so much the protection of their trade, as the cheerfulness of intercourse, the promotion of fellowship and good-will, the relief of the dulness of humdrum lives. Probably no age, not even our own, ever felt a greater craving for some form of social life, wider than the family, and narrower than the State. It was a movement at which, as we have seen, even the greatest and strongest of the emperors had to connive. It penetrated society down to its lowest layers. Even the slaves and freedmen of great houses organised themselves in colleges. There were colleges in the imperial household.(1493) T. Aelius Primitivus, chief of the imperial kitchen, being a man of great posthumous ambition, left the care of his own and his wife’s monument to the college of the palatine cooks.(1494) In the inscriptions of Moesia there is the album of a Bacchic club of household slaves containing 80 names, with apparently different grades among them, designated by such titles as _archimysta_, _bouleuta_, _frater_ and _filius_.(1495) A similar club of the servile class, devoted to the worship of Isis, existed at Tarraco.(1496) The officers of another bear the pompous titles of tribune, quaestor, and triumvir, and the slab records the thanks of one Hilara, that her ashes have been allowed to mingle in the same urn with those of Mida the chamberlain.(1497) A provincial treasurer at Ephesus, who was a _verna Augusti_, commits the custody of his wife’s monument to five colleges of slaves and freedmen in the emperor’s household. One of the colleges bears the name of Faustina. Another college is devoted to the cult of the Lares and images of Antoninus Pius.(1498) Private masters seem to have encouraged the formation of such associations among their dependents, and sometimes to have endowed them with a perpetual foundation.(1499) It was probably politic, as well as kind, to provide for slaves social pleasures within the circle of the household, and thus to forestall the attractions of the numerous clubs outside, which freely offered their hospitality.(1500) We may be sure that the college “which was in the house of Sergia Paulina” was not encouraged by the mistress without good reason.