Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
[1] I was glad to hear, from people who have been with you, that you live on familiar terms with your slaves. That fits your good sense; it fits your education. 'They're slaves.' No - human beings. 'They're slaves.' No - housemates. 'They're slaves.' No - friends of humble rank. 'They're slaves.' No - fellow slaves, once you reflect that fortune holds exactly the same power over both of you. [2] So I laugh at the people who think it degrading to dine with their own slave. Why is it degrading, except that our most arrogant custom rings the dining master with a crowd of standing slaves? The master devours past what he can hold, cramming with enormous greed a belly stretched tight and no longer able to do a belly's work, so that he labors harder to get it all out than he did to stuff it in. [3] Meanwhile the wretched slaves may not move their lips even to speak. The rod cuts off every murmur; not even accidents - a cough, a sneeze, a hiccup - are exempt from the lash. Breaking the silence with any sound is paid for with heavy punishment. All night they stand there, hungry and mute. [4] The result is that men who may not talk in front of the master talk about the master. But slaves in the old days, who could speak not only in the master's presence but with him, whose mouths were not sewn shut, were ready to stretch out their necks for him, to draw an approaching danger down on their own heads. They talked at dinner parties; under torture they said nothing. [5] Then there is that proverb, born of the same arrogance, that we have as many enemies as we have slaves. We do not have them as enemies; we make them so. I pass over other treatment, cruel and inhuman - that we misuse them not even as human beings but as pack animals. While we recline at dinner, one wipes up spittle; another, crouched under the couch, gathers what the drunks have dropped. [6] Another carves expensive birds: guiding his practiced hand in fixed strokes across breast and rump, he flicks off the portions - poor man, who lives for this one skill, carving fowl elegantly; though the man who teaches it for pleasure's sake is more pitiful than the one who learns it because he must. [7] Another, the wine server, decked out like a woman, is at war with his own age: he is not allowed to escape boyhood; he is dragged back into it. Though he already has a soldier's build, he is kept smooth, his hair rubbed away or plucked out by the roots, and he stays awake the whole night, dividing it between his master's drunkenness and his master's lust - a man in the bedroom, a boy at the table. [8] Another, entrusted with grading the guests, stands there miserably, watching to see whose flattery and whose lack of restraint - of gullet or of tongue - will earn an invitation back tomorrow. Add the buyers of delicacies, who possess a fine-tuned knowledge of the master's palate: which flavor rouses him, which sight delights him, what novelty can prop him up when he is queasy, what he now rejects from sheer fullness, what he is hungry for on a given day. With these people he cannot bear to dine; he considers it a diminishment of his dignity to come to the same table as his own slave. Gods forbid! - how many masters he has among them! [9] I saw Callistus's former master standing at Callistus's door: the man who had hung the sale-notice on him, who had put him up with the throwaway lot of slaves, was shut out while others went in. That slave paid him back - the slave once tossed into the first batch on the block, the batch where the auctioneer warms up his voice: now he in his turn struck the master off his list; now he judged him unworthy of his house. The master sold Callistus; but how much Callistus cost the master! [10] Be willing to remember that this man you call your slave grew from the same seed, has the same sky above him, and draws breath, lives, and dies just as you yourself do. You can as easily see a freeborn man in him as he can see a slave in you. In the disaster under Varus, fortune crushed many men of the most brilliant birth, men beginning the climb to senatorial rank through military service: she made one of them a shepherd, another the keeper of a hut. Now go despise a man whose condition you may pass into even while you are despising it.
[11] I do not want to launch into that vast topic and argue about the treatment of slaves, toward whom we are so arrogant, so cruel, so abusive. But the core of my teaching is this: live with your inferior the way you would want your superior to live with you. Every time it occurs to you how much you are allowed to do to your slave, let it also occur to you that your own master is allowed exactly as much against you. [12] 'But I have no master,' you say. You are still young; perhaps you will. Do you not know at what age Hecuba became a slave, at what age Croesus did, and the mother of Darius, and Plato, and Diogenes? [13] Live with your slave mercifully, even companionably; admit him to your conversation, to your deliberations, to your table.
At this point the whole troop of the pampered will shout me down: 'Nothing could be more degrading, nothing more shameful.' These same men I will catch kissing the hands of other people's slaves. [14] Do you not even see how our ancestors stripped away everything invidious from the master's position and everything insulting from the slave's? They called the master 'father of the household' and the slaves 'members of the household' - a usage that survives to this day in the mime plays. They established a festival day, not as the only day masters ate with their slaves, but as a day on which they always did. They allowed slaves to hold offices within the house, to give judgments there, and they considered the household a miniature commonwealth. [15] 'What then? Shall I bring all my slaves to my table?' No more than all free men. You are wrong if you think I would turn some away as doing dirtier work - that muleteer, say, or that herdsman. I will value them not by their jobs but by their characters. Each man gives himself his character; chance assigns the jobs. Let some dine with you because they deserve it, and some so that they may come to deserve it; for if anything slavish still clings to them from low company, eating with more honorable men will shake it off. [16] There is no reason, my Lucilius, to look for a friend only in the forum and the senate house. If you pay close attention, you will find one at home too. Good material often sits idle for lack of a craftsman: try it, put it to the test. A man buying a horse who inspects not the animal itself but its saddle-cloth and bridle is a fool; even more foolish is the man who values a human being by his clothes or by his station - which is merely a kind of clothing wrapped around us. [17] 'He is a slave.' But perhaps free in soul. 'He is a slave.' Will that count against him? Show me who is not one. One man is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition - all of us to hope, all of us to fear. I will show you an ex-consul enslaved to a little old woman, a rich man enslaved to a servant girl; I will point out young men of the noblest houses who are chattel to pantomime dancers. No slavery is more shameful than the voluntary kind. So there is no reason to let those fastidious people scare you out of showing a cheerful face to your slaves and a superiority without arrogance. Let them respect you rather than fear you.
[18] Someone will now say I am summoning slaves to the freedman's cap and toppling masters from their eminence, because I said 'let them respect the master rather than fear him.' 'Really?' he says. 'Respect him like clients, like morning callers?' The man who talks this way has forgotten that what suffices for a god can hardly be too little for a master. Whoever is respected is also loved; and love cannot be mixed with fear. [19] So I judge that you are doing exactly right in not wanting your slaves to fear you, in correcting them with words: whipping is how we train dumb animals. Not everything that annoys us also harms us; but soft living drives us to fury, so that whatever fails to answer our will calls out our anger. [20] We have put on the temper of kings; for they too, forgetting their own strength and other men's weakness, blaze up and rage as though they had suffered a wrong - though the sheer size of their fortune makes them perfectly safe from any such thing. They know this well enough, but by complaining they hunt for an opening to do harm; they claim they received an injury so that they can inflict one.
[21] I will not keep you longer, for you need no encouragement. Good character has this advantage, among others: it satisfies itself, and it lasts. Badness is fickle; it changes often - not for the better, just into something else. Farewell.