Those immense _familiae urbanae_, of which the historian of slavery has given a detailed account in his second volume[335], belong rather to the early Empire than to the last years of the Republic--the evidence for them is drawn chiefly from Seneca, Juvenal, Tacitus, Martial, etc.; but such evidence as we have for the age of Cicero seems to suggest that the vast palaces of the capitalists, which Sallust describes as being almost like cities[336], were already beginning to be served by a familia urbana which rendered them almost independent of any aid from without by labour or purchase.

Not only the ordinary domestic helpers of all kinds, but copyists, librarians, paedagogi as tutors for the children, and even doctors might all be found in such households in a servile condition, without reckoning the great numbers who seem to have been always available as escorts when the great man was travelling in Italy or in the provinces.

Valerius Maximus tells us[337] that Cato the censor as proconsul of Spain took only three slaves with him, and that his descendant Cato of Utica during the Civil Wars had twelve; as both these men were extremely frugal, we can form an idea from this passage both of the increasing supply of slaves and of the far larger escorts which accompanied the ordinary wealthy traveller.
As regards the familia rustica, the working population of the farm, the evidence is much more definite.

The old Roman farm, in which the paterfamilias lived with his wife, children, and slaves, was, no doubt, like the old English holding in a manor, for the most part self-sufficing, doing little in the way of sale or purchase, and worked by all the members of the familia, bond and free.

In the middle of the second century B.C., when Cato wrote his treatise on husbandry, we find that a change has taken place; the master can only pay the farm an occasional visit, to see that it is being properly managed by the slave steward[338] (vilicus), and the business is being run upon capitalistic lines, i.e.with a view to realising the utmost possible profit from it by the sale of its products.