Романские времена в истории Великобритании.


                             The  Roman Empire.
     Two thousand years ago while the Celts were still living in tribes  the
Romans were the most powerful people in the world.  Roman  society  differed
greatly from that of  the  Celts.  It  was  a  slave  society  divided  into
antagonistic classes. The main  classes  were  the  slaves  and  the  slave-
owners. The slave-owners made up the minority of  the  population  but  they
owned the land, tools, buildings and slaves. The  slaves  possessed  neither
land nor tools and were themselves the property  of  the  slave-owners.  The
slaves could be brought and sold, exchanged or given  away  like  any  other
thing. They could be kept in chains, whipped and put to death.
     Slavery was the first and the most inhuman form  of  exploitation.  The
slave owners appropriated almost all the results of the slaves’ labour;  the
slaves were given some food and clothing so  that  they  would  not  die  of
starvation and cold. Thus, whatever was produced by the slaves  beyond  what
they needed to keep themselves  alive  was  taken  away  by  their  masters.
Therefore the slaves were not interested in the results of their labour.
     Overseers forced the slaves to work more. The disobedient  slaves  were
severely  punished.  Government  bodies  issued  acts  beneficial   to   the
exploiters. With the  help  of  the  army  the  slave-owners  put  down  the
uprising of the exploited. The army also helped the slave-owners to  protect
their riches against foreign enemies and to wage endless wars  in  order  to
conquer new lands and to seize more slaves.
     The Romans conquered all the countries around  the  Mediterranean  Sea.
In the wars, in which  Rome  gained  one  province  after  another  for  the
empire, many thousands of prisoners were taken. They were sold at the slave-
market at Rome. Slaves were so cheap that all the Romans except the  poorest
had one or more, and rich slave-owners possessed hundreds of them.
     In the 1st century BC and in the 1st century AD slavery  spread  widely
in the Roman Empire. Unlike the Ancient East and Greece where the  land  was
cultivated chiefly by peasants, in Rome, very many slaves  were  engaged  in
agriculture; large farms in Italy were worked entirely by gangs  of  slaves.
The slave system reached its peak in the Roman Empire. No other  country  in
the ancient world had so many slaves as Rome did. In no  other  country  did
slave labour replace that of the freemen on such a large scale.

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