they would arm themselves and strike for freedom,—as in fact they did try to do time and time again. In 73 B.C. a slave named Spartacus persuaded seventy of his companions to rebel with him. They went into the crater of Vesuvius to make arrangements for their struggle for liberty. Here they were joined by thousands of slaves and robbers. Three thousand Roman soldiers were sent against them, but Spartacus quickly defeated them. This victory caused the slaves, around on the farms and in the cities, to run away from their masters by the thousands, until finally Spartacus had a slave army of seventy thousand men. They captured many of the Romans and treated them as cruelly as the Romans had treated the slaves. They managed to withstand the Roman armies for two years, or until their leader was killed and his followers scattered. Thus Rome was always afraid of her slaves, for as I said, there were now really more slaves than there were Romans.
    Again many of the uneducated slaves were men and women who had immoral habits, into which the Romans gradually fell.
    But I must tell you also that many of the bad habits which Rome contracted from her slave-class, and which helped toward her ruin, were taken from the well-educated Greeks.
    That you may understand this better, I will tell you something about some of the customs of the Greeks before they became slaves. You remember how Greece was cut up by the mountains. These many little city-states were never able to make a single government binding them all together. They finally quit trying to do so, and gave themselves up to luxurious living, study and art. They spent so much time in warring and in trying to turn life into pleasure, that they forgot the worship of their ancient gods. They argued so much and so cleverly about some of their bad habits that nobody was quite sure that anything was really wrong or bad. One group of these debaters, or philosophers, as they were called, was led by a man named Epicurus, who taught that all people should live for was to enjoy themselves. Epicurus himself was a very good man, but what he taught did not have a good effect upon the people, because it gave them an excuse for doing all sorts of bad things which they would pass by lightly, saying these were for their enjoyment, and that Epicurus taught that whatever would lead to enjoyment was right to do.
    Besides Epicurus, there were many other leaders in