Cicero and his friend Atticus both had slaves whom they valued, not only for their useful service, but as friends.

Tiro, who edited Cicero's letters after his death, and to whom we therefore owe an eternal debt of gratitude, was the object of the tenderest affection on the part of his owner, and the letters addressed to him by the latter when he was taken ill at Patrae in 50 B.C.are among the most touching writings that have come down to us from antiquity.

"I miss you," he writes in one of them[352], "yes, but I also love you.

Love prompts the wish to see you in good health: the other motive would make me wish to see you as soon as possible,--and the former one is the best." Atticus, too, had his Tiro, Alexis, "imago Tironis," as Cicero calls him in a letter to his friend,[353] and many others who were engaged in the work of copying and transcribing books, which was one of Atticus' many pursuits.

All such slaves would sooner or later be manumitted, i.e.transmuted from a _res_ to a _persona_; and in the ease with which this process of transmutation could be effected we have the one redeeming point of the whole system of bondage.