_Perinthia_ which goes so far in cruelty that Terence omitted this scene. Here again, therefore, we have not a Roman characteristic. The fact is that in Plautus’ day slaves were relatively scarce at Rome; the working classes in the city were still largely free natives, the farms were usually owned in small plots by working farmers, and the few slaves on them were still treated in the way that single farm hands are usually treated in our own simpler rural districts, that is, as members of the household. Bound slaves were very rare, the _ergastulum_ was hardly known as yet, and the slave when set free still became a citizen with the same status as his master. It was not till the end of the Punic war that Rome for the first time knew what it was to possess non-Italic captives in considerable numbers—slaves who had to be bound and watched—and of course it required a generation or two of slave culture on large villas and estates before the saucy type could appear, the type familiar to us in the comedies. No, this type would perhaps be plausible at Rome in the Gracchan day, but not before. My feeling is that Plautus has not only given us the Greek type as he found it, but, since the morality of citizens was not involved in a slave’s rascalities, he has somewhat padded his plays with slave intrigue in order to speed up his action. Not from a single trait should we infer that he depicted the Roman slave of his own day. It is significant that when true Roman comedies began to be written the slave rôle was at once toned down because, as Donatus says, a Roman master ought not be represented as outwitted by a slave.