with your slaves; it becomes your prudence and your erudition.  Are they slaves?  Nay, they are men.  Slaves?  Nay, companions.  Slaves?  Nay, humble friends.  Slaves? Nay, fellow-slaves, if you but consider that fortune has power over you both.”  He proceeds, in a passage to which we have already alluded, to reprobate the haughty and inconsiderate fashion of keeping them standing for hours, mute and fasting, while their masters gorged themselves at the banquet.  He deplores the cruelty which thinks it necessary to punish with terrible severity an accidental cough or sneeze.  He quotes the proverb—­a proverb which reveals a whole history—­“So many slaves, so many foes,” and proves that they are not foes, but that men made them so; whereas, when kindly treated, when considerately addressed, they would be silent, even under torture, rather than speak to their master’s disadvantage.  “Are they not sprung,” he asks, “from the same origin, do they not breathe the same air, do they not live and die just as we do?” The blows, the broken limbs, the clanking chains, the stinted food of the ergastula or slave-prisons, excited all Seneca’s compassion, and in all probability presented a picture of misery which the world has rarely seen surpassed, unless it were in that nefarious trade which England to her shame once practised, and, to her eternal glory, resolutely swept away.

But Seneca’s inculcation of tenderness towards slaves was in reality one of the most original of his moral teachings; and, from all that we know of Roman life, it is to be feared that the number of those who acted in accordance with it was small.  Certainly Epaphroditus, the master of Epictetus, was not one of them.  The historical facts which we know of this man are slight.  He was one of the four who accompanied the tragic and despicable flight of Nero from Rome in the year 69, and when, after many waverings of cowardice, Nero at last, under imminent peril of being captured and executed, put the dagger to his breast, it was Epaphroditus who helped the tyrant to drive it home into his heart, for which he was subsequently banished, and finally executed by the Emperor Domitian.

Epictetus was accustomed to tell one or two anecdotes which, although given without comment, show the narrowness and vulgarity of the man.  Among his slaves was a certain worthless cobbler named Felicio; as the cobbler was quite useless, Epaphroditus sold him, and by some chance he was bought by some one of Caesar’s household, and made Caesar’s cobbler.  Instantly Epaphroditus began to pay him the profoundest respect, and to address him in the most endearing terms, so that if any one asked what Epaphroditus was doing, the answer, as likely as not, would be, “He is holding an important consultation with Felicio.”

On one occasion, some one came to him bewailing, and weeping, and embracing his knees in a paroxysm of grief, because of all his fortune little more than 50,000_l_. was left!  “What did Epaphroditus do?” asks Epictetus; “did he laugh at the man as we did?  Not at all; on the contrary, he exclaimed, in a tone of commiseration and surprise, ’Poor fellow! how could you possibly keep silence and endure such a misfortune?’”