§131. Numbers of Slaves.--We have almost no testimony as to the number of slaves in Italy, none even as to the ratio of the free to the servile population. We have indirect evidence enough, however, to make good the statements in the preceding paragraphs. That slaves were few in early times is shown by their names (§58): if it had been usual for a master to have more than one slave, such names as _Marcipor_, and Olipor would not have sufficed to distinguish them. An idea of the rapid increase after the Punic wars may be gained from the number of captives sold into slavery by successful generals. Scipio Aemilianus is said to have disposed in this way of 60,000 Carthaginians, Marius of 140,000 Cimbri, Aemilius Paulus of 150,000 Greeks, Pompeius and Caesar together of more than a million of Asiatics and Gauls.
§132. The very insurrections of the slaves, unsuccessful as they always were, also testify to their overwhelming numbers. Of the two in Sicily, the first lasted from 134 to 132 B.C., and the second from 102 to 98; the last in spite of the fact that at the close of the first the consul Rupilius had crucified 20,000, whom he had taken alive, as a warning to others to submit in silence to their servitude. Spartacus defied the armies of Rome for two years, and in the decisive battle with Crassus (71 B.C.) left 60,000 dead upon the field. Cicero's orations against Catiline show clearly that it was the calling out of the hordes of slaves by the conspirators that was most dreaded in the city.
§133. Of the number under the Empire we may get some idea from more direct testimony. Horace tells us that ten slaves were as few as a gentleman in even moderate circumstances could afford to own. He himself had two in town and eight on his little Sabine farm, and he was a poor man and his father had been a slave. Tacitus tells us of a city prefect who had four hundred slaves in his mansion. Pliny says that one Caius Caecilius Claudius Isodorus left at his death over four thousand slaves. Athenaeus (170-230 A.D.) gives us to understand that individuals owned as many as ten thousand and twenty thousand. The fact that house slaves were commonly divided into "groups of ten" (_decuriae_) points in the same direction.
