Mason Wheelock-Johnson (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Previous interpretations of the treatment of slavery by Seneca the Younger (Bobzien 1998, 338–45; Roller 2001, 214–33; and Edwards 2009, 139–59), agree on two interrelated claims: first, that Seneca only introduces slavery as a foil to his definition of freedom in Stoic political philosophy (Patterson 1982, 17–34); and second, that Seneca’s treatment of slavery, exemplified by Epistulae Morales 47, is primarily metaphorical and provides little insight into the historical institution of slavery, let alone a critique of it. In this paper, I revisit these literary and social historical interpretations of slavery in view of recent work on the role of time in the Epistulae Morales (Viparelli 2000, 11–60; Wildberger 2006, 104–32; Ker 2009, 147–76), and I demonstrate that Seneca distinguishes between two forms of slavery, sociological servitus and philosophical mancipium. While these definitions of slavery do not challenge the socio-historical criticism implicit in the existing interpretations of Seneca outlined above, they nevertheless open a space for a representation of the moral agency of enslaved individuals (servi). With his own unique development of the Stoic theory of time (Goldschmidt 1953), which specifically valorizes the future in Ep. 124.17 (Moreau 1969) and through his careful use of grammatical tenses in Ep. 47, Seneca provides a nuanced description of the agency servi, which they direct toward self-realization and which makes them more than mere foils for their ruling class owners (their moral or metaphorical mancipia).
After offering a brief description of key grammatical features of Seneca’s description of the relationship of human virtue and the future in Ep 124, I perform a close reading of Seneca’s complex use of grammatical tenses in his canonical treatment of slavery in Ep. 47. To describe philosophical freedom, Seneca deploys a new dichotomy between the morally free individual and the mancipium, a term used only in condemnation of the freeborn Ep. 47.17 (nobilissimos iuvenes mancipia pantomimorum). In this same section, Seneca questions how the social status of servus “will harm” (nocebit) the individual in question. In this letter, the sociological dichotomy and the new philosophical dichotomy intersect: the individual servi, whose activities Seneca describes, exhibit facility with their hands which mark them as able to use the future and to possibly achieve the Good, while the masters in the letter are rendered completely inactive mancipia through their misguided and immoral activities.
As a result of the two definitions of enslavement that he develops, along with his close attention to time and grammatical tense in this hallmark treatment of slavery, Seneca suggests that the social masters’ failure to act with respect to the future leads to their immobilization and bodily disintegration, while the socially dominated servi still have a chance to gain philosophical freedom and health by focusing on the future. While this redefinition of slavery does not “save” Seneca from the socio-historical criticism of appropriating the very meaning of slavery for the ends of slave owners, it nevertheless constitutes a novel theory of time and labor, which opens a space for the moral agency of enslaved individuals in the future.