Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/39

 Let us rejoice, whilst it is yet permitted us to delight our souls. Enjoy thyself, O Manes! Nothing is sweeter than eating and drinking. Virtues, embassies, generalships, are vain pomps, resembling the plaudits of a dream. Heaven at the fated hour will deliver thee to the cold grasp of death, and thou wilt bear with thee nothing but what thou hast drunk and eaten! All else is dust, like Pericles, Codros and Cimon."

The employment of household slaves necessarily varied according to the rank and condition of their lords. In the dwellings of the wealthy and luxurious, they were accustomed to fan their masters and mistresses, and drive away the flies with branches of myrtle. Among the Roman ladies, it was customary to retain a female slave, for the sole purpose of looking after the Melitensian lap-dogs of their mistresses, in which they were less ambitious than that dame in Lucian, who kept a philosopher for this purpose. Female cup-bearers and ladies' maids were likewise slaves; the latter were initiated in all the arts of the toilet.

There seems to have been a set of men who earned their subsistence by initiating slaves in household labors. In the bakers' business, Anaxarchos, a philosopher, introduced an improvement, by which modern times may profit, — to preserve his bread pure from the touch, and even from the breath of the slaves who made it, he caused them to knead the dough with gloves on their hands, and to wear a respirator of some gauze-like substance over their mouths. Other individuals, who grudged their domestics a taste of their delicacies, obliged them to wear a broad collar like a wheel around their necks, which prevented them from bringing their hands to their mouths. This odious praclice, however, could not have been general.

Besides working at the mill and fetching water, both somewhat laborious employments, we find that female slaves were sometimes engaged in wood cutting upon the mountains. Towards the decline of the commonwealth, it became a mark of wealth and consequence to be served by black domestics; as was also the fashion among the Romans and the Egyptian Greeks. Cleopatra had negro boys for torch-bearers; and the Athenian ladies, as a foil, perhaps, liked to be attended by black waiting maids.

When men have usurped an undue dominion over their fellows, they seldom know where to stop. The Syrians, themselves enslaved politically, and often sold into servitude abroad, affected when rich a peculiarly luxurious manner: female attendants waited on their ladies, who, when mounting their carriages, required them to bend on all fours, that they might make a footstool of their backs.

We append to our notice of slavery in Athens, a description of the splendors of that celebrated city, from whence the light of intellectual cultivation has spread for thousands of years down to our own time. This capital of the old kingdom of Attica, and of the more modern democracy, was founded by Cecrops, 1550 years before Christ. The old city was built on the summit of some rocks, which lie in the midst of a wide and pleasant plain, which became