על שכל אדם ישר הוא בן חורין ו׳Every Good Man is Free 6
א׳
1VI. [32] That services rendered are no proof of enslavement is very clearly shown in war-time. We see soldiers in the field all working on their own account, not only carrying all their weapons, but also laden like beasts with every necessary requirement, and then making expeditions to get water or firewood or fodder for the animals.
ב׳
2[33] As for labours required in defence against the enemy, such as cutting trenches or building walls or constructing triremes, and all other skilled or subsidiary operations in which the hands and the rest of the body are employed, there is no need to recount them at length.
ג׳
3[34] On the other hand, there is a peace-time war, no less grave than those fought with arms, a war set on foot by disrepute and poverty and dire lack of the necessaries of life, a war by which men are forced under duress to undertake the most servile tasks, digging and toiling on the land and practising menial crafts, labouring unceasingly to earn a meagre subsistence; often too carrying burdens in the midst of the market place before the eyes of their fellows in age who were their associates in boyhood and in youth.
ד׳
4[35] There are others born in slavery, who by a happy dispensation of fortune pursue the occupations of the free. They receive the stewardship of houses and landed estates and great properties; sometimes too they become the rulers of their fellow slaves. Many too have the wives and orphan children of their masters committed to their charge, being preferred for trustworthiness to friends and members of the family. Still all the same they are slaves though they lend, purchase, collect revenues and are much courted. Why then should we wonder when the opposite occurs and a man whose good luck has taken a bad turn performs the offices of a slave?
ה׳
5[36] But you say, “by obedience to another he loses his liberty.” How then is it that children suffer the orders of their father or mother, and pupils the injunctions of their instructors? For no one is willing to be a slave; and surely parents will not show such an extreme hatred of their offspring as to compel their own children to submit to render services which according to you are the sole distinctive marks of slavery.
ו׳
6[37] Again, anyone who thinks that people put up for sale by kidnappers thereby become slaves goes utterly astray from the truth. Selling does not make the purchaser a master, nor the purchased a slave. Fathers pay a price for their sons and sons often for their fathers if they have been carried off in raids or taken prisoners in war, and that such persons are free men is asserted by the laws of nature which have a more solid foundation than those of our lower world.
ז׳
7Indeed, [38] some of those thus bought and sold reverse the situation to such an extreme extent that they become the masters of their purchasers instead of their slaves. I have often myself seen pretty little slave girls with a natural gift for wheedling words, who with these two sources of strength, beauty of face and charm of speech, stormed the hearts of their owners. For these two are engines of attack against souls with no ballast or stability, engines mightier than all the machines constructed to demolish walls.
ח׳
8[39] This is shown by the way in which their owners court them, supplicate them, eagerly beg their favours, as though they were praying to fortune or some good genius. If they are scouted they go into fits of despair and if they just see a kindly glance they dance for joy.
ט׳
9[40] If selling constitutes slavery we should have to assert that a person who had bought some lions is master of the lions, whereas if the beasts do but turn menacing eyes upon him, the poor man will learn at once by experience the cruel and ferocious lordship of those whom he has purchased. Well then must we not suppose that if lions cannot, still less can the wise man be enslaved, who has in his free and unscathed soul a greater power of resistance to the yoke than any he could make with the naturally slavish body and all the vigour of its physical strength?