The figure of the slave in the depth-psychology corpus occupies a remarkable range of registers — historical, philosophical, psychological, and mythological — and the tension between literal bondage and its metaphorical or structural equivalents runs throughout. Bernard Williams subjects Aristotle’s notorious attempt to naturalise slavery to sustained critical pressure, exposing the ideological contradictions that attend the claim that some persons are ‘living property’ by nature. The Stoic tradition, as documented in Epictetus and in Long and Sedley’s compilation, inverts the social relation entirely: the wise man alone is free, and even the literal slave — Epictetus himself — may be sovereign in his rational soul. Shaw and the biblical-therapeutic tradition deploy slavery as the governing metaphor for addiction and idolatry. McGilchrist and Hume repurpose the slave trope to map hemispheric hierarchy: reason ought to be ‘the slave of the passions.’ Homer’s Odyssey furnishes the corpus with its most detailed literary slaveries, from the ‘noble slave’ Eumaeus to the hanged Melantho. Paul’s theology, as examined by Thielman, navigates actual Roman slave law while recoding the slave relation through the love command. These convergences reveal that ‘slave’ in this literature is never merely a sociological datum; it is a mobile figure for questions of power, nature, freedom, interiority, and the proper ordering of human faculties.
it is by convention that one man is a slave and another is free, and in nature there is no difference; therefore it is not just, either; since it is imposed by force
Williams exposes the ancient counter-argument to Aristotle — that slavery is conventional and violent rather than natural — and shows that Aristotle’s own defence is riddled with ideological inconsistency.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and so never can pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them
McGilchrist recruits Hume’s famous formulation to argue that left-hemispheric reason should be subordinate to right-hemispheric intuitive wisdom, translating the slave metaphor into a neuropsychological hierarchy.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
the only recorded fact of his early life is that he was a slave in Rome, and his master was Epaphroditus, a profligate freedman of the Emperor Nero
The biographical note on Epictetus anchors the Stoic doctrine of inner freedom in the concrete experience of literal slavery, lending his philosophy its paradoxical authority on the question of true bondage versus true liberty.
, Discourses, 108thesis
Addiction is likened to slavery and idolatry in the Bible. You use the temporarily pleasurable substance to escape, but in reality you find that you are physically enslaved rather than free.
Shaw deploys the biblical slave metaphor diagnostically, equating addiction with enslavement to a temporary object of pleasure and framing recovery as liberation from an idolatrous master-servant inversion.
, The Heart of Addiction: A Biblical Perspective, 2008thesis
Zeno corrected Sophocles’ passage: ‘Whoever does business with a tyrant is the latter’s slave, even if he goes as a free man,’ rewriting it as, ‘is not a slave, if he goes as a free man.’
The Stoic revision of Sophocles exemplifies the Stoic inversion of the slave concept: external political subjection cannot constitute genuine slavery for the philosophically free person.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis
Slaves in Athens were chattel slaves in the fullest sense, pieces of individual property — ‘living property’, in the phrase of Aristotle
Williams establishes the historical and conceptual precision necessary for evaluating the justice of ancient slavery, distinguishing chattel slaves from serfs and foregrounding Aristotle’s disturbing formulation of the slave as animated property.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
it is necessary and natural that some people should be masters of others; so far, it could be arbitrary which people were which. But if it is arbitrary, then this, as he said, might support the charge of injustice.
Williams identifies the logical gap at the core of Aristotle’s naturalisation of slavery: demonstrating that a hierarchy must exist does not determine who should occupy which position, leaving the institution vulnerable to charges of injustice.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
The most prominent slave character in the poem is the swineherd Eumaeus, the ‘good’ counterpart to the ‘bad’ goatherd, Melanthius… we are clearly supposed to admire this ‘noble slave’ for identifying his own interests with those of his owner.
The editorial commentary on the Odyssey identifies Eumaeus as the exemplary ‘noble slave,’ whose psychology of total identification with his master’s interests the poem presents as morally admirable, revealing the ideological work the figure performs.
, The Odyssey, 2017supporting
Roman law distinguished between a slave who ran away to escape his master’s ownership and a slave who fled to a master’s friend, to a temple, or to an image of a Roman emperor for asylum.
Thielman situates Paul’s letter to Philemon within the precise legal framework governing fugitive slaves in the Roman world, showing that Onesimus’s situation engaged established protocols of asylum and intercession.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Paul does not appeal to Philemon on the basis of an affection that has naturally developed between a master and his household slave, but on the basis of Jesus’ own reduction of the Mosaic law’s regulation of social relationships to the precept of Leviticus 19:18
Thielman argues that Paul’s appeal for Onesimus transcends the conventional Roman idiom of master-slave affection by grounding it in the love command, thereby implicitly subverting the social hierarchy.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
there simultaneously emerged in Britain, the United States, and France the first widespread public call for the abolition of slavery, with the appearance of enormously popular petitions against the slave trade
Tarnas correlates the emergence of abolitionism with a specific Uranus-Pluto alignment, situating the historical struggle against chattel slavery within an archetypal pattern of emancipatory awakening.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
Slaves too should serve their masters honorably and respectfully ‘so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered’
The Pastoral Epistles’ injunction to slaves is shown by Thielman to be governed not by social conservatism for its own sake but by the missionary concern that Christian conduct not discredit the gospel.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
Tremble about your poor slaves lest they steal, lest they run away
Epictetus uses the anxiety of the slave-owner as a satirical example of misplaced concern for externals, implying that dependency on slaves reflects a deeper form of psychological enslavement.
, Discourses, 108supporting
The only measure of value in Homer is provided by cattle. In most instances of Homeric trade we hear of only one item, generally a slave, with no x, and b left unspecified
Seaford’s analysis of Homeric exchange reveals that the slave was the paradigmatic commodity in pre-monetary Greek trade, functioning as the primary unit of value before the abstraction of money.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
Melantho: sister of Melanthius and slave of Penelope. She has a sexual relationship with Eurymachus and is hanged by Telemachus, along with eleven others.
The index entry for Melantho tersely documents the fate of the ‘bad’ slave whose sexual transgression and execution illustrate the violent policing of the boundary between loyal and disloyal bondage in the Odyssey.
, The Odyssey, 2017aside
in the case, for example, of a slave sale only the ‘buyer’ of the slave can be the subject of sa’amum, not the ‘seller’
Seaford’s philological analysis of Akkadian commercial terminology uses the asymmetry of slave-sale language to distinguish barter from money-mediated exchange in ancient Near Eastern trade.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside