traders. Some few slave traders seem to have engaged in the ugly trade of breeding and selling slaves, a common business in earlier centuries. Indebtedness was a cause of slavery in early Rome, but this practice was forbidden by law long before the NT period. During the third to first centuries BC, slaves were introduced into Roman society by the hundreds of thousands. However, one must be careful not to assign the barbaric treatment of slaves by the Romans in the pre-Christian centuries to the early