In his attitude toward slavery, Plutarch does not seem to hold as advanced views as Seneca and some of the better men of his age and preceding times. Yet he did not endorse the prevalent opinion, embodied in legislation, that a slave is a soulless thing, though the justice of emancipation occupied his attention but little. Here again we find his practical ideas in the foreground. He is concerned to make the best of the situation as he finds it. Slavery exists, is an ineradicable element of organized society and is coextensive with the human race. The best that the philosopher can do is to make sages of slave-holders, to the end that they treat their bondmen with justice and humaneness. Compare the anecdotes of Plato and Archytas in De Sera, Chap. 5. According to Plutarch slaves have souls like other human beings, and are capable of mental and moral improvement; consequently masters have duties to perform toward them that are just as plain and just as imperative as those due to persons on the same social level with themselves.
The prosperity of nations rests mainly upon the numbers and intelligence of its middle classes. It can everywhere be measured by the rise of this class. What wonder then that the nations were poor among whom it scarcely existed? Rome could not go on plundering interminably, and the riches of its provinces in time became exhausted because not replenished. All that the ancient world has left upon record for us, proceeds upon the assumption of a large body of slaves and a small body of free citizens, and breathes a contempt for labor and trade. In most of the Greek states the commercial and manufacturing class consisted chiefly of resident aliens who were also slave-holders, and no citizen was so poor that he did not own at least one slave. To be a slave-owner was a badge of respectability even for those who were not citizens. In the Greek states, so long as they were free polities, war and religion occupied all the time and attention of the citizens, except that small body that were interested in philosophical pursuits. When they were no longer free and no longer had serious affairs in which to employ their time, they spent most of it in idle gossip or as the Acts tell us, “in hearing or telling some new thing.” What legislation they were still permitted to engage in never concerned matters of grave import. They decreed crowns and statues to real or supposed benefactors, only to annul their decrees when those whom they were intended to honor happened to incur the displeasure of the legislators or to fall into disgrace with the higher powers. Then there were deputations between different states about boundary disputes, about festivals, about claims and counter claims of all sorts, the sending of which was often debated with a solemnity that makes us wonder how the participants could themselves fail to see their farcical character. Generally the game at stake was the favor of the emperor, each party striving to outbid the other in professions of loyalty or to outvie it in the length of its bill for services rendered. When, as was frequently the case, these delegations did not find the emperor in Rome, they had, of course, to follow him into provinces or to await his return. This required time that, we may be sure, was in most cases ungrudgingly given. Instead of directing their energies into channels of activity and trying by honest work to better their worldly condition it was talk, talk with the Greeks, and talk without end.