SOME FRAGMENTS.
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see to it that you do not yourself have slaves. For if you endure to have slaves, it seems that you yourself are first of all a slave. For evil has no communion with virtue, nor freedom with slavery.
XII.The cruel chain of the body is circumstance; of the soul, vice. Now he who is loosed in the body but bound in the soul is a slave; but he who is bound in the body but loosed in the soul is free.
XIII.As one who is in health would not choose to be served by the sick, nor to have sick people about him, so no one who is free would bear to be served by slaves, or that those living with him should be slaves.[1]
- ↑ The parallelisms of thought in Epictetus and the New Testament have often been noticed: it is a pity that the latter contains no parallel to this condemnation of slavery. Note that Epictetus, consistently with his principles, puts the objection to slavery on the side of the masters, not on that of the slaves—showing how one who consents to enslave the bodies of others can himself have no spiritual freedom, and therefore is more deeply enslaved than those of whom he calls himself the master.
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