What were the accidents--or rather, what was "the unseen Providence, by man nicknamed chance"--which assigned Epictetus to the house of Epaphroditus we do not know. To a heart refined and noble there could hardly have been a more trying position. The slaves of a Roman _familia_ were crowded together in immense gangs; they were liable to the most violent and capricious punishments; they might be subjected to the most degraded and brutalising influences. Men sink too often to the level to which they are supposed to belong. Treated with infamy for long years, they are apt to deem themselves worthy of infamy--to lose that self-respect which is the invariable concomitant of religious feeling, and which, apart from religious feeling, is the sole preventive of personal degradation. Well may St. Paul say, "Art thou called, being a servant? care not for it: _but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather_." [62]
It is true that even in the heathen world there began at this time to be disseminated among the best and wisest thinkers a sense that slaves were made of the same clay as their masters, that they differed from freeborn men only in the externals and accidents of their position, and that kindness to them and consideration for their difficulties was a common and elementary duty of humanity. "I am glad to learn," says Seneca, in one of his interesting letters to Lucilius, "that you live on terms of familiarity with your slaves; it becomes your prudence and your erudition. Are they slaves? Nay, they are men. Slaves? Nay, companions. Slaves? Nay, humble friends. Slaves? _Nay, fellow-slaves,_ if you but consider that fortune has power over you both." He proceeds, in a passage to which we have already alluded, to reprobate the haughty and inconsiderate fashion of keeping them standing for hours, mute and fasting, while their masters gorged themselves at the banquet. He deplores the cruelty which thinks it necessary to punish with terrible severity an accidental cough or sneeze. He quotes the proverb--a proverb which reveals a whole history--"So many slaves, so many foes," and proves that they are not foes, but that men _made_ them so; whereas, when kindly treated, when considerately addressed, they would be silent, even under torture, rather than speak to their master's disadvantage. "Are they not sprung," he asks, "from the same origin, do they not breathe the same air, do they not live and die just as we do?" The blows, the broken limbs, the clanking chains, the stinted food of the _ergastula_ or slave-prisons, excited all Seneca's compassion, and in all probability presented a picture of misery which the world has rarely seen surpassed, unless it were in that nefarious trade which England to her shame once practised, and, to her eternal glory, resolutely swept away.