--- Chris Brooke <chris.brooke at magdalen.oxford.ac.uk> wrote: The Stoic argument (very roughly) was that bodily slavery didn't really matter because mental slavery was what really mattered, and that had no relationship to one's legal status as slave or free. And that argument played quite an important role (I think) in shaping early Christian attitudes to slavery, with the distinctive coexistence of occasional moral condemnation coupled with legal/political toleration of the institution.
Chris -- That is true of the late Stoics, after it had become _the_ imperial philosophy, not apparently of the early ones. Early Stoicism appears to have been quite radical. (A similar thing happened to Christianity, as you know.)
The reference to the Republic having been burned due to its attack on slavery is a memory from a class on Stoicism I took in grad school -- I may be mistaken.
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