nd feed them and even lead them about; and who will say that any such
lion is free? Nay, does he not live the more slavishly the more he
lives at ease? And who that had sense and reason would wish to be one
of those lions? Again, how much will caged birds suffer in trying to
escape? Nay, some of them starve themselves rather than undergo such a
life; others are saved only with difficulty and in a pining condition;
and the moment they find any opening, out they go. Such a desire have
they for their natural freedom, and to be at their own disposal, and
unrestrained. "And what harm can this confinement do you?" "What say
you? I was born to fly where I please, to live in the open air, to
sing when I please. You deprive me of all this, and then ask what harm
I suffer?"

Hence we will allow those only to be free who will not endure
captivity, but, so soon as they are taken, die and escape. Thus
Diogenes somewhere says that the only way to freedom is to die with
ease. And he writes to the Persian king, "You can no more enslave the
Athenians than you can fish." "How? Can I not get possession of them?"
"If you do," said he, "they will leave you and be gone like fish. For
catch a fish, and it dies. And if the Athenians, too, die as soon as
you have caught them, of what use are your warlike preparations?" This
is the voice of a free man who had examined the matter in earnest,
and, as it might be expected, found it all out. But if you seek it
where it is not, what wonder if you never find it?

A slave wishes to be immediately set free. Think you it is because he
is desirous to pay his fee [of manumission] to the officer? No, but
because he fancies that, for want of acquiring his freedom, he has
hitherto lived under restraint and unprosperously. "If I am once set
free," he says, "it is all prosperity; I care for no one; I can speak
to all as being their equal and on a level with them. I go where I
will, I come when and how I will." He is at last made free, and
presently having nowhere to eat he seeks whom he may flatter, with
whom he may sup. He then either submits to the basest and most
infamous degradation, and if he can obtain admission to some great
man's table, falls into a slavery much worse than the former; or
perhaps, if the ignorant fellow should grow rich, he dotes upon some
girl, laments, and is unhappy, and wishes for slavery again. "For what
harm did it do me? Another clothed me, another shod me, another fed
me, anoth