The year is 73 BC. In the midst of the Roman world, emerging as a formidable power, a seemingly minor event—the escape of barely seventy men—becomes a sign. Spartacus, a deserter from the Roman army, escapes from the gladiator training school in Capua (the same city that was once a mandatory stop for General Hannibal). What is decisive is not the military action itself, but what is at stake in it. It is the awakening, albeit fleeting and complete, of human possibility.
Spartacus heads for Mount Vesuvius. Along the way, contingents of slaves numbering in the thousands join him, and in just a few months, they become a magnificent army that successively repels two Roman battalions. A year later, the news reaches Rome: a force of 90,000 slaves has defeated two consuls and their respective armies.
Spartacus now moves north towards the Alps, perhaps with the idea of dispersing his soldiers outside the borders of Italy. At this point, the soldiers refuse to leave the peninsula. The leader then decided to return to Lucania in a desperate attempt to reach Sicily, but it was too late. Marcus Licinius Crassus was waiting for him with eight fresh legions. It was useless for Spartacus to divide his forces. The Gallic and Germanic armies were defeated first. Later, the leader himself fell in battle.
What is worldview
Was the Thracian slave’s struggle an act of liberation, or perhaps revenge? Was it, as was commented in the Roman Senate, an excuse for pillage and adventure? In a way, this rebellion was a front against slavery, but that does not mean that its purpose was the liberation of slaves in the empire or equality among men. To assume such a thing would be to dress Spartacus in the conceptual armor of an enlightened philosopher, born centuries later under the lights of the 18th century.
Was Spartacus more discerning in moral matters than Seneca, the Cordovan philosopher, who, commenting on slavery in his letter to Lucilius, suggests inviting one’s slaves to the table from time to time? Seneca’s reasoning was not to abolish slavery, but to alleviate it by calling for more humane treatment of slaves. A sad paradox, we would say today, of someone who was considered ahead of his time. However, it is not appropriate to label him as backward for not condemning the slave system; it was simply not part of his possible horizon. I am talking about that invisible battlefield where ideas clash, where the new has not yet won and the old refuses to die.
Each era is characterized by a set of ideas, beliefs, values, and perceptions that sustain it, a kind of world map of social, political, religious, and natural events. In turn, each change between contiguous eras requires a chain of processes to sustain it. Human understanding may anticipate or hold back, but that does not alter the fluidity of the process itself. “Slavery is immoral” is a true statement today, but it does not have the same meaning in 2025 as it did in 1825, 1325, or 125 AD.
Since Wilhem Dilthey, we have understood the importance of worldview (Weltanschauung) in understanding history. Unquestionably, each era carries with it its own emanation, its particular way of making sense of the world.
In The Theory of World Conceptions, Dilthey proposes:
The worldview is determined by the image of the world, the valuation of life, and the orientation of the will, which results from the gradual nature of psychic evolution. Both religion and philosophy seek firmness, efficacy, mastery, and universal validity. History makes a selection among them, but their great types remain standing side by side, independent, unprovable, and indestructible. They do not owe their origin to any demonstration, and no demonstration can dissolve them.
This is not at all an intellectual theory, but an experiential structure, that is, a way of living and feeling the world from historical, social, and cultural experience. The philosophical concern of Peter Abelard in the 12th century is very different from that of Descartes, a rationalist in the 17th century. Shakespeare’s existential worldview is very different from Dostoevsky’s nihilism. In the 13th century, it was believed that the stars influenced people’s health and destiny. In the 14th century, the Earth was still believed to be the center of the universe. The 17th century accepted the theory of the four humors as true, and until the 19th century, the idea persisted that diseases came from miasmas, and spontaneous generation of life was also accepted.
Seneca and the critical crack in Stoicism
In every ideological periphery, there is a tension between deeply rooted certainties and principles that are ready to be modified. The former, because they are established, tend to avoid questioning; their validity is taken for granted, in custom or cultural automatism. These ideas do not encounter immediate resistance, and only shocks, obvious or hidden, manage to fracture their apparent solidity.
Understanding slavery within the Roman Empire requires careful differentiation: on the one hand, as a political and economic institution; on the other, as an object of philosophical reflection, especially within the framework of Stoicism. In this context, the thinking of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC–65 AD), a philosopher from Cordoba and a leading figure in the Stoic tradition, is particularly valuable. His contribution consists of introducing a critical crack into an ideology that, in his time, seemed immovable.
Roman philosophy, particularly Stoicism, distanced itself from the metaphysical speculation typical of Platonism and Aristotelianism. Instead, it returned to the pre-Socratics, proposing an ethic centered on everyday practice and the cultivation of virtue as a constant exercise. This is the root of a morality founded on reason and oriented toward ethics, both conceived as the path to true human freedom.
The Senecan world conforms to a logic that defends the possibility of knowledge as an incorrigible faculty of perception. Truth lies in the order of the universe. “Live in accordance with nature,” a commandment upheld by Zeno of Citium, was not a rhetorical slogan, but a principle of life. The cosmos, governed by a harmonious determinism, imposes an order that the wise recognize and adhere to. This position should not be confused with that of the cynic—nor that of certain Epicureans—who, distrusting the notion of a divinely organized cosmos, drifted toward a more instinctive naturalism, and sometimes toward a caviling moral relativism that the Stoic always kept in check.
The Stoic maintains a firm position: man is the measure of all things. Yes, but only insofar as he embodies the ethical ideal of virtue, which is the supreme good and a necessary condition for happiness. The Stoic philosophy in which Seneca was trained is the result of both the tradition of the city-state and classical Greek thought. In the Greek polis, the individual was absorbed by the collective, which explains why, when we encounter its literature and art, we perceive figures that border on the archetypal. It was not until the Hellenistic period that the individual began to express his own vision of the world in the face of an increasingly vast and systematized reality. In contrast, the Roman city was distinguished by its cosmopolitan character.
Roman culture adopted a new philosophical orientation, more pragmatic and far removed from the metaphysical speculation characteristic of Platonic and Aristotelian thought. Stoicism, for its part, dates back to the pre-Socratics and proposes a worldview centered on moral practice and the constant exercise necessary to achieve virtue. From this conception arise both the ethics of reason and the reason of ethics. Both ultimately lead to human freedom.
Dignity is apatheia
Epictetus (himself a slave) says in Enchiridion (Book IV):
I affirm that tranquility is nothing other than the good order of the mind.
The Stoic ideal of tranquility (apatheia) reflected the image of the ideal Roman citizen: rational, self-sufficient, capable of enduring pain, adversity, or death without losing dignity. Many are mistaken in interpreting Stoic philosophy as a form of pessimism imbued with a conception of divine predestination. What Stoicism seeks is a balance in which the development and end of things respond to a cosmic truth. The universe is governed by the logos, the divine reason that permeates all things. To understand nature is to understand God, for both God and nature are one and the same. This vision leads Seneca to reject superstitious fear of natural phenomena: everything that happens in nature has a reason and a rightful place in the universal order. The Stoic emphasizes that knowledge of natural phenomena elevates human beings above their worldly concerns.
In his preface to Natural Questions, Seneca writes:
What thing is more sublime than to rise above the clouds, see the lightning beneath you, and not fear the thunder?
Virtue is equivalent to the best action taught by wise men. Virtue denotes the best attribute because it entails internal harmony. Stoicism seeks in apatheia a freedom based on self-sufficiency. Political freedom is subordinate to the personal and existential freedom of the individual. However, the cosmic order goes beyond all human possibility of self-sufficiency.
Life always brings immeasurable suffering. We must know how to live in a seemingly banal and unjust world. Philosophy gives man unique value and vigor, for it allows him to surrender his soul to the best reason. From there, human beings allow themselves to build inner strength. Indeed, Seneca does not urge the liberation of slaves as a social arrangement inherited from the past—at least not the strictest social order in his universe. Seneca, the Stoic, accepts his reality as justly established. However, when it comes to slavery, his thinking is broader than that of the Greeks. This is precisely the point we will analyze below.
Slavery in Rome
Roman slavery represented the political, economic, and social dimensions of the empire. The practice originated with the conquests of the Etruscans in the late 5th century BC. Rome sought to dominate its immediate neighbors, which threatened the independence of the Latin peoples.
The so-called “Latin War” of 340 BC, won by Rome in a short time, made it the master of the Italian peninsula. Later, the price of this preeminence would bring friction with Carthage, a powerful commercial neighbor dominating North Africa. The Romans finally destroyed that power in 146 BC. Shortly thereafter, Rome turned its ambition eastward. With overwhelming force, Roman troops overthrew, one by one, the ancient bastions of the Hellenistic Empire: Syria, Macedonia, Greece, and Egypt. At last, Rome was the undisputed master of the Mediterranean.
If the conquest was no easy task, maintaining control of these overseas territories was even more difficult. Rome ended up becoming an interregional economic center. This led to a crisis in the domestic labor market, which could not compete with cheaper and better products brought in from the provinces. As a result, a large part of the peasant population migrated to the city, which accentuated the existing inequality between the aristocracy and the dispossessed masses, causing constant situations of anarchy. Not surprisingly, at that time, gladiator shows in the circus were the favorite entertainment of the common Roman.
All this social tension degenerated into the civil wars of the Republic that are well known in history. Rome paid a huge price for this social agreement. Little by little, Rome’s production became increasingly dependent on slave labor, not only as a palliative for the shortage of farmers and soldiers, but also for the need for labor in the mines and, after the republic, for the domestic life of the Roman oligarchy. The weight of the slave-dependent industry reached one million during the reign of Nero. Slavery was the most entrenched institution in the empire—perhaps as legitimate as the emperor’s power itself.
The condition of humanitas
According to Seneca, humanitas is the most important natural condition in human relations. Since slaves are human beings, it is now difficult to assume that the separation between slaves and Romans is based on a natural condition and not on a mere accident.
That inferior natural condition is what Aristotle defends in Politics, Chapter I:
Yes, the Greek has the right to command the barbarian, since nature has willed that the barbarian and the slave should be one and the same.
The conceptual leap between Aristotle and Seneca is clear. For the former, all barbarians—that is, non-Greeks—are slaves “by nature.” This does not mean, as some have suggested, that barbarians lack rationality. The issue is quite different. Aristotle asserts that slaves are “animated instruments,” someone who belongs to another, whose life is at the service of their master. Slaves do not act of their own free will, but under the will of another. The master/slave relationship is teleological: it is the natural end of things. For the Macedonian philosopher, slavery is part of this order, and to question it is to go against nature. It is this condition of natural subordination of the slave that prevents him from fully developing the ethical and contemplative life that Aristotle considers essential to achieving eudaimonia. And it is not only barbarians; there are people who, by natural disposition, lack the rational capacity to govern themselves and are therefore destined to be governed by others.
In Seneca’s Rome, slaves were not mere shadows at the service of their masters, but in many cases lived in unexpected proximity: they were educators who shaped the minds of children, doctors who watched over the health of bodies, administrators who maintained order in the households. This closeness, which Seneca evokes in his Letter 47 to Lucilius when he says that slaves shared the table with their masters, cannot but have opened a crack of empathy, a fissure in the wall that separated the free from the servant, so different from the rigid distance that in Aristotle’s Greece stood as an insurmountable wall.
The slave in Rome was not just an instrument, but a man who, by sharing the space of everyday life, revealed his humanity. Stoicism, which Seneca inherited from Hellenistic currents, brings with it an air of universality: the logos that dwells in all, slaves or free, citizens of a cosmos, transcends the boundaries of the Aristotelian polis, so closed in on itself, so jealous of its hierarchies.
The slave can be a potential friend, a comrade with whom relationships of respect must be forged. “Treat your slave with compassion, even with courtesy,” writes the philosopher to Lucilius.
In that first century, when Seneca was writing, something new was beginning to stir on the horizon of the Roman world, an egalitarian murmur that, without naming it, we can recognize in the first voices of Christianity and the message of a dignity common to all men. Could it be that these ideas, still in their infancy, somehow touched the heart of the Stoic from Cordoba, leading him to see slaves not as inferior beings, but as a reflection of his own humanity?
Slavery is rather a condition of fortune, both paradoxical and unexpected. For Seneca, the value of man lies in character, not rank. Rank is given by accident; virtue, on the other hand, is the product of character cultivation. This idea already had a precedent in Cicero, who considered slavery to be a state of mind. “Only the wise are free, and the stupid are slaves,” declared the Roman philosopher and lawyer.
There is another conceptual twist: there is a type of slavery that does not involve chains. It is the slavery of the body, even deeper than that of the spirit: “Show me the man who is not a slave to desire, others to usury, others to ambition, and all to fear,” Seneca writes to Lucilius. Furthermore: “If a Roman can be a slave to vice, then a slave without vice can be as free as a Roman.”
After Seneca, one may wonder whether slavery of the spirit also includes that cruel and execrable master. If man’s freedom lies in his virtue, this opens up the possibility that a man who lacks virtue is a potential slave to himself. Without condemning the indignity of slavery, Seneca introduces a new perspective. Perhaps it was unfortunate that slavery died a natural death long after the fall of the Roman Empire. The issue disappeared for centuries without being confronted at the level of ideas. I imagine the theologians of the early Middle Ages, suspended between the Stoic aspiration for inner freedom and the Aristotelian view that naturalized the relationship between master and slave, unable to resolve this tension. As we shall see, this question reappeared in the 16th century, at the court of Charles V.
The fall of the Roman Empire and the advent of the Middle Ages transformed forms of production and human relations, but this shift did not bring with it a renewal in the understanding of a practice as old as man himself. In medieval Europe, slavery was not perceived as a problem requiring urgent reflection; it was considered, rather, a distant echo, an ancient vestige. Historical analysis as such did not yet exist, and the scholastic philosopher, immersed in his theological world, did not see the slavery of the body as a pressing issue. His gaze, more elevated, rested on the slavery of the soul, on that inner servitude that separates man from his ultimate destiny.
[Cover image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice Verso, 1872]
