<DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> --- > My impression is that most people in the ancient world accepted it as a given. That's what the books I have say, anyway.  > 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. As fara s I can tell, one difference wasn't the idea that there were special groups of people, races or whatever, tahtw ere natuiral slaves, but just that siome (many) people, even Romans or Greeks or whatever, who were natural slaves. >  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? That is a really interesting question. I will ask some people who might know. I think we know that Euripides thought slavery was immoral -- would Ari have thought it worth arguing against a playwrite? jks __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com