The second fact that we have to grasp is this. In the old days, when such slaves as there then were came from Italy itself, and worked under the master's own eye upon the farm, they might and did share to some extent in the social life of the family, and even in its religious rites, and so might under favourable circumstances come within the range of its moral influences[366]. But towards the close of the Republican period those moral influences, as we have seen, were fast vanishing in the majority of families which possessed large numbers of slaves. The common kind of slave in the city, who was not attached to his owner as was a man of culture like Tiro, had no moral standard except implicit obedience; the highest virtue was to obey orders diligently, and fear of punishment was the only sanction of his conduct. The typical city slave, as he appears in Plautus, though by no means a miserable being without any enjoyment of life, is a liar and a thief, bent on overreaching, and destitute of a conscience[367]. We need but reflect that the slave must often have had to do vile things in the name of his one virtue, obedience, to realise that the poison was present, and ready to become active, in every Roman household. "Nec turpe est quod dominus iubet."[368] On the latifundia in the country the master was himself seldom resident, and the slaves were under the control of one or more of their own kind, promoted for good conduct and capacity. The slaves of the great sheep and cattle farms were, as we saw, of the wildest sort, and we may judge of their morality by the story of the Sicilian slave-owner who, when his slaves complained that they were insufficiently clothed, told them that the remedy was to rob the travellers they fell in with.[369] The _ergastula_, where slaves were habitually chained and treated like beasts, were sowing the seeds of permanent moral contamination in Italy.[370] But on the smaller estates of olive-yard and vineyard their condition was better, and a humane owner who chose his overseers carefully might possibly reproduce something of the old feeling of participation in the life as well as the industry of the economic unit. In an interesting chapter Varro advises that the vilicus should be carefully selected, and should be conciliated by being allowed a wife and the means of accumulating a property (_peculium_); he even urges that he should enforce obedience rather by words than blows.[371] But of the condition of the ordinary slave on the farm this is the only hint he gives us, and it never seems to have occurred to him, or to any other Roman of his day, that the work to be done would be better performed by men not deprived by their condition of a moral sense; that slave labour is unwillingly and unintelligently rendered, because the labourer has no hope, no sense of dutiful conduct leading him to rejoice in the work of his hands. Nor did any writer recognise the