Slaves?
Nay, companions.
Slaves?
Nay, humble friends.

Slaves?
_Nay, fellow-slaves,_ if you but consider that fortune has power over you both." He proceeds, in a passage to which we have already alluded, to reprobate the haughty and inconsiderate fashion of keeping them standing for hours, mute and fasting, while their masters gorged themselves at the banquet.

He deplores the cruelty which thinks it necessary to punish with terrible severity an accidental cough or sneeze.

He quotes the proverb--a proverb which reveals a whole history--"So many slaves, so many foes," and proves that they are not foes, but that men _made_ them so; whereas, when kindly treated, when considerately addressed, they would be silent, even under torture, rather than speak to their master's disadvantage.
"Are they not sprung," he asks, "from the same origin, do they not breathe the same air, do they not live and die just as we do ?" The blows, the broken limbs, the clanking chains, the stinted food of the _ergastula_ or slave-prisons, excited all Seneca's compassion, and in all probability presented a picture of misery which the world has rarely seen surpassed, unless it were in that nefarious trade which England to her shame once practised, and, to her eternal glory, resolutely swept away.
But Seneca's inculcation of tenderness towards slaves was in reality one of the most original of his moral teachings; and, from all that we know of Roman life, it is to be feared that the number of those who acted in accordance with it was small.

Certainly Epaphroditus, the master of Epictetus, was not one of them.