ABSTRACT
Societies which formally recognise the differences between their powerful and their weaker members have a variety of institutions which try to regulate and control the ways in which the good things in life are abstracted from the latter and allocated to the former to consume or in turn redistribute as they please: forced labour, indentures, apprenticeship, rent, taxes, gifts, the ‘free’ market—not to mention the relationships between husband and wife and parents and children. The uniformity of rightlessness ascribed to all slaves by legal codes of course masks the wide range of different social and economic roles slaves played, and the fact that most functions performed by slaves could also be undertaken by persons of free status. While Stoic philosophy, and later Christianity, cannot be considered to have had any noticeable effect on improving the conditions of slaves, let alone leading to its ‘abolition’, the attitudes of intellectuals towards slavery did have some interesting consequences.
