The Word, and What Is Wrong With It
People coming from your house tell me that you live on friendly terms with your slaves.1 I am glad of it. It is what I would expect from a sensible and well-educated man, and I want to spend this letter telling you why it matters more than you or your critics think.
They are slaves, people say.
No. They are men.
Slaves! No — companions.
Slaves! No — unassuming friends.
Slaves! No. They are our fellow slaves, if you stop for one moment and consider that Fortune has precisely the same rights over free men as she has over them.
The Dinner
So I smile at people who think it degrading to eat with a slave. Why should it be? Only because purse-proud etiquette surrounds a householder at dinner with a standing mob of them.
The master eats past his own capacity. He loads his belly with monstrous greed until it is stretched out of use and stops behaving like a belly at all, so that he takes more trouble getting the food out of himself than he took getting it in.
And through all of it the men around him may not move their lips. Not a word. A murmur is put down with the rod. Any chance sound — a cough, a sneeze, a hiccup — is answered with the lash. There is a serious penalty for the slightest breach of silence. They stand there all night, hungry and mute.
So naturally these men, who may not speak in their master's presence, speak about him instead. The slaves of an earlier time, who were allowed to talk not only in front of their masters but to them, whose mouths were not stitched shut, would bare their necks for the man and take onto their own heads any danger that came near him. They talked at the feast and kept silence under torture.
There is a saying that comes out of the way we behave now: you have as many enemies as you have slaves. That is false as it stands. They are not enemies when we acquire them. We make them enemies.
I will pass over the rest of the cruelty, since we treat them not as men but as pack animals. One mops up what is vomited. One crouches under the table to collect what the drunk guests drop. One carves the game birds, and — poor devil — his whole existence is the correct dismembering of a fattened chicken; unless the man who teaches that art for pleasure is more wretched still than the man who learns it because he must. One serves the wine dressed as a woman, fighting off his own age, kept beardless by plucking, awake all night dividing his hours between his master's drunkenness and his master's lust: in the bedroom a man, at the table a boy. And one stands there pricing the guests — watching whose flattery, whose greed, whose indecency of appetite or of speech will earn them tomorrow's invitation.
With men like these around him, the master cannot bear to dine. He would think it beneath his dignity to sit at the same table as his slave. Heaven forbid.
And how many masters is he manufacturing in the process?
I have seen the former owner of Callistus standing in the queue outside Callistus's door. I have seen him shut out while others were let in — the man who once hung the For Sale placard on Callistus and put him in the market with the useless stock. He has been repaid by the slave who went into the first lot, the one the auctioneer uses to warm up his voice. That slave in turn struck his name off the list, and in his turn judged him not fit to enter the house.
The master sold Callistus. Look what Callistus made him pay for it.
The Same Sky
Kindly remember that the man you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same sky, and on precisely the same terms as you breathes, lives and dies.
You could as easily be looking at a free man as he could be looking at a slave.
In the massacres under Marius, men of distinguished birth who had taken the first steps towards the Senate through army service were brought down by fortune — one became a shepherd, another the caretaker of a country cottage. So despise them if you dare. You may be joining them.
Important
Here is the kernel of my advice, and it is short. Treat those beneath you as you would want to be treated by those above you. And every time you catch yourself noticing how much power you have over a slave, remember that someone has exactly that much power over you.
You will say you have no master. You are still young. You may yet get one. Do you know at what age Hecuba entered captivity? Or Croesus? Or the mother of Darius? Or Plato? Or Diogenes?
What I Am and Am Not Proposing
Live with your slave on kindly and even affable terms. Let him talk with you, plan with you, live with you.
At which point every fashionable man in Rome cries out that there is nothing more debasing. These are the same men I have caught kissing the hands of other people's slaves.
Do you not see what our ancestors did? They removed everything invidious from the master and everything insulting from the slave. They called the master father of the household and the slaves members of the household, and the phrase survives in the theatre. They set aside a holiday on which masters and slaves had to eat together. They let slaves hold offices within the house and give judgments, because they held that a household was a small state.
So do I mean you must seat every slave at your own table? No — no more than you would invite every free man to it. But you are mistaken if you imagine I would bar the muleteer or the herdsman on the grounds that their work is humble. I propose to rate them by their character and not by their duties.
A man acquires his character himself. His duties are assigned to him by accident.
Invite some to your table because they have earned the honor, and others so that they may come to earn it. If there is anything slavish in them from their low associations, keeping better company will shake it off.
And do not go hunting for friends only in the forum and the Senate house. If you are attentive, you will find them at home as well. Good material often lies idle for want of a craftsman. Try it and see.
A man who buys a horse and inspects only the saddle and bridle is a fool. The man who prices a human being by his clothes, or by his rank — which is only another garment we happen to be wearing — is twice the fool.
Show Me a Man Who Is Not a Slave
He is a slave. His soul may be a free man's.
He is a slave. And is that to stand in his way?
Show me anyone who is not a slave. One man is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and every last one of us to fear. I will name you an ex-consul who takes his orders from an old woman, and a millionaire who takes his from a serving girl, and boys of the noblest families in Rome in bondage to pantomime actors.
Note
No servitude is more disgraceful than the kind a man puts on himself.
So do not be talked out of showing yourself to your household as an approachable man rather than a lofty one. They ought to respect you rather than fear you. Someone will accuse me of handing out liberty caps and toppling lords off their estates because I ask that slaves respect their masters instead of dreading them — and whoever says that has forgotten that what is good enough for a god cannot be too little for a master.
Respect means love, and love and fear cannot be mixed.
So you are entirely right not to want your slaves to be frightened of you, and right to correct them with your tongue rather than with a strap. Only dumb animals need the whip.
Nobody Is Well Born
You keep telling me you are a nobody. That nature short-changed you first and fortune finished the job. And you say this while holding in your hand the one thing that would let you step out of the crowd entirely.
If philosophy is good for anything, it is good for this: it never looks into pedigrees.
You are a Roman knight, and your own persistence got you there. Fine — there are plenty of places barred to you still. The senate house is not open to everyone. Even the army is fussy about whom it admits to danger. But a noble mind is available to any man alive, and by that test all of us may become distinguished. Philosophy rejects nobody and selects nobody. Its light falls on everyone.
Socrates was no aristocrat. Cleanthes worked at a well and hired himself out to water a garden. Philosophy did not find Plato a nobleman — it made him one.
Why should you despair of standing among them? They are all your ancestors, if you conduct yourself in a way worthy of them.
So who is well born? The man who is by nature fitted for virtue. That is the only point worth considering. A hall full of smoke-blackened busts does not make a nobleman. No life has been lived on your behalf to lend you glory, and what existed before you is not yours.
The soul alone makes us noble, and it can rise above Fortune out of any condition whatsoever — no matter what that condition has been.
Farewell.