1.30 Dio Chrysostom, Oration 15 (Excerpted):²⁵ Greek Epideictic Oratory (Late First/Early Second Century CE)

      Literature: Panzeri 2011.

      As it happens, I was present lately when two men had a dispute over slavery and freedom. […] The one man, finding his arguments outmatched and himself at a loss, turned to abuse, as often happens in such cases, and taunted the other with not being a free man. The taunted man very gently smiled and said: “My good man, how can one tell who is a slave and who is a free man?”

      The first man said: “By Zeus, I do know, of course, that I and all these here are free men, while you have nothing to do with freedom.” […]

      The other stood up and […] asked him how he knew this about the two of them. The first man said: “Because I know that my father is an Athenian, if anyone is, while yours is a slave of so and so,” mentioning his name. […] “And I also know that your mother is a fellow-slave of your father.” […]

      The other responded: “Come now, by the gods, if I do agree with you that my parents are such as you say, how can you know about their slavery? Did you also have precise knowledge of their parents and are prepared to swear that they were both born to slave people and that so were those before them and everyone from the beginning of the line? For, clearly, if there has been one free man among a kin-group, it is no longer possible rightly to consider his descendants as slaves. It is impossible, my good man, that any kin-group existing from all eternity, as they say, does not have countless members who have been free and no fewer who have been slaves.” […]

      The first man responded: “Let us then leave aside arguments related to one’s kin-group and ancestors, since you consider these so difficult to determine.” […]

      And the other said: “But, in the name of the gods, what actions and experiences of mine do you know of, that make you say you know I am a slave?”

      “I know that you are kept by your master, that you attend him and do whatever he orders you to do, and that you take a beating if you don’t obey.”

      “But you thus also make sons their fathers’ slaves,” the other said, “for poor sons often attend their fathers and walk with them to the gymnasium or to dinner; also, they are all kept by their fathers, often take beatings from them and do whatever their fathers command them to do. Moreover, on the basis of showing obedience and taking a beating, you can go on and claim that a school-master’s pupils are his slaves and that gymnastic trainers or any other teachers are their pupils’ masters. For they too give orders and beat those who disobey.”

      “No, by Zeus!” the first man said, “for gymnastic trainers and other teachers cannot imprison their pupils, nor sell them nor throw them into the mill; masters, however, are allowed to do all these things.”

“Well, perhaps you are not aware of the fact that among many communities, and extremely well-ordered ones at that, fathers are allowed to do to their sons all these things you mentioned, including selling them, if they so wish, and even more terrible than these: that is, they are allowed to kill them, without trial or without even bringing any accusations at all against them. Yet these men are not their fathers’ slaves but their sons. And if I was as much of a slave as could be,” he said, “and had been one justly from the beginning, what prevents me being as much of a free man as anyone else from now on? Or what prevents you from the opposite fate? That is, if you had been born to manifestly free parents, to be now more of a slave than anyone else?”

      “I can’t see,” the first man said, “how I, a free man, will become a slave, but it is not impossible that you have become free, if your master manumitted you. […] How, as you claim, can I become a slave?”

      “Well, countless men, while free, sell themselves, and end up working as slaves by contract – sometimes not at all on reasonable terms, but on the harshest ones.”

      Up to this point, those present paid attention to the arguments with the idea that they were put forward not so much in earnest as in jest. Afterward, however, they started to be more involved in the rivalry, and it seemed to them odd that it was not possible to name a criterion by which one could indisputably distinguish the slave from the free, but instead, it was easy to question everything and produce counter-arguments constantly. So, they set aside the particular case of that man and his slavery and started to examine who is a slave. And they tended toward the conclusion that the man who is validly possessed by someone else, like another item of his property or another one of his grazing animals, to the degree that he can be used in any way the owner wants, this man is correctly called and is the slave of his owner. Once more, the man who had been bringing counter-arguments in relation to slavery raised the question: what on earth determined the validity of possession? For many long-time owners had been shown to possess houses, or fields, or horses, or oxen unjustly, including even some who had inherited these things from their fathers. Similarly, it was possible to possess a man unjustly.

      “For owners acquire slaves, similarly to all the rest of their property by taking them from others, or as gifts, or by purchase, or by inheritance, or by having them born in their own house – those called ‘home-born’ slaves. Another way of possession, which I think is the most ancient of all, is when men are taken as war captives or through plunder and are thus enslaved. It stands to reason that those who were first enslaved were not initially born slaves but were defeated in war or captured by robbers and were thus forced to be slaves to their captors. So, the most ancient way, which all the rest depend on, is extremely weak and has no strong value. For whenever these men manage to flee again, nothing prevents them from being free, as they were slaves unjustly; consequently, they were not slaves before that either. In fact, there are cases in that not only did they themselves flee from slavery but also enslaved their masters. In this case, too, a shell flips, as they say, and everything becomes the opposite of what it was before.”

One of the bystanders said that the captured persons themselves could not perhaps be called slaves, but those born to them, and those of the following generation and the one after that, could fittingly be called slaves.

      “But how? For if being captured makes one a slave, then the name of slave would be more fitting to those captured than to their children; if again it is having been born to slaves what makes one a slave, then clearly the children born to men who were free but got captured cannot be slaves. […] So, if even this way of possession, from which all the others derive, is not just, it is possible that no other such way is just, and no one can be characterized as really and truly a slave. But perhaps to start with, we should not characterize as a slave one for whose body money has been paid or one born to parents characterized as slaves, as is widely thought, but rather one whose behavior is not that of a free man but befitting a slave. For we can agree that many called