Slavery among the Greeks.-Whilst slavery, in a mild form, was permitted among the people of God, a much worse kind of it prevailed among the heathen nations of antiquity. With other abominable.customs, the traffic in men quickly spread from Chaldea into Egypt, Arabia, and over all the east, and by degrees found its way into every known region under heaven. Of this hateful commerce we shall not attempt to trace the progress through every age and country, but shall only take a transient view of it among the Greeks and Romans, and a few other nations. One can hardly read a book of the Iliad or Odyssey, without perceiving that, in the age of Homer, all prisoners of war were treated as slaves, and compelled, without regard to rank, sex, or years, to labor for their masters in offices of the vilest drudgery. So universally was their cruel treatment of captives admitted to be the right of the victor, that the poet introduces Hector, when taking a tender and perhaps last farewell of his wife, telling her, as a thing of course, that, on the conquest of Troy, she would be compelled

To bear the victor's hard commands, or bring The weight of water from Hyperia's spring. At an early period the Phoenicians had such an established commerce in slaves, that, not satisfied with reducing to bondage their prisoners of war, they kidnapped persons who had never offended them, to supply their foreign markets. In the Odyssey, b. 14, Ulysses represents himself as having narrowly escaped a snare of this kind laid for him by a false Phoenician. Such were the manners of the Greeks in the heroic age; nor were they much improved at the periods of greater refinement. Philip II. of Macedon, having conquered the Thebans, not only sold his captives, but even took money for permitting the dead to be buried; and Alexander, who had more generosity than Philip, afterwards razed Thebes, and sold the inhabitants, men, women, and children, for slaves. See MACEDON. This cruel treatment of a brave people may indeed have proceeded from the avarice of the conqueror, but more from the momentary resentment of a man who was savage and generous by turns, and who had no command of his passions. But, from the manner in which the Spartans behaved to their slaves, there is little reason to imagine, that, had they received from the Thebans the same provocation with Alexander, they would have treated their captives with greater lenity. At Sparta,' says the late humane and elegant Dr. Beattie, slaves were treated with a degree of rigor that is hardly conceivable; although to them, as their husbandmen and artificers, their proud and idle masters were indebted for all the necessaries of life. The Lacedemonian youth, trained up in the practice of deceiving and butchering those poor men, were from time to time let loose upon them, to show their proficiency in stratagem and massacre. And once, without any provocation, and merely for their own amusement, we are told that they murdered 3000 in one night, not only with the connivance of law, but by its avowed permission. Such, in promoting the happiness of one part of

society and the virtue of another, are the effects of slavery.' It has been said that in Athens and Rome slaves were better treated than in Sparta: but in the former city their treatment cannot have been good, nor their lives comfortable, where the Athenians relished that tragedy of Euripides in which queen Hecuba is introduced as lamenting that she was chained like a dog at Agamemnon's gate.

Slavery among the Romans-Of the estima tion in which slaves were held at Rome we may form a tolerable notion from the well known fact that one of those unhappy beings was often chained to the gate of a great man's house, to give admittance to the guests invited to the feast. In the early periods of the commonwealth it was customary, in certain sacred shows exhibited on solemn occasions, to drag through the circus a slave, who had been scourged to death holding in his hand a fork in the form of a gibbet. But we need not multiply proofs of the cruelty of the Romans to their slaves. If the inhuman comhats of the gladiators (see GLADIATORS) admit of any apology, on account of the martial spirit with which they were thought to inspire the spectators, the conduct of Vedius Pollio must have proceeded from the most wanton and brutal cruelty. See POLLIO. This man threw such slaves as gave him the slightest offence into his fish ponds to fatten his lampreys; and yet he was suffered to die in peace! The emperor, indeed, ordered his lampreys to be destroyed, and his ponds to be filled up; but we hear of no other punishment inflicted on the savage master. Till the reign of Augustus, the depositions of slaves were never admitted into the courts of judicature; and even then they were received only when persons were accused of treasonable practices. The origin of slavery in Rome was the same as in other countries. Prisoners of war were reduced to that state, as if they had been criminals. The dictator Camillus, one of the most accomplished generals of the republic, sold his Etrurian captives to pay the Roman ladies for the jewels which they had presented to Apollo. Fabius, whose cautious conduct saved his country when Hannibal was victorious in Italy, having subdued Tarentum, reduced 30,000 of the citizens to slavery, and sold them to the highest bidder. Coriolanus, when driven from Rome, and fighting for the Volsci, scrupled not to make slaves of his own countrymen; and Julius Cæsar, among whose faults wanton cruelty has never been reckoned, sold at one time 53,000 captives for slaves. Nor did the slaves in Rome consist only of foreigners taken in war. By one of the laws of the XII tables, creditors were empowered to seize their insolvent debtors, and keep them in their houses, till, by their services or labor, they had discharged the sum they owed: and in the beginning of the commonwealth they were authorised to sell such debtors, and even to put them to death. The children of slaves were the property not of the commonwealth, or of their own parents, but of their masters; and thus was slavery perpetuated in the families of such un happy men as fell into that state, whether through the chance of war or the cruelty of a sordid creditor. The consequence was, that the number of

slaves belonging to the rich patricians was almost incredible. Caius Cæcilius Isidorus, who died about seven years before the Christian era, left to his heir 4116 slaves; and if any of those wretched creatures made an unsuccessful attempt to regain his liberty, or was even suspected of such a design, he was marked on the forehead with a red hot iron. In Sicily, during the most flourishing periods of the commonwealth, it seems to have been customary for masters to mark their slaves in this manner; at least such was the practice of Damophilus, who, not satisfied with this security, shut up his slaves every night in close prisons, and led them out like beasts in the morning to their daily labor in the field. Hence arose the servile war in Sicily. Though many laws were enacted by Augustus and other philanthropic emperors to diminish the power of creditors over their insolvent debtors; though the influence of the mild spirit of Christianity tended much to meliorate the condition of slaves, even under Pagan masters; and though the emperor Adrian made it capital to kill a slave without a just reason; yet this infamous commerce prevailed universally in the empire for many ages after the conversion of Constantine to the Christian religion. It was not completely abolished even in the reign of Justinian; and in many countries, which had once been provinces of the empire, it continued long after the empire itself had fallen to pieces.

Slavery, ancient and modern, in Britain.-The Anglo-Saxons, after they were settled in this island, seem not to have carried on that traffic so honorably as the Germans. By a statute of Alfred the Great, the purchase of a man, a horse, or an ox, without a voucher to warrant the sale, was strictly forbidden. That law was, doubtless, enacted to prevent the stealing of men and cattle; but it shows us that, so late as the ninth or tenth century, a man, when fairly purchased, was, in England, as much the property of the buyer as the horse on which he rode, or the ox which dragged his plough. In the same country, now so nobly tenacious of freedom and the rights of man, a species of slavery similar to that which prevailed among the ancient Germans subsisted even to the end of the sixteenth century. This appears from a commission issued by queen Elizabeth in 1574, for enquiring into the lands and goods of all her bond-men and bond-women in the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Gloucester, in order to compound with them for their manumission, that they might enjoy their lands and goods as freemen. In Scotland there certainly existed an order of slaves, or bondmen, who tilled the ground, were attached to the soil, and with it were transferrable from one proprietor to another, at a period so late as the thirteenth century; but when or how those villains, as they were called, obtained their freedom, seems to be unknown to every lawyer and antiquary of the present day. Colliers and salters were, in the same country, slaves till within these forty years, that they were manumitted by an act of the British legislature, and restored to the rights of freemen and citizens. See DEWAR. Before that period the sons of colliers could follow no

business but that of their fathers; nor were they at liberty to seek employment in any other mines than those to which they were attached by birth, without the consent of the lord of the manor, who, if he had no use for their services himself, tranferred them by a written deed to some neighbouring proprietor.

Slavery of the ancient Africans.-That the savage nations of Africa were at any period of history exempted from this opprobrium of our nature, which spread over all the rest of the world, the enlightened reader will not suppose. It is indeed in that vast country that slavery has in every age appeared in its ugliest form. About the era of the Trojan war, a commerce in slaves was carried on between Phoenicia and Lybia: and the Carthaginians, who were a colony of Phoenicians, and followed the customs, manners, and religion of their parent state, undoubtedly continued the Tyrian traffic in human flesh with the interior tribes of Africa. Of this we might rest assured, although we had no other evidence of the fact than what results from the practice of human sacrifices, so prevalent in the republic of Carthage. The genuine instincts of nature are often subdued by dire superstition, but they cannot be wholly eradicated; and the rich Carthaginian, when a human victim was demanded from him to the gods, would be ready to supply the place of his own child by the son of a poor stranger, perfidiously purchased at whatever price. That this was, indeed, a very common practice among them, we learn from the testimony of various hsitorians, who assure us that when Agathocles the tyrant of Syracuse had overthrown their generals, Hanno and Bomilcar, and threatened Carthage itself with a siege, the people attributed their misfortunes to the just anger of Saturn for having been worshipped for some years, by the sacrifices of children meanly born, and secretly bought, instead of those of noble extraction." These substitutions of one offering for another were considered as a profane deviation from the religion of their forefathers; and, therefore, to expiate the guilt of so horrid an impiety, a sacrifice of 200 children of the first rank was on that occasion made to the bloody god. As the Carthaginians were a commercial people we cannot suppose that they purchased slaves only for sacrifices. They undoubtedly condemned many of their prisoners of war to the state of servitude, and either sold them to foreigners, or distributed them among their senators and the leaders of their armies. Hanno, who endeavoured to usurp the supreme power in Carthage whilst that republic was engaged in war with Timoleon in Sicily, armed 20,000 of his slaves to carry his nefarious purpose into execution; and Hannibal, after his decisive victory at Cannæ, sold to the Greeks many of his prisoners whom the Roman senate refused to redeem. That illustrious commander was indeed more humane, as well as more politic, than the generality of his countrymen. Before his days it was customary with the Carthaginians either to massacre their captives in cold blood, that they might never again bear arms against them, or to offer them in sacrifice as a grateful acknowledgment to the gods; but

this was not always done even by their most superstitious or most unprincipled leaders. Among other rich spoils which Agathocles, after his victory, found in the camp of Hanno and Bomilcar, were 20,000 pairs of fetters and manacles, which those generals had provided for such of the Sicilian prisoners as they intended to preserve alive and reduce to a state of slavery. With the ancient state of the other African nations we are but very little acquainted. All the African states were in alliance with one or other of those rival republics; and, as the people of those states appear to have been less enlightened than either the Romans or the Carthaginians, we cannot suppose that they had purer morals, or a greater regard for the sacred rights of man, than the powerful nations by whom they were either protected or oppressed. They would, indeed, insensibly adopt their customs; and the ready market which Marius found for the prisoners taken in Capsa shows that slavery was then no strange thing to the Numidians. It seems indeed to have prevailed through all Africa, from the very first peopling of that unexplored country; and we doubt if in any age of the world the unhappy negro was absolutely secure of his personal freedom, or even of not being sold to a foreign trader.

6

Slavery of the Negroes, and modern Africa.It is the common opinion that the practice of making slaves of the negroes is of a very modern date; that it owes its origin to the incursions of the Portuguese on the western coast of Africa; and that, but for the cunning or cruelty of Europeans, it would not now exist, and would never have existed. But all this is said by some writers to be a complication of mistakes. Mr. Whitaker, particularly, in his Review of Gibbon's Roman History, is thought to have proved, with a force of evidence which admits of no reply, that from the coast of Guinea a great trade in slaves was carried on by the Arabs some hundreds of years before the Portuguese embarked in that traffic, or had even seen a woolly-headed negro. Even the wandering Arabs of the desert, who never had any friendly correspondence with the Christians of Europe, have from time immemorial been served by negro slaves. The Arab must be poor indeed,' says M. Saugnier, not to have at least one negro slave. Their wives, who are captive negresses, do all the domestic work, and are roughly treated by the Arabs. Their children are slaves like them, and put to all kinds of drudgery. Surely no man, who is not completely prejudiced, will pretend that those roving tribes of Arabs, so remarkable for their independent spirit and attachment to ancient customs, learned to enslave the negroes from the Europeans! They seem to have, without interruption, continued the practice of slavery from the days of their great ancestor Ishmael; and it seems vident that none of the European nations had ever seen a woolly-headed negro till the year 1100, when the crusaders fell in with a small party of them near the town of Hebron in Judea, and were so struck with the novelty of their appearance, that the army burst into a general fit of laughter. Long before the crusades, however, the natives of Guinea had been sold in foreign countries. In 651 the Mahometan Arabs

in Egypt so harassed the king of Nubla or Ethiopia, who was a Christian, that he agreed to send them annually, by way of tribute, a vast number of Nubian or Ethiopian slaves into Egypt. Such a tribute, at that time, was more agreeable to the caliph than any other, as the Arabs then made no small account of those slaves.' This shows that a commerce in bond-servants could not then be a new branch of trade either to the Arabs or the Ethiopians; but the vast number which the Ethiopian monarch was now compelled to furnish every year induced him to feed this great drain upon his subjects from the natives of the neighbouring countries. He therefore brought the blacks of Guinea, for the first time, into the service and families of the east; and the staves which he paid in tribute to the Arabs, whether derived from Ethiopia, the Mediterranean regions, or the shores of the Atlantic, were all called Ethiopians, from the country by which they were conveyed into Egypt. "At this time, therefore,' according to Mr. Whitaker, began that kind of traffic in human flesh,

6

'Which spoils unhappy Guinea of its sons.' But, as a female Ethiopian slave is mentioned in the Eunuch of Terence, we suspect that Guinea was occasionally spoiled of its sons' at a much earlier period. At any rate, from the observations made by the European travellers who first penetrated into that continent, it appears undeniable that slavery must have prevailed from time immemorial among such of the tribes as had never carried on any commerce with foreign nations. In fact, this kind of commerce prevailed in Africa so early as in the reign of Jugurtha. That it was not introduced among the negroes either by the Arabs or by the Portuguese appears still more evident from the behaviour of the Dahomans at the conquest of Whidah, and from the manner in which the people of Angola, at the earliest stage of their foreign trade, procured a supply of slaves for the Portuguese market. The greater part of the slaves, whom the Angolans exported from St. Paulo de Loanda, were brought from interior countries, some hundreds of leagues distant, where they could not have been regularly purchased, had that commerce been till then unknown. The Dahomans, till 1727, had never seen a white man; and when their prince and his army first met with some Europeans, in the town of Sabi, they were so shocked at their complexion and their dress that they were afraid to approach them, and could not be persuaded that they were men till they heard them speak, and were assured by the Whidanese that these were the merchants who purchased all the slaves that were sold in Guinea. We are assured by Snelgrave, who was then in the army, that those people treated their captives with such horrid cruelty as was shocking to the natives of the sea coast. A great part of their prisoners were sacrificed to their gods, or eaten by the soldiers; and when our author expressed to a colonel of the guard some surprise that a prince so enlightened as the sovereign of Dahomy should sacrifice so many men whom he might have sold to great advantage, he was told that it had been the custom of their nation, from time immemorial, to offer, after victory, a certain

number of prisoners to the gods; and that they selected the old men for victims, because they were of less value at market, and more dangerous from their experience than the young men. One of the kings of Dahomy slaughtered at once not only all the captives taken in war, but also 127 prisoners of different kinds, that he might have a sufficiency of skulls to adorn the walls of his palace; though at the very time of that massacre he knew that there were six slave ships in the road of Whidah, from which he could have got for every prime slave a price little short of £30 sterling.-Dalzel's History of Dahomy. These facts, and others which the reader will find detailed in the Modern Universal History, vol. xiii., by writers who were at the greatest Dains to procure authentic information-who were neither biassed by interest nor blinded by enthusiasm, and who held the infamous traffic in utter abhorrence, are alleged as proving, beyond the possibility of doubt, that slavery must have prevailed among all the negro nations before they were visited either by the Portuguese or by the Arabs. These two nations may indeed have been the first who dragged the unhappy negro from his native continent, and made his slavery doubly severe, by compelling him to labor, without his own consent, for masters whom he hardly considered as human beings. On this commerce, and the dreadful cruelty with which it has been carried on to the present day, it is impossible to reflect without horror: see our article SLAVETRADE: and there may be some consolation, however small, in believing that its original authors were not Europeans. The purchase of Guinea blacks for slaves, by foreign nations, does seem to have commenced ages before the Portu. guese had laid that country open to the intercourse of Europe. Even after they had made many incursions into it, the inhabitants were as regularly purchased for slaves by some of the adjoining states as they are now by the maritime Europeans. In the French West India islands, before the late revolution in the mother country, the condition of the negro slaves was better than that of the bond men among the ancient Germans.-See Ramsay's Essay, sect. V. SLAUGHTER, n. s. & v. a. Saxon, onSLAUGHTERHOUSE, N. s. rlauzt, from SLAUGHTERMAN, rlægan, rleSLAUGHTEROUs, adj. gan, to strike or kill. Massacre; destruction by the sword: to massacre, slay: a slaughterhouse is applied particularly to the building in which beasts are slain by a butcher.

Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee!

Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Shakspeare. Macbeth.
Your castle is surprised, your wife and babes
Savagely slaughtered.

Id.

Away with me, all you whose souls abhor The' uncleanly savour of a slaughter-house; For I am stifled with the smell of sin. Shakspeare. The mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds; as did the wives of Jewry, At Herod's bloody hunting slaughterman. I have supt full with horrours: Direness familiar to my slaughterous thoughts Cannot once start me.

Id.

Id. Macbeth.

He must by blood and battle's power maintain, And slay the monarchs ere he rule the plain. Prior.

SLEAFORD, NEW, a flourishing market town of Lincolnshire, pleasantly situated on the Slea, which rises in the vicinity, and soon joins the Witham. The church is a handsome, spacious, Gothic structure. It appears to have been built in the year 1271 by Roger Blunt and Roger Brickham of Sleaford, merchants. It consists of a chancel, nave, transept, and two aisles, with a tower crowned by a spire, which rises to the height of 144 feet. In the chancel are several monuments to the family of Carr, by one of whom a free school was erected and endowed in 1603, and also an hospital for twelve poor men. Opposite the west front is the marketplace. There was once a castle at Sleaford, built in the year 1112 by Alexander, bishop of Lincoln. This castle was standing in Leland's time, and is described by him; it is now levelled with the ground. Many Roman coins have been found here of the family of Constantine; and from this and other circumstances Dr. Stukely conjectures that this was a Roman town. Market on Monday, well supplied with provision of all sorts. Sixteen miles south of Lincoln, and

116 north of London.

I on a fountain light,

Whose brim with pinks was platted;
The banks with daffadillies dight
With grass like sleave was matted.

Drayton. Cynthia.
SLED, n. s. Saxon, rlees; Goth. and
SLED'DED, adj. Swed. slad; Belg. sledde,
SLEDGE, n. s. Goth. and Isl. sleggia. A low
carriage without wheels: a large heavy hammer
the two noun substantives have been confounded
The painful smith, with force of fervent heat,
The hardest iron soon doth mollify,

That with his heavy sledge he can it beat, And fashion to what he it list apply.

Spenser

So frowned he once when in an angry parle, He smote the sledded Polack on the ice. Shakspeare The sled, the tumbril, hurdles, and the slail, These all must be prepared. Dryden It would follow that the quick stroke of a light hammer should be of greater efficacy than any softer and more gentle striking of a great sledge.

Wilkins's Mathematical Magick. In Lancashire they use a sort of sledge, made with thick wheels, to bring their marl out, drawn with one horse. Mortimer's Husbandry.

The uphand sledge is used by under workmen, when the work is not of the largest, yet requires help to batter and draw it out: they use it with both their hands before them, and seldom lift their hammers higher than their head. Moxon.

SLEDGE ISLAND, a small island in the North Pacific Ocean, on the north-western shore of America. It is about four leagues in circuit.

Captain Cook says, 'The surface of the ground is composed chiefly of large loose stones, that are in many places covered with moss and other vegetables, of which there were above twenty or thirty different sorts, and most of them in flower. But I saw neither shrub nor tree, either upon the island, or on the continent. On a small low spot, near the beach where we landed, was a good deal of wild purslain, pease, long-wort, &c.; some of which we took on board for the pot. We saw one fox; a few plovers, and some other small birds; and we met with some decayed huts that were partly built below ground. People had lately been on the island: and it is pretty clear that they frequently visit it for some purpose or other, as there was a beaten path from the one end to the other. We found, a little way from the shore where we landed, a sledge, which occasioned this name being given to the island. It seemed to be such a one as the Russians in Kamtschatka make use of to convey goods from place to place, over the ice or snow. It was ten feet long, twenty inches broad, and had a kind of rail-work on each side, and was shod with bone. The construction of it was admirable, and all the parts neatly put together; some with wooden pins, but mostly with thongs or lashings of whalebone, which made me think

The SLEDGE is to be used with both hands; of this there are two sorts, the up hand sledge, described by Moxon; and the about sledge, which is used for battering or drawing out the largest work, and is held by the handle with both hands, and swung round over their heads, at their arms' end, to strike as hard a blow as possible.

The SLEDGE is used for the conveyance of very weighty things, as huge stones, bells, &c. The sledge for carrying criminals, condemned for high treason, to execution, is called hurdle. The Dutch have a kind of sledge on which they can carry a vessel of any burden by land. It consists of a plank of the length of the keel of a moderate ship, raised a little behind, and hollow in the middle; so that the sides go a little aslope, and are furnished with holes to receive pins, &c. The rest is quite even.

SLEEK, n. s. & v. a. SLEEK'LY, adv. SLEEK'STONE, n. s.

Goth. and Swed. slek; Belgic, sleych. Smooth; glossy; soft:

to make so: the adverb corresponding: sleekstone means a stone used for this purpose. As if it fed ye; and how sleek and wanton How eagerly ye follow my disgrace, Y' appear in ev'ry thing may bring my ruin.

Shakspeare.

Gentle, my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night. Id. Let their heads be sleekly combed, and their blue coats brushed. Id. Taming of the Shrew. What time the groves were clad in green, The fields all drest in flowers, And that the sleek-haired nymphs were seen To seek them summer bowers. Drayton. Yet are the men more loose than they, More kembed, and bathed, and rubbed, and trimmed, More sleeked, more soft, and slacker limbed.

She does sleek

Ben Jonson.

With crumbs of bread and milk, and lies a-nights In her neat gloves.

Id. Catiline.

smooth, and as even as you can.
The purest paste-board with a sleckstone rub

As in gaze admiring, oft he bowed
His turret crest, and sleek enamelled neck,
Fawning.

Peachum.

Milton's Paradise Lost.

By dead Parthenope's dear tomb, And fair Ligea's golden comb, Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks.

The persuasive rhetorick That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve So little here, nay lost.

Id.

Id.

A sheet of well sleeked marble paper did not cast Boyle. any of its distinct colors upon the wall. So sleek her skin, so faultless was her make, Ev'n Juno did unwilling pleasure take To see so fair a rival.

Dryden.

A cruise of fragrance formed of burnished gold, Odour divine! whose soft refreshing streams Sleek the smooth skin, and scent the snowy limbs.

SLEEP, v. n. & n.s.】 SLEEP'ER, n. s. SLEEP'ILY, adv. SLEEP'INESS, n. s. SLEEP'LESS, adj. SLEEP'Y, adj.

Pope.

Sax. rleepan; Goth. slepan; Belg. slaepen. To take rest, by suspension of many of the mental and corporal powers: hence to