242 The elder Seneca 



whatever. Still there are a few references of significance and value. 

 Thus, when the poor man's son refuses the rich man's offer to adopt 

 him, and his own father approves the proposal, one rhetorician made 

 the young man 1 say 'Great troops of slaves whom their lord does not 

 know by sight, and the farm-prisons echoing to the sound of the lash, 

 have no charm for me: my love for my father is an unbought love.' 

 Again, a poor man, whose property has been outrageously damaged 

 by a rich neighbour, protests 2 against the whims of modern luxury. 

 'Country districts' he says 'that once were the plough-lands of whole 

 communities are now each worked by a single slave-gang, and the sway 

 of stewards is wider than the realms of kings.' Now, we cannot cite 

 the old rhetorician as an authority on agriculture directly : but he gives 

 us proof positive that references to estates worked by gangs 3 of slaves, 

 and the ergastula in which the poor wretches were shut up after the 

 hours of labour, would not in his time sound strange to Roman audiences. 

 Another passage 4 touches on a very typical lecture-room theme, an 

 unnatural son. A father is banished for unintentional homicide. The 

 law forbids the sheltering and feeding of an exile. But the father con- 

 trives to return and haunt an estate adjoining the main property, now 

 controlled by his son. The son hears of these visits, flogs the vilicus 

 for connivance, and compels him to exclude the old man. The piece 

 is one of which only a brief abstract remains, but there is enough to 

 shew that, while the gist of it was a casuistic discussion of a moral 

 problem, it assumes as a matter of course the liability of a trusted slave 

 to the lash. The faithful and kindly slave is contrasted with the un- 

 natural son. There are in these curious collections other utterances 

 indicative of the spread of humanitarian notions. Thus in the piece 

 first cited 6 above, the poor man's son in refusing the rich man's offer of 

 adoption, as a situation to which he could never accommodate himself, 

 is made to add 'If you were selling a favourite slave, you would inquire 

 whether the buyer was a cruel man.' Such ideas come from the later 

 Greek philosophies, chiefly Stoic, the system on which Seneca brought 

 up his more famous son. In one place 6 we find an echo of an earlier 

 Greek sentiment, when a rhetorician propounds the doctrine that For- 

 tune only, not Nature, distinguishes freemen from slaves. 



Indeed it is evident, from the many passages that touch on slavery 

 and expose some of its worst horrors, that the subject was at this time 

 beginning to attract more general attention than heretofore. And the 



1 Seneca controversiae n i 26. 2 Seneca excerpt contr v 5 



3 Compare the reference to unruly servorum agniina in Calabria, Tac ann XII 65, in the 

 time of Claudius. 



4 Seneca excerpt contr vi 2. 5 Seneca contr n i 5. 

 6 Seneca contr vii 6 18. 



