Читать книгу The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery. How it came into the world and how it shall be made to go out онлайн

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The traditions of early Greece harmonise, in this respect, with those of the Jews. Who has not read of the fifty daughters of Danaüs? In Homer, we find old Priam appealing to his numerous progeny, as the best means of exciting pity and respect in the vindictive breast of Achilles. We find him telling of his fifty children—of nineteen born of the same mother, Hecuba; and all the rest, of concubines. Livy and Plutarch tell us of the three hundred Fabians—all of the same family—who perished in a great battle against the Tuscans, fought in the early wars of the Republic; and Plutarch also makes mention, in his Life of Theseus, of a certain personage, Pallas, who had fifty children.

From these and innumerable testimonies of a similar kind, we may readily conceive that these numerous wives and concubines kept by the heads of families in early times made fathers vastly more important personages than they are nowadays, and gave them progenies which, in comparison with modern ones, might be considered clans or tribes. What with wives, concubines, children, and grandchildren, every such father was veritably the head of a community; and inasmuch as his power was absolute over each and all, he had every motive that selfishness could dictate to make them, and keep them, slaves for his aggrandisement and pleasure. In fact, the more numerous his progeny and household, the greater was his source of wealth, the higher his status, and the better his security against personal violence in lawless times. That slavery should originate and grow up in this way appears to us perfectly natural. At all events, in no other way has it ever been, or can it ever be, satisfactorily accounted for.