Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

Plutarch and the Greece of His Age
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 con
cerned to make the best of the situation as he finds
it.
Slavery exists, is an ineradicable element of or
ganized society and is coextensive with the human
race. The best that the philosopher can do is to
make sages of slaveholders, to the end that they treat
their bondmen with justice and humaneness. Com
pare 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 assump
tion 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 slaveholders, and no citizen was
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