A familia of one hundred and fifty slaves, such as Calvus’s, requires a semi-military organization. Everything should run smoothly. At the head of all are the upper slaves, proud, arrogant beings with their own body servants, the commissioned officers of the army. The _procurator_ (sometimes a freedman), who does the purchasing and outside business; the _dispensator_, who manages the storerooms; the _atriensis_, who acts as general chamberlain, and especially the _silentarius_, who enforces “silence” and general discipline form the heads of this category. They are often petty tyrants, and the newcomer Crœsus will have far more to fear from their harshness than from Calvus, who will hardly know him by sight. The staff at large is carefully split up into _decuriæ_ (squads of ten) each under its special chief. There are the house cleaners, the table retinue, the kitchen force, the chamber boys and maids, the keepers of the wardrobes, the master’s valets, the mistress’s maids, the special attendants of Calvus’s children, the litter bearers, the corps of messengers--each forming a separate contingent. The master, too, has several secretaries, expert copyists and readers, and a librarian. There are several slave physicians although their duties are largely confined to the familia; the masters will call in fashionable free professionals for their own serious ills. The two sexes are about equally divided, and a great many slaves are respectably if informally married,[60] although a familia is anything but a school of social virtue. =111. Discipline in a Well-Ordered Mansion. Long Hours of Idleness.=--In such a mansion the master and mistress have little acquaintance with the lower run of the human beings over whom they possess absolute power. Calvus, however, knows his upper servants, his favorite valets, and his first secretary, and being a genuinely kindly man has come to esteem them and trust them familiarly; and it is the same between Gratia and her confidential maids. The other slaves they treat fairly humanely, all things considered, but absolutely impersonally--their presence is to be taken for granted like articles of furniture, and their personal problems are ignored. In the peristylium there is always posted a bulletin board informing the slaves of the nights when their master is going out to dinner, and although Calvus does not imitate certain very haughty individuals by trying to give all his orders through signs and never addressing a menial, it is good breeding to speak to ordinary slaves as seldom and then as curtly as possible, just as one should not waste words addressing a yoke of oxen.