The slave-jail was a perfect hell on earth. It presented the spectacle of human beings in their worst aspect, entirely dehumanised by despair and misery. The slaves who were imprisoned there were treated like wild beasts, and became no better than wild beasts, with less of rage but more of malice and foulness. They worked in chains, and were driven to work with scourges. Torture and starvation were the sole methods of government. They were a herd of wretches clothed in rags, ill-fed, untended, unpitied, passing their days and nights under filthy conditions and in pestilential air, hateful and hating one another. Some of them were men half mad and wholly untameable, who could not be depended upon except so far as they were coerced by violence. Others were pure barbarians, only speaking a few words of any intelligible language, and therefore useless in a town _familia_. Others were criminals only exempted from death because of the value of their labour. Some of them knew that there was little chance of their being taken thence, unless it were to be crucified, and that when death released them, their bodies would be carelessly flung to rot amid the seething abominations of the corpse-pits (_puticuli_) like that which Onesimus had once seen in Rome near the Esquiline hill. The only slaves who retained any vestige of decency and self-respect in these seething masses of human misery and degradation, were those who found themselves denizens of an _ergastulum_ for a short period, at the caprice of a master or mistress. The experience was so terrible that it cowed the most contumacious into trembling servility. A few came there for no real fault, who were far less guilty of any misdoing than the owners who subjected them to this dreaded punishment. Sometimes a page or favourite who had been tempted to speak pertly in consequence of too much petting, or a youth who had been goaded into rebellion by the intolerable tyranny of a freedman, or a slave whose blood had been turned into flame by some atrocious wrong, learnt forever the hopelessness of his condition, and the abjectness of his servitude, by being sent there for a week or even for a month. Emerging from that den of despair, a human being felt the conviction enter like iron into his soul, that slaves were not men, and had none of the rights of men; and that, unless they wished to throw away their lives altogether, no complaisance to an owner could be too abject, and nothing must be considered criminal which an owner required of his human chattel.