ABSTRACT
Already some of the earliest Greeks to interest themselves in philosophical problems, the Sophists, had speculated about whether social inferiority implied moral inferiority, and about the circumstances under which slavery might be held to be justified. Aristotle developed the theory of ‘natural slavery’ which implied that, for their own good, inferior barbarians ought to become the slaves of superior Hellenes (racial theory which did not correspond to Greek practice, and was quite inappropriate at Rome, where slavery functioned precisely as a way of making outsiders part of society). The idea that a person’s legal status affected only his body, so that quite different criteria had to be applied to see whether his soul-and therefore his real character-was slave or free, could be accepted and developed without difficulty by Christians. The abolition of slavery as an institution did not occur to them, and would not have interested them: the liberation of every man’s soul did.
