1Their other slaves they do not employ in our fashion, with duties assigned throughout the household: each controls his own dwelling, his own home. 1The master imposes on him a quantity of grain or cattle or cloth, as on a tenant, and the slave obeys so far; 1the other duties of the house are carried out by the wife and children. 2To flog a slave or to punish him with chains and hard labour is rare: they often kill one, not through discipline and severity, but in a fit of passion and anger, as they would an enemy, except that it goes unpunished. 3Freedmen are not much above slaves, rarely of any weight in the household, never in the state, except only among those peoples that are ruled by kings.
3For there they rise above both the freeborn and the nobles: among the rest the inferior position of freedmen is the proof of freedom.