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Slave labour, we may think, had filled a gap, created by abnormal circumstances, and did not oust free labour entirely; but it tended constantly to cramp it, and doubtless started notions of work in general which helped to degrade it . Those immense familiae urbanae, of which the historian of slavery has given a detailed account in his second volume , belong rather to the early Empire than to the last years of the Republic the evidence for them is drawn chiefly from Seneca, Juvenal, Tacitus, Martial, etc.; but such evidence as we have for the age of Cicero seems to suggest that the vast palaces of the capitalists, which Sallust describes as being almost like cities , were already beginning to be served by a familia urbana which rendered them almost independent of any aid from without by labour or purchase.
Unto the very end, they employed all the ruses of their diplomacy to prevent the Barbarian chiefs from imagining themselves anything else but vassals of the Empire. Honorius, at bay in Ravenna, persisted in refusing Alaric the title of commander of the Cohortes Urbanae, even though his refusal were to lead to the sack of Rome and imperil his own life.
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