As conditions were, the slaveholding South could have realized a
metropolitan life only through absentee proprietorships. In the Roman
_latifundia_, which overspread central and southern Italy after the
Hannibalic war, absenteeism was a chronic feature and a curse. The
overseers there were commonly not helpers in the proprietors' daily
routine, but sole managers charged with a paramount duty of procuring
the greatest possible revenues and transmitting them to meet the urban
expenditures of their patrician employers. The owners, having no more
personal touch with their great gangs of slaves than modern stockholders
have with the operatives in their mills, exploited them accordingly. Where
humanity and profits were incompatible, business considerations were likely
to prevail. Illustrations of the policy may be drawn from Cato the Elder's
treatise on agriculture. Heavy work by day, he reasoned, would not only
increase the crops but would cause deep slumber by night, valuable as a
safeguard against conspiracy; discord was to be sown instead of harmony
among the slaves, for the same purpose of hindering plots; capital
sentences when imposed by law were to be administered in the presence of
the whole corps for the sake of their terrorizing effect; while rations for
the able-bodied were not to exceed a fixed rate, those for the sick were to
be still more frugally stinted; and the old and sick slaves were to be
sold along with other superfluities.
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