On 02-18-98 David Martorana wrote to Day Brown... 
 DM>  DB> If you have seen my posts on Philemon, 
 DM>  DB> slavery, Epictetus, and autocracy... IF not, I will be happy to 
 DM>  DB> oblige since I found more on the issue. 
 DM>   
 DM>      Oblige, by all means ......always enjoy those gifted moments 
 DM>      of the ultra-conscious.... 
 By 700 BCE the good bottom land in Greece was passing from the 
hands of the yeomen families whose forefathers had cleared it, 
to the friends of the guys who ran the county courthouse.  With 
enough slaves to work the land, consolodation of holdings was a 
very profitable setup. 
 
 Both Lycurgus in Sparta, and Solon later in Athens, saw what it 
was doing.  Lycurgus pulled a coup, and burned the mortgages in 
the town square, and gave equal shares of the output to citizens 
in town... a socialist citizenry supported by serfs & slaves out 
on the land known as Helots.  Solon saw a different solution to 
the problem, and abolished slavery... no slavery, no economic 
advantage to landed estates... in 707 BCE, the first time that I 
know of in all history that it was abolished. 
 
Both men saw that a city needed strong soldiers to defend it, and 
that the tendency to malnourish slave children don't produce any. 
Nevertheless the powers that be continued to refine their methods 
of manipulating books, taxes, and deeds to enrich themselves, and 
by the time of Alexander, many disposessed yeomen sons joined up, 
and many even got rich on the war path.  But soil/pollen cores of 
the region showed how the crops changed from food to profit. 
 
Without the personal investment in the polity, and with the rich 
corrupting the processes, the republican governments became only 
shells of what they once were. 
 
You can see the same pattern in the western Greek colonies, and 
eventually in Republican Rome.  Cato documents what happend when 
Crassus had his cronies appointed grain inspectors on the Tiber 
docks while he bought up all the grain on the Roman market.  He 
told his friends to be very scrupulous in checking for vermin 
until the price went up to what he wanted; then he let the ships 
come on up to town and watched the price collapse.  It did not 
take very long for this kind of manipulation to bankrupt yeomen 
farmers all over Italy. 
 
The Senators were delighted, bought up the land cheaply, and put 
the land in Falernian [grape wine was cool] instead of wheat. It 
was all powered by slavery, made lots of wine, & lots of money. 
 
Meanwhile, the cosmopolitan culture of Imperial Rome was bringing 
new gods and cosmologies into town all the time.  A professional 
class of bureaucrats, lawyers, and engineers developed which, like 
we do, sent the college boy off, in this case, to Athens.  Frats 
still have Greek names.  One of the things they came back with, as 
Cato, Pliny, Cicero, and numerous others attest, was philosophy. 
 
Of course, *that* included writings of Solon and the republican 
Greeks, which included the Stoics, and had many inherent problems 
with the institution of slavery.  Epictetus: God made your body. 
You are not the owner, only steward thereof; where do you get off 
claiming you own the body of anyone else? The only thing that God 
does that you can do is think.  What you think is up to you, and 
if you are a slave, that does not matter, you can still think. If 
you will think, you will have to learn self control; a child who 
learns to control a slave does not learn to control himself. 
 
They soon found out that a thinking stoic slave was oxymoronic. 
 
At the same time, St. Paul was going around telling the slave he 
would be rewarded in heaven for all his labors by Jesus.  Imagine 
the slavedriver considering the effect of a stoic or Christian 
preacher on his crew, and realizing that if Jesus is going to 
reward these turkeys in heaven, they will be more amenable. In 
his letter to Philemon, Paul makes it perfectly clear that he 
respects the laws concerning slavery. 
 
In Romans 13, Paul makes it clear that he respects the power and 
authority of the emperor, and began the tradition of the divine 
right of kings.  In his writings, Epictetus makes it perfectly 
clear that governments are instituted by men, and have no such 
divine sanction, or intrinsic right to control the lives of men. 
 
In one of the greatest cop outs of history, one of his students, 
Marcus Aurelius became emperor, and did nothing at all about the 
inconsistency of his personal philosophy and the autocratic rule 
of the state.  Had he and the Roman power structure been up to 
the ethical challenge of stoicism instead of using Christian 
dogma to justify their abuse of power, I think the Roman state 
would still be a power to be reckoned with. 
 
Had they developed stoicism, instead of denigrating this life into 
a mere preparation for the next one, they would have had to deal 
with injustice more directly, and worked out ethics more fully- 
lacking any dispensation from 'God' as to what should be done. 
So rather than accept misery as just for sinners and payment for 
entry into heaven, they would have had to deal with it. 
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 * OFFLINE 1.58 * God's *real* name is Murphy. 
--- Maximus 3.01
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