he
had never known; and was trained up from his infancy in the severe
discipline of the seraglio. [53] His name, his wealth,his honors, were
the gift of a master, who might, without injustice, resume what he had
bestowed. Rustan's knowledge, if he possessed any, could only serve to
confirm his habits by prejudices. His language afforded not words for
any form of government, except absolute monarchy. The history of the
East informed him, that such had ever been the condition of mankind.
[54] The Koran, and the interpreters of that divine book, inculcated to
him, that the sultan was the descendant of the prophet, and the
vicegerent of heaven; that patience was the first virtue of a Mussulman,
and unlimited obedience the great duty of a subject.

[Footnote 52: Voyage de Chardin en Perse, vol. iii. p. 293.]

[Footnote 53: The practice of raising slaves to the great offices of
state is still more common among the Turks than among the Persians. The
miserable countries of Georgia and Circassia supply rulers to the
greatest part of the East.]

[Footnote 54: Chardin says, that European travellers have diffused among
the Persians some ideas of the freedom and mildness of our governments.
They have done them a very ill office.]

The minds of the Romans were very differently prepared for slavery.
Oppressed beneath the weight of their own corruption and of military
violence, they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least
the ideas, of their free-born ancestors. The education of Helvidius and
Thrasea, of Tacitus and Pliny, was the same as that of Cato and Cicero.
From Grecian philosophy, they had imbibed the justest and most liberal
notions of the dignity of human nature, and the origin of civil society.
The history of their own country had taught them to revere a free, a
virtuous, and a victorious commonwealth; to abhor the successful crimes
of Caesar and Augustus; and inwardly to despise those tyrants whom they
adored with the most abject flattery. As magistrates and senators they
were admitted into the great council, which had once dictated laws
to the earth, whose authority was so often prostituted to the vilest
purposes of tyranny. Tiberius, and those emperors who adopted his
maxims, attempted to disguise their murders by the formalities of
justice, and perhaps enjoyed a secret pleasure in rendering the senate
their accomplice as well as their victim. By this assembly, the last of
the Romans were condemned for