--- andie nachgeborenen Aristotle, however, claimed that some people are slaves by nature, see Politics 1254a22 (" . .. from the hour of their birth some are marked out for subjection, others for rule."), and that slaves and women "lacked the deliberative faculty at all." (id. at 1260a12). Plato makes the point that the actual social hierachy is arbitrary, and this point has to be covered up by a "noble lie"` (Republic 414c ff), but according to Orlando Patterson's history of freedom and slavery, this was an anomalous view and hardly widely accepted, Not that I am an expert on ancient political theory or ancient history. I should look up what de St, Croix and Finley say about this. jks
--- My impression is that most people in the ancient world accepted it as a given. Anyway ancient slavery was not based on these ideas in the same way that e.g. Nazism is based on racism. They were invented after the fact to account for an existing practice. It sure would be interesting to know who Aristotle was arguing against in Politics 2, though. Clearly there was somebody arguing that slavery was immoral or he wouldn't have felt the need to address the issue. Zeno the Stoic's treatise The Republic was burned b/c it argued for abolishing slavery -- maybe the early Stoics were Aristotle's target?
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