Page:Origin of metallic currency and weight standards.djvu/70

 asses, the same principle holds good, horses and camels on account of their great value being treated as higher units for occasional use, just as the elephant is regarded at present in parts of Further India. The slave, as we have before remarked, played an important part as a higher unit or multiple of the ox, the average slave having a fixed value, whilst of course in the case of female captives of unusual beauty a fancy price would be paid. As climate and pasture would not affect the keeping of slaves, and as human beings were fairly universally spread over the area of the ox, the probabilities are that it was almost as easy proportionally to get slaves as oxen, and to keep the one as to keep the other from being stolen. Thus there would be more or less of a constant ratio between slaves and oxen. There would be a tendency likewise to regulate the number of slaves by the amount of work to be done, and as this work in the pastoral stage is almost entirely that of the neatherd, the shepherd, the swineherd and the goatherd, the number of male slaves at least would be to a certain extent conditioned by the extent of the flocks and herds. Such we may infer from the picture of the household of Ulysses in the Odyssey was the practice in early Greece. The faithful swineherd Eumaeus, and his fellow the good neatherd, with the rascally goatherd Melanthius, and their underlings, seem, with the addition perhaps of a few house slaves who would assist in tilling the chieftain s demesne (temenos), to have comprised all the men-*servants. The master of the house worked hard himself in his field and at various handicrafts, as we find Ulysses boasting of his expertness both as a ploughman and mower; he was also a skilled carpenter, having with his own hands built the chamber of Penelope and constructed a cunningly wrought bedstead. Hence the amount of help to be required from male slaves, exclusive of their duties as herdsmen, would be but insignificant. When we come to deal with the question of female slaves, the conditions of their number seem at first sight entirely different. The question of polygamy here comes in, and we must bear in mind that they were acquired not merely as servants to perform menial duties, but likewise to be