=114. Branding of Slaves. _Ergastula_--Slave Prisons.=--If a slave’s offense is too great to be rewarded by a mere whipping, and yet does not provoke the death penalty, there are plenty of intermediate punishments. Toiling around Calvus’s atrium is an ill-favored lad with the scars of branding barely healed on his forehead: “FVR” he is marked (“Thief”)[62]. He is taking the place of another youth who, to cure extreme laziness, has been sent for a month to the “mill gang”--chained to the great lever which turns the grist mill and forced to toil all day like a hard-driven ass--an excellent cure for idleness. This fate is not so bad, however, as what befell one of the eques Pollio’s valets, a bright clever lad, who foolishly became too pert to his master. In a fit of anger Pollio ordered, “Give him six months in the _ergastulum_.” The soft-handed boy was, therefore, not merely shipped off to severe farm labor, itself utterly repulsive, but was obliged to work in the fields in a chain-gang along with the very scum of slave-criminals; always in fetters, lashed by brutish keepers themselves slaves, and confined at night in underground prisons (_ergastula_) that were mere kennels. =115. Death Penalties for Slaves. Pursuit of Runaways.=--If a slave really deserves death, there are, of course, two standard methods of capital punishment, both very degrading as well as fearful. Everybody knows about crucifixion with its hours and perhaps days of hideous agony; but more common and nearly as painful is death on the _furca_.[63] The victim’s head is placed at the opening of two “V”-shaped beams and his arms tightly lashed upon them; then the professional floggers strike the wretch with their loaded whips, the leaden balls worked into the thongs making them a terrific weapon, until death comes as blessed relief. It has been a long day since there has been an execution at Calvus’s house, but some years ago a Spanish boy who murdered an upper-servant perished thus under the lash. There is, however, a much simpler way of disposing of criminal slaves, one bringing a certain return to their masters,--namely, to sell them to the givers of public shows to train as gladiators or merely to set in the arena to give sport to the bears or lions. Of course, under such conditions slaves will often try to run away. They seldom really succeed, however, unless they are persons of marked intelligence and can make off with considerable money. The Roman Empire is one vast police unit, unattached strangers are everywhere scrutinized carefully and when a slave disappears a reward is promptly offered. Only now a crier has gone down Mercury Street, with a crowd after him, as he proclaims: “_Disappeared from the public baths, a boy aged about sixteen. Free and easy habits. Curly hair. Good-looking. Answers to name of Giton. A thousand sesterces to anybody haling him back to Aulus Sulpicius near the Temple of Ops, or to anyone who will betray his whereabouts!_”[64]