four hundred: one of the few indications that we have of the number of slaves in an aristocratic Roman household. Other numbers are 400 slaves given by a wealthy woman in North Africa named Pudentilla to her sons by a first marriage in her will (which they contested on the grounds that the bulk of the estate went to the second husband) (Apuleius, Apol. 93) and 4,116 owned by the freedman C. Caecilius Isidorus when he died in 8 AD (Pliny, NH 33.135). The younger Pliny said that he gave freedom to 100 slaves in his will, implying a total of some 500 (though by no means all in one house: ILS 2927). The basic categorization of slave households under Roman law appears in Gaius Institutes 1.42-43: According to the Fufian-Caninian Law certain limits are set for the number of slaves that can be freed in a will (43) it is permitted for a person who has more then two but no more than ten slaves to free half of them, it is permitted for a person who has more than ten slaves but no more than thirty to free a third of them, it is permitted for a person who has more than thirty slaves but no more than a hundred to free a quarter of them, finally, it is permitted for a person who has more than a hundred slaves, but no more than five hundred to free one fifth of them, and for a person who owns more than five hundred slaves to free a proportion from that number, but the law prescribes that he can free no more than a hundred. If a person only has one or two slaves, he does not full under this law, and he can grant freedom as he wishes.