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Excerpt from History of Rome, and of the Roman People, From Its Origin to the Invasion of the Barbarians, Vol. 6 Homer shows us, in the palace of Ulysses, twelve women employed night and day in grinding corn for the house, i.e., for perhaps two hundred persons. We now have flour-mills in which twenty-four workmen can grind every day by machinery as much corn as will furnish bread for a hundred thousand men. In ancient societies an enormous amount of manual labor was required to supply the simplest wants of life; so that slavery was then a necessity, as, for other reasons, it so long seemed to be in European colonies within the tropics. In the Roman Empire a person was born a slave or became so; slavery was kept up by birth, commerce, and war. Anciently the creditor sold the insolvent debtor; magistrates, the citizen who refused military service; and the father, his own son. These sources of slavery became less abundant as manners became milder, but without entirely disappearing: not until the time of Caracalla and Diocletian do we find rescripts which protect the child and the insolvent debtor against servitude imposed by the father and the creditor. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.