. One is amazed to
find how easily any one who went on a journey might fall into slavery,
or how recklessly the democracy of one city voted to sell the people of
a defeated city into slavery, yet how unhesitatingly everybody accepted
and repeated the current opinions about the baseness of slave character.
Homer says that a slave has only half the soul of a man.[738] The love
stories in the _Scriptores Erotici_ very often contain an incident of
kidnapping. The story of Eumaeus must have been that of many a
slave.[739] It is also only rarely and very incidentally that the
classical writers show any pity for slaves, although they often speak of
the sadness of slavery.[740] If any man, especially a merchant, who went
on a journey incurred a great risk of slavery, why was not slavery a
familiar danger of every man, and therefore a matter for pity and
sympathy? In the great tragedies the woes of slavery, especially the
contrasts for princes and princesses, heroes and heroines, are often
presented. Polyxena, in Euripides's _Hekuba_, 360, bewails her
anticipated lot as a slave. A fierce master will buy her. She will have
to knead bread for him, to sweep and weave, leading a miserable life,
given as wife to some base slave. She prefers to be sacrificed at
Achilles's tomb. When the Greeks were going to kill her, she asked them
to keep their hands off. She would submit. Let her die free. "It would
be a shame to me, royal, to be called a slave amongst the dead." In the
_Trojan Women_ the screams of the Trojan women are heard, as they are
distributed by lot to their new Greek masters. The play is full of the
woes of slavery. At Athens slaves enjoyed great freedom of manners and
conduct. They dressed like the poorest freedmen. No one dare misuse the
slave of another simply because he was a slave. If the master abused a
slave, the latter had an asylum in the temple and could demand to be
sold. Slaves could pursue any trade which they knew, paying a stipulated
sum to their owners, and could thus buy their manumission. Their
happiness, however, depended on the will of another.[741] In the law
they were owned as things were, and could be given, lent, sold, and
bequeathed. They could not possess property, nor have wives in assured
exclusive possession against masters. Their children belonged to their
masters. Plato thought that nature had made some to command, others to
serve.[742] He thought the soul of a slave base, incapable of good,
un