=105. The City Slaves and the Country Slaves.=--Calvus and Gratia have a familia of about one hundred and fifty slaves in their city house. Scattered upon their villas there are always at least as many more, but between the _city slaves_ and the _rustic slaves_ there is a great gulf fixed. The first class utterly despises the latter. The city slaves are mostly soft-handed ministers to their owners’ luxuries. The country slaves are toiling farm hands often under extremely severe discipline. When the master, attended by a great retinue from his town house, sojourns at a villa, squabbling and even fights between the two contingents are extremely probable. Let a serving boy become too insolent, or a tiring maid fail in her duty--the master or mistress can simply order, “Send him or her to the villa!” The wretch will then beg instead to be flogged in sheer mercy. Banishment to the rustic slave colony seems a mere death in life. =106. Purchasing a Slave Boy.=--In any large city familia, the purchase of new slaves to replace vacancies caused by death or otherwise is an everyday occurrence. Very lately a new errand boy was wanted by Calvus, who could not condescend to purchase such a menial in person; and he left the task to a competent freedman, Cleander. The latter conscientiously went through the great slave bazaars near the fora and especially along the Sæpta Julia, the great porticoes lining the Via Lata. Here any quantity of human bipeds were on sale as in a regular cattle market. There were numbers of little stalls or pens with crowds of buyers or mere spectators constantly elbowing in and out, and from many of them rose a gross fleshly odor as from closely confined animals. At the entrance to these pens notices, written on white boards with red chalk, recited the nature of the slaves inside, and sometimes the hour when they would be sold at auction. Every nationality was represented among these vendable commodities--Egyptians, Moors, Arabs, Cilicians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Greeks and alleged Greeks, Celts from Gaul, Spain, and Britain, and a good many Teutons, fair-haired creatures from beyond the Rhine. They were of both sexes and of all ages, but with youths and grown-up girls predominating. As Cleander went about he heard a crier announcing that a new coffle of Jews was just being put on sale, the results of the latest success of the Emperor’s generals in capturing one of the last rebellious strongholds in Palestine.