Fortune has the same claim on [licere] slaves and free men alike... Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same seed, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies! [ex isdem seminibus ortum eodem frui caelo, aeque spirare, aeque vivere, aeque mori!] It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave. As a result of the massacres in Marius's day, many a man of distinguished birth, who was taking the first steps toward senatorial rank by service in the army, was humbled by fortune, one becoming a shepherd, another a caretaker of a country cottage...I propose to value them according to their character, and not according to their duties. Each man acquires his character for himself, but accident assigns his duties. [Non ministeriis illos aestimabo sed moribus: sibi quisque dat mores, ministeria casus assignat.]...Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. [Ostende quis non sit: alius libidini servit, alius avaritiae, alius ambitioni, <omnes spei>, omnes timori.]-Seneca, Letter 47, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).
To simplify, we can identify two distinct ways of thinking about slavery in Plato and Aristotle. First, in Aristotle, what we may call authentic slavery maps onto an innate hierarchy of human beings. This kind of view was trotted out in the Spanish conquest of the Americas and, drawing on new iterations in Hume and Montesquieu, still popular in the eighteenth century United Kingdom.
Second, Iin Plato (who, of course, was no stranger to views on natural hierarchy), slavery is a kind of retributive punishment for defeat in aggressive war. And one finds a similar, but more Lockean version of the argument, in the quite egalitarian and even severe critics of slavery like Cugoano. Having said that, Plato's Socrates (see here and here) clearly circumscribes slavery for those who are from the stock of would-be-permanent-enemies and tries to rule it out among the (Greek) would-be-permanent-friends. Would be permanent friends are not rooted in human nature, but in the more conventional barriers that separate peoples.*
Third, Seneca (recall Letter 44), embraces natural equality (in the sense of the methodological analytic egalitarian (MAE)), and clearly thinks there is no moral justification for slavery. But strikingly that does not lead him to abolition. It may be worth reflecting on why this is so.
The answer resides in disordered politics. Now, Seneca is explicit that politics is governed by fortune, which can strike anytime. And, in particular, anyone can be subjugated by it. Now, looking at today's headlines one need not be reminded of natural misfortune. But Senecal is treating natural and political misfortune on par; and in political struggle force is decisive. In one sense force does not respect morality. But in another sense it is also a great equalizer--all of us can be subject to it. So, force is the cause or mechanism by which fortune elevates or diminishes each of us. (Seneca even speaks of the wheel of fortune in his play Agamemnon.)
I use 'disordered' because in this very letter (47), Seneca also produces an image of ordered politics. This is possible, when force has settled the balance of power. Then power is channeled to structure order. This image is the patriarchal household (familiares and its father). This order is clearly intimate and habitual, but also hierarchical because in addition to a father it has servants/slaves. And, in fact, Letter 47, which is among the first 50 or so letters, quite lengthy, contains a mini treatise on household management, the art of orderly political leadership [for, "a household was a miniature commonwealth"] -- when the question of force is temporarily settled among moral equals who have been turned into political unequals.
Because today's post is not on the art of statecraft, I ignore Seneca's teachings. But crucially even this mini-treatise, understands itself as idealized. It explicitly compares itself to the representation of the ancestral, patriarchal family life on the (dated) stage (mimis).+ And, even in this representation, the ordered hierarchy can -- not unlike in carnaval -- be overturned: "They allowed the slaves to attain honours in the household and to pronounce judgment."
So, Seneca can't see a path toward abolition of slavery because he does not see a path toward the elimination of force as the ultimate decider in political life. And, so, political inequality -- and thereby a variety of servitudes -- is inevitable.
*Plato artfully shows that each people thinks itself in some sense superior to others from within its own world-view. (In my opinion, Plato anticipates ideas about how cultures understand themselves as unequal, yet therein are on equal footing.)
+The situation is more complicated, because the mime can be wordless or a farce. And all of these may well be thought to resonate here. In particular, it is clear that by placing the ordered polity onto the stage and into an ancestral past, Seneca is reinforcing he does not live in orderly political times.
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