Live kindly with your servants. Seneca, Epistles 5.47.10-13
Seneca
reflects on the fickleness of fortune as one reason for being kind to
servants, and members of the lower classes generally. In the ancient
world, anyone might be captured, taken in war by soldiers or in peace
by privateers, and sold into slavery, becoming overnight a
servant in spite of free or even noble upbringing, which was no
universal guarantee of status. We should be the kind of master or
boss that we would want to have, if and when being servants should
fall to our lot.
Vis
tu cogitare istum quem servum tuum vocas ex isdem seminibus ortum
eodem frui caelo, aeque spirare, aeque vivere, aeque mori! tam tu
illum videre ingenuum potes quam ille te servum. Variana clade multos
splendidissime natos, senatorium per militiam auspicantes gradum,
fortuna depressit: alium ex illis pastorem, alium custodem casae
fecit. Contemne nunc eius fortunae hominem in quam transire dum
contemnis potes.
Nolo
in ingentem me locum immittere et de usu servorum disputare, in quos
superbissimi, crudelissimi, contumeliosissimi sumus. Haec tamen
praecepti mei summa est: sic cum inferiore vivas quemadmodum tecum
superiorem velis vivere. Quotiens in mentem venerit quantum
tibi in servum liceat, veniat in mentem tantundem in te domino tuo
licere. At ego inquis nullum habeo dominum. Bona aetas
est: forsitan habebis. Nescis qua aetate Hecuba servire coeperit, qua
Croesus, qua Darei mater, qua Platon, qua Diogenes? Vive cum servo
clementer, comiter quoque, et in sermonem illum admitte et in
consilium et in convictum.
You,
in contrast, are willing to consider that the man you call your
servant is sprung from the same seeds as yourself: he enjoys the same
heaven, breathing and living and dying even as you. So you can see
him as a noble, just as he might see you as a servant. Many the men
whom fortune has crushed, crushed and beaten down, in spite of their
splendid birth, as they marched through the military en route to the
senate. One she makes into a shepherd; another becomes the janitor.
Dare now to despise the man whose fortune you might inherit, even as
you condemn him.
I
don't want to go into a great rant about the way we use our servants,
toward whom we are the most arrogant, cruel, and cantankerous
bastards imaginable. The sum of my teaching here is this: you should
live with your social inferiors the way that you wish your superiors
would live with you. As often as you ponder how much you can get away
with against a servant, consider that your master has the same
latitude. “But I have no master!” you say. There is much life in
you yet: you could still have one. Have you forgotten how old Hecuba
was, when she became a slave? Or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or
Plato, or Diogenes? (†) Live kindly with your servants, kindly and
companionably. Admit them to your conversation, sharing with them
your plans and presence.
---
(†)
A catalogue of mature adults taken into slavery by war or piracy.
Hecuba was the wife of Priam, the mythical king of Troy before it
fell (Homer, Iliad 24.748-59;
Euripides, Trojan Women & Hecuba). Croesus was the
ruler of Lydia before Cyrus the Great conquered it, and him
(Herodotus, Histories 1).
When Alexander the Great defeated the Persian king Darius III at
Issus, he took the king's mother Sisygambis captive (Plutarch,
Alexander). Plato was
sold into slavery after he offended Dionysius the Elder, the tyrant of Syracuse: he
was redeemed & returned to Athens by the Cyrenaic philosopher
Anniceris (Diogenes Laertius 3).
Diogenes the Dog, the philosopher from Sinope, was captured by
pirates while sailing to Aegina: he was sold to Xeniades of Corinth,
where he lived to the end of his life (Diogenes Laertius 6).