4 - The continuum of (servile) relationships

Summary

As an extreme condition, slavery provided the free with a metaphor and a yardstick for a variety of relationships. Aristotle had mapped out political, social and familial relations in terms of dominance and subordination, drawing a series of analogies and distinctions between the different relationships, and others followed suit. Cicero's version in De republica 3.37 (=Augustine Contra Julianum, 4.12.61) is particularly interesting:

sed et imperandi et serviendi sunt dissimilitudines cognoscendae. Nam ut animus corpori dicitur imperare, dicitur etiam libidini, sed corpori ut rex civibus suis aut parens liberis, libidini autem ut servis dominus quod eam coercet et frangit … domini autem servos fatigant ut optima pars animi, id est sapientia, eiusdem animi vitiosas imbecillasque partes, ut libidines, ut iracundias, ut perturbationes ceteras …

But the different kinds of ruling and serving should be distinguished. For as the mind is said to rule the body, it is also said to rule desire, but it rules the body as a king his citizens or a father his sons, but desire as a master his slaves, in that it restrains and crushes it … masters belabor their slaves as the best part of the mind, that is wisdom, does the flawed and weak parts of the same mind, such as desires, anger, and other disturbances …

Cicero identifies three spheres of domination: the state, the family and the individual. The slave-master relation takes its own place within these, as a sub-category of familial relations, but slavery also provides a principle of differentiation: you can't dominate a citizen or a child as you would a slave; the body is to be guided, but the desires are to be compelled and chastened like slaves. Failure to observe these distinctions leads to slavish dispositions in the relevant sphere.