The
master of a horde of slaves had half his moral sense paralysed,
because he had no feeling of responsibility for so many of those with
whom he came in contact every day and hour. When most members of a
man's household or estate are absolutely at his mercy, when he has no
feeling of any contractual relation with them, his sense of duty and
obligation is inevitably deadened, even towards others who are not
thus in his power. Can we doubt that the lack of a sense of justice
and right dealing, more especially towards provincials, but also
towards a man's fellow-citizens, which we have noticed in the two
upper sections of society, was due in great part to the constant
exercise of arbitrary power at home, to the habit of looking upon the
men who ministered to his luxurious ease as absolutely without claim
upon his respect or his benevolence? or that the recklessness of human
life which was shown in the growing popularity of bloody gladiatorial
shows, and in the incredible cruelty of the victors in the Civil
Wars, was the result of this unconscious cultivation, from childhood
onwards, of the despotic temper?[374] Even the best men of the age,
such as Cicero, Caesar, Lucretius, show hardly a sign of any sympathy
with, or interest in, that vast mass of suffering humanity, both bond
and free with which the Roman dominion was populated; to disregard
misery, except when they found it among the privileged classes, had
become second nature to them.
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