"But it is shameful to contemplate these things as runaway slaves do; we should sit, as in a theater, free from distraction, and listen at one time to the tragic actor, at another time to the lute-player; and not do as slaves do.
"As soon as the slave has taken his station he praises the actor and at the same time looks round: then if any one calls out his master's name, the slave is immediately frightened and disturbed. It is shameful for philosophers thus to contemplate the works of nature.
"For what is a master? Man is not the master of man; but death is, and life and pleasure and pain; for if he comes without these things, bring Caesar to me and you will see how firm I am. But when he shall come with these things, thundering and lightning, and when I am afraid of them, what do I do then except to recognize my master like the runaway slave?
"But so long as I have any respite from these terrors, as a runaway slave stands in the theater, so do I: I bathe, I drink, I sing; but all this I do with terror and uneasiness. But if I shall release myself from my masters, that is from those things by means of which masters are formidable, what further trouble have I, what master have I still?" . . .
--Epictetus, Discourses 1.29 (tr Long)
We pride ourselves, and rightly so, as a society that has abolished the brutal institution of slavery, where one man is nothing more than the property of another. We are also right, I think, to continue fighting against such servitude beyond our shores, as well as unmasking other forms of slavery, which simply take on different names, on our own doorstep.
Remember that our author, Epictetus, was himself a slave. He understood quite well what it meant not to be free in his body, though he was a philosopher who showed us what it meant to be free in his soul.
I believe that distinction to be a crucial one, and I continue to raise eyebrows when I claim that while most of us are not slaves in our bodies, many of us are slaves in our souls.
It is entirely right and proper, according to his very nature, for man to have freedom and leisure. He should not have to look over his shoulder, afraid of the power of his master. He should never feel the need to run from anyone or from anything.
That master need not be another person, because we freely choose to become slaves to any of the things around us. We sell ourselves to money, to fame, to pleasure, to our very love of living and our fear of dying. We are in constant need of retaining the things we desire, and in constant terror of losing them.
Even if we try to run away from such a dependence, we never seem to escape its hold, and I believe this is because we are still thinking like consumers, and not like philosophers.
You and I may live in a world with the greatest political freedoms, and the greatest physical luxuries, ever known to mankind. We also run the grave risk of being the most morally enslaved people, because we so easily surrender the freedom of ruling ourselves to false idols and to mere trinkets.
Written in 4/1999
Image: Cesare Dandini, Personification of Constancy, c. 1634
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