Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/38

 individuals were subjected to torture, in order to obtain that kind of evidence which the ancients deemed most satisfactory, but which the moderns regard with extreme uncertainty.

Æsop, the oldest Greek fabulist, was a native of Phrygia, and a slave, until he was set free by his last owner. He lived about the middle of the sixth century B. C. He inculcated rules of practical morality, drawn from the habits of the inferior creation, and thus spread his fame through Greece and all the neighboring countries. Crœsus, king of Lydia, invited Æsop to his court, and kept him always about his person. Indeed, he was never absent, except during his journeys to Greece, Persia and Egypt. Crœsus once sent him to Delphi to offer sacrifice to Apollo; while engaged in this embassy, he wrote his fable of the Floating Log, which appeared terrible at a distance, but lost its terrors when approached. The priests of Delphi, applying the fable to themselves, resolved to take vengeance on the author, and plunged him from a precipice. Planudes, who wrote a miserable romance, of which he makes Æsop the hero, describes him as excessively deformed and disagreeable in his appealance, and given to stuttering; but this account does not agree with what his contemporaries say of him. The stories related of Æsop, even by the ancients, are not entitled to credit. A collection of fables made by Planudes, which are still extant under the name of the Grecian fabulist, are ascribed to him with little foundation; their origin is lost in the darkness of antiquity.

A very significant and pleasant custom prevailed when a slave newly purchased was first brought into the house. They placed him before the hearth, where his future master, mistress and fellows [sic]ervants poured baskets of ripe fruit, dates, figs, filberts, walnuts, &c., upon his head, to intimate that he was come into the abode of plenty. The occasion was converted by his fellow slaves into a holiday and feast; for custom appropriated to them whatever was cast upon the new comer.

Their food was commonly, as might be expected, inferior to that of their masters. Thus the dates grown in Greece, which ripened but imperfectly, were appropriated to their use; and for their drink they had a thin wine, made of the husks of grapes, laid, after they had been pressed, to soak in water, and then squeezed again. A drink precisely similar is now made in the wine districts of France. They generally ate barley bread; the citizens themselves frequently did the same. To give a relish to their plain meal of bread, plain broth and salted fish, they were indulged with pickles. In the early ages of the commonwealth, they imitated the frugal manner of their lords, so that no slave, who valued his reputation, would be seen to enter a tavern; but in later times they naturally shared largely in the general depravity of morals, and placed their greatest good in eating and drinking. Their whole creed, on this point, has been summed up in a few words by the poet Socian. "Wherefore," exclaims a slave, "dole forth these absurdities; these ravings of sophists, prating up and down the Lyceum, the Academy, and the gates of the Odeion? In all these there is nothing of value. Let us drink — let us drink deeply