Treating People as Human Beings — Letters from a Stoic

They are slaves, no, they are men. No, comrades. No, fellow-slaves, if you reflect that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike. Letter 47 is one of the most radical things Seneca ever wrote. He praises Lucilius for living on friendly terms with his slaves, and then launches into a full indictment of how Roman masters actually treat theirs.

Slaves who may not speak, not cough, not sneeze without risking the lash. Wine-bearers forced to remain beardless and boyish into adulthood for their master's pleasure. Men reduced to carving birds or timing their master's digestion, alive only for that purpose. Seneca's argument isn't simply humanitarian, though it is that. It's practical and historical.

The slaves of an earlier Rome, treated as members of a household, were willing to die for their masters. Those treated as machinery become enemies who know everything about you. The letter builds to its central point: he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, breathes the same skies, and dies under the same conditions. It is as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave. And the closing paradox that lands hardest: show me a man who is not a slave.

One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, all men to fear. No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.