LIBER VII · CAPUT 39
SLAVES FOR WHICH A HIGH PRICE HAS BEEN GIVEN
Latine · Mayhoff 1906
Pretium hominis in servitio geniti maximum ad hanc diem, quod equidem conpererim, fuit grammaticae artis, Daphnin Attio Pisaurense vendente et M. Scauro principe civitatis IIIDCC licente. excessere hoc in nostro aevo, nec modice, histriones, sed hi libertatem suam mercati, quippe cum iam apud maiores Roscius histrio II D annua meritasse prodatur, nisi si quis in hoc loco desiderat Armeniaci belli paulo ante propter Tiridaten gesti dispensatorem, quem Nero III |CXXX| manumisit. sed hoc pretium belli, non hominis, fuit tam Hercules quam libidinis, non formae, Paezontem e spadonibus Seiani III |D???| mercanteClutorio Prisco. quam quidem iniuriam lucri fecit ille mercatus in luctu civitatis, quoniam arguere nulli vacabat.
English · Bostock & Riley 1855–57
The highest price ever given for a man born in slavery, so far as I am able to discover, was that paid for Daphnus, the grammarian, who was sold by Natius of Pisaurum to M. Scaurus, the first man in the state, for seven hundred thousand sesterces. In our day, no doubt, comic actors have fetched a higher price, but then they were purchasing their own freedom. In the time of our ancestors, Roscius, the actor, gained five hundred thousand sesterces annually. Perhaps, too, a person might in the present instance refer to the case of the army commissary in the Armenian war, which was of late years undertaken in favour of Tiridates; which officer, in our own time, received his manumission from Nero for the sum of thirteen million sesterces; but, in this case, the consideration was the profit to be derived from the war, and it was not the value of the man that was paid for. And so, too, when Lutorius Priscus bought of Sejanus, the eunuch, Pæzon, for fifty million sesterces, the price was given, by Hercules! rather to gratify the passion of the purchaser, than in commendation of the beauty of the slave. Universal sorrow and consternation then reigning, the public were too much pre-occupied with it to put a stop to a bargain of so scandalous a nature.