Slavery

This chapter seeks to broaden discussion of slavery in Seneca by moving away from a focus on Seneca’s normative views about slavery. Instead, it asks what function slavery plays in Seneca’s idea of the philosophical life. Examination of a series of stories about enslaved people shows that Seneca uses such stories both to give specificity to his idea of the philosophical life and to argue for its value. Seneca’s ideas about not only freedom but also instrumentality and moral development turn on the conceptual and rhetorical materials supplied by slavery. The tracing of this dependence is a study in the centrality of slavery in Roman intellectual history.