Volume 8, Number 1 · January 26, 1967
The Idea of Slavery
By M.I. Finley
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
by David Brion Davis
Cornell, 505 pp., $10.00
In the year AD 61 the prefect of the city of Rome, Pedanius Secundus, was murdered by one of the slaves in his town house. Under the law, not only the culprit but all the other slaves in the household had to be executed, in this instance numbering four hundred. There was a popular outcry and the Senate debated the question. Some senators rose to plead clemency, but the day was carried by the distinguished jurist, Gaius Cassius Longinus, who argued that all change from ancestral laws and customs is always for the worse. When a mob tried to prevent the sentence from being carried out, the emperor personally intervened on the side of the law, though he rejected another proposal that Pedanius's ex-slaves should also be punished by banishment. That, he said, would be unnecessary cruelty.
Review, 2948 words
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