[11] Now, Cato was a moralist of wide
repute, a stoic it is true, but even so a man who had a strong sense of
duty. If such were his maxims, the oppressions inflicted by his fellow
proprietors and their slave drivers must have been stringent indeed.
[Footnote 11: A.H.J. Greenidge, _History of Rome during the later Republic
and the early Principate_ (New York, 1905), I, 64-85; M. Porcius Cato, _De
Agri Cultura_, Keil ed. (Leipsig, 1882).]
The heartlessness of the Roman _latifundiarii_ was the product partly of
their absenteeism, partly of the cheapness of their slaves which were
poured into the markets by conquests and raids in all quarters of the
Mediterranean world, and partly of the lack of difference between masters
and slaves in racial traits. In the ante-bellum South all these conditions
were reversed: the planters were commonly resident; the slaves were costly;
and the slaves were negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality
submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable
and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited
paternalism rather than repression. Many a city slave in Rome was the boon
companion of his master, sharing his intellectual pleasures and his revels,
while most of those on the _latifundia_ were driven cattle.
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