MISCELLANEOUS NOTES 755
allow slaves to touch them, to enter their houses, travel with them in cars, etc. would it have been possible for the master to train his slave, to raise him from semi-barbarism to a cultured state ? Obviously not. It is because the slave was not held to be an untouchable that the master could train him and raise him. We again come back therefore, to the same conclusion-namely, that what has saved the slave is that his personality was recognised by society and what has ruined the untouchable is that Hindu society did not recognize his personality, treated him as unfit for human association and common dealing.
That the slave in Rome was no less of a man because he was a slave, that he was fit for human intercourse although he was in bondage is proved by the attitude that the Roman Religion had towards the slave. As has been observed—
“……….Roman religion was never hostile to the slave. It did not close the temple doors against him ; it did not banish him from its festivals. If slaves were excluded from certain ceremonies, the same may be said of free men and women-being excluded from the rites of Bono Dea, Vesta and Ceres, women from those of Hercules at the Ara Maxima. In the days when the old Roman divinities counted for some-thing, the slave came to be informally included in the family, and could consider himself under the protection of the gods of the household .......Augustus ordered that freed women should be eligible as priestesses of Vesta. The law insisted that a slave’s grave should be regarded as sacred and for his soul Roman mythology provided no special heaven and no particular hell. Even Juvenal agrees that the slave, soul and body is made of the same stuff as his master...”
SLAVE IN LAW
There was no stigma attached to his person. There was no gulf social or religious which separated the slave at any rate in Rome from the rest of the society. In outward appearance he did not differ from the free man ; neither colour nor clothing revealed his conditions ; he witnessed the same games as the freemen, he shared in the life of the Municipal towns, and employed in state service, enaged himself in trade and commerce as all free men