Letter 47

Gladly have I learned, from those who come from you, that you live on familiar terms with your slaves. This befits your good sense, this your learning. "They are slaves." Nay, men. "They are slaves." Nay, companions of your roof. "They are slaves." Nay, humble friends. "They are slaves." Nay, fellow slaves, if you consider that fortune has just as much power over both.

And so I laugh at those who think it a shameful thing to dine with their own slave. Why, except that a most arrogant custom has set about the dining master a throng of standing slaves? He eats more than he can hold, and with vast greed loads his distended belly, now grown unused to the belly's office, so that he disgorges all he has crammed in with greater labour than he crammed it.

But meanwhile the wretched slaves are not permitted to move their lips even for this, to speak. Every murmur is checked by the rod, and not even chance sounds are exempted from blows—a cough, a sneeze, a hiccup. The silence broken by any utterance at all is atoned for by a heavy penalty. All night long they stand fasting and dumb.

So it comes about that those men talk about their master who are not allowed to talk in their master's presence. But those whose talk was not only in the presence of their masters but with them, whose mouth was not sewn up, were ready to stretch out their necks for their master, to turn an impending peril upon their own head; they talked at the feasts, but under torture they were silent.

Then there is bandied about that proverb of the same arrogance, that we have as many enemies as we have slaves. We do not have them for enemies; we make them so. I pass over for the moment other cruel and inhuman things, that we misuse them not even as men, but as beasts of burden. When we have reclined to dine, one wipes up the spittle, another, crouched beneath the couch, gathers up the leavings of the drunken.

Another carves the costly birds; sweeping his trained hand in sure strokes through breast and rump, he detaches the morsels—an unhappy man, who lives for this one thing, that he may carve fattened fowl becomingly; save that he is more wretched who teaches this for pleasure's sake than he who learns it from necessity.

Another, the wine-server, dressed up in woman's fashion, wrestles with his years; he cannot escape his boyhood, he is dragged back to it, and already of soldierly build, smooth, his hair worn off or plucked out by the roots, he keeps awake the whole night through, which he divides between his master's drunkenness and his lust, and in the bedchamber is a man, at the feast a boy.

Another, to whom the rating of the guests has been entrusted, stands wretched and waits to see whom flattery and intemperance, either of gullet or of tongue, will recall to the morrow. Add the caterers, who have a fine knowledge of their master's palate, who know by what flavour he is roused, by what sight he is delighted, by what novelty he can be revived when queasy, what now in his very surfeit he loathes, what he will hunger for on a given day. With these he cannot endure to dine, and counts it a lessening of his majesty to come to the same table with his own slave. Heaven forfend!

How many masters has he among such men! I have seen standing before the threshold of Callistus that man who had been Callistus's master, and who had hung the placard upon him, who had brought him out among the refuse slaves, shut out while others entered. That slave, flung into the first lot, in which the crier tries his voice, repaid him the favour; he in his turn struck him off his list, he in his turn judged him unworthy of his house. The master sold Callistus; but how much did Callistus sell to the master!

Will you reflect that this man whom you call your slave sprang from the same seeds, enjoys the same sky, breathes alike, lives alike, dies alike! You can as well see him freeborn as he can see you a slave. By the disaster of Marius fortune cast down many men of most splendid birth, who through military service were entering on the senatorial career, and made one of them a shepherd, another the keeper of a hut; now despise the man of that fortune, into which, while you despise it, you may pass.

I do not wish to launch myself into a vast theme and to discuss the treatment of slaves, toward whom we are most arrogant, most cruel, most insulting. But this is the sum of my counsel: live with your inferior as you would wish your superior to live with you. As often as it comes into your mind how much you are allowed against a slave, let it come into your mind that your own master is allowed just as much against you.

"But I," you say, "have no master." Your age is favourable; perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at what age Hecuba began to serve, at what age Croesus, at what age the mother of Darius, at what age Plato, at what age Diogenes?

Live with your slave mercifully, courteously too, and admit him to your conversation and to your counsel and to your company. At this point the whole tribe of the fastidious will cry out at me: "Nothing is more degrading than this, nothing more disgraceful." These same men I shall catch kissing the hand of other men's slaves.

Do you not even see this, how our ancestors took away from masters all that was odious, from slaves all that was insulting? They called the master "father of the household," and the slaves "members of the household"—which still endures in mimes. They appointed a festal day, not as the only day on which masters should eat with their slaves, but as one on which they should do so without fail; they allowed them to hold offices in the household and to give judgement, and judged the household to be a tiny commonwealth.

"What then? Shall I admit all my slaves to my table?" No more than all freemen. You are mistaken if you think I would reject certain ones as of meaner employment, such as that muleteer there, or that herdsman; I will value them not by their duties, but by their characters. Each man gives himself his own character; chance assigns the duties. Let some dine with you because they are worthy, others that they may become so. For if there is anything servile in them from low company, the company of more honourable men will shake it out.

There is no reason, my Lucilius, why you should seek a friend only in the forum and the senate-house; if you watch carefully, you will find one at home too. Often good material lies idle without a craftsman; try, and you will find by experience. As he is foolish who, about to buy a horse, inspects not the horse itself but its saddle-cloth and bridle, so he is most foolish who values a man either by his clothing or by his condition, which is wrapped about us only after the manner of clothing.

"He is a slave." But perhaps free in spirit. "He is a slave." Will this harm him? Show me who is not. One is a slave to lust, another to avarice, another to ambition, all to fear. I will give you a man of consular rank a slave to a little old woman, a rich man a slave to a serving-maid; I will show you youths of the noblest birth the bondsmen of pantomime players. No slavery is more shameful than the voluntary. There is no reason, therefore, why those fastidious people should deter you from showing yourself cheerful toward your slaves and not haughtily their superior; let them rather revere you than fear you.

Someone will now say that I am calling slaves to the cap of liberty and casting masters down from their height, because I said: "let them rather revere their master than fear him." "So," he says, "exactly: let them revere him as clients, as morning callers?" Whoever says this forgets that what is enough for a god is not too little for masters. He who is revered is also loved; love cannot be mingled with fear.

You judge most rightly, therefore, in not wishing to be feared by your slaves, and in using the chastisement of words; dumb beasts are admonished with blows. Not everything that offends us also injures us. But our indulgences drive us to the point of madness, so that whatever does not answer our will calls forth our anger.

We put on the tempers of kings. For they too, forgetful of their own strength and of another's weakness, blaze up and rage as if they had received an injury, from all peril of which the greatness of their fortune keeps them most safe. Nor are they ignorant of this, but by complaining they catch at an occasion for doing harm; they have received an injury in order to commit one.

I do not wish to detain you longer; for you have no need of exhortation. This, among other things, good character has: it is pleased with itself, it endures. Wickedness is fickle, it changes often, not for the better, but for something else. Farewell.