The cheapened labour which was now spread over Italy presented as many varieties of moral as of physical type, and these came to be well known to the prospective owner, not because he aimed at being a moral influence, but because he objected to being worried by the vagaries of an eccentric type. Sardinians were always for sale, not because they were specially abundant, but because they showed an indocility that rendered them a sorry possession.[245] The passive Oriental, the Spaniard fierce and proud, required different methods of management and inspired different precautions; yet experience soon proved that the hellenised sons of the East had a better capacity for organising revolt than their fellow-sufferers from the North and West, and much of the harshness of Roman slavery was prompted by the panic which is the nemesis of the man who deals in human lives. But more of it was due to the indifference which springs from familiarity, and from the cold practical spirit in which the Roman always tended to play with the pawns of his business game, even when they were freemen and fellow-citizens. A man like Cato, who had sense and honesty enough to look after his own business, elaborated a machine-like system for governing his household, the aim of which was the maximum of profit with the minimum amount of humanity which is consistent with the attainment of such an end. The element of humanity is, however, accidental. There is no conscious appeal to such a feeling. The slaves seem to be looked on rather as automata who perform certain mental and physical processes analogous to those of men. Cato's servants were never to enter another house except at his bidding or at that of his wife, and were to express utter ignorance of his domestic history to all inquirers; their life was to alternate between working and sleeping, and the heavy sleeper was valued as presumably a peaceful character; little bickerings between the servants were to be encouraged, for unanimity was a matter for suspicion and fear; the death sentence pronounced on any one of them by the law was carried out in the presence of the assembled household, so as to strike a wholesome terror into the rest. If they wished to propagate their kind, they must pay for the privilege, and a fixed sum was demanded from the slave who desired to find a mate amongst his fellow-servants.[246] The rations were fixed and only raised at the people's festivals of the Saturnalia and Compitalia;[247] a sick slave was supposed to need less than his usual share[248]--perhaps an excellent hygienic maxim, but one scarcely adopted on purely hygienic grounds. Such a life was an emphatic protest against the indulgence of the city, the free and careless intercourse which often reversed the position of master and slave and formed part of the stock-in-trade of the comedian. Yet, even when the bond between the man of fashion and his artful Servants had merely a life of pleasure and of mischief as its