Slavery and Moral Sentiments

Rome

Here’s an excerpt from David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World about slavery in Ancient Rome.

He notes that antebellum Southerners were familiar with Roman law, which sanctioned slavery, and liked to style themselves as modern day Catos on their plantations:

“Bradley most vividly illustrates the Roman slave’s status of animality in an analysis of Apuleius’ mid-second-century C.E. novel, The Golden Ass, or Metamorphoses. In this story a prosperous, well-born, and well-educated young man, Lucius, becomes suddenly transformed into a four-footed ass or donkey – “a paradigmatic illustration of the animalization of the slave in real life.” Since Lucius retains his rational human identity but is unable to speak or complain as he is flogged, “set to the drudgery of turning a mill,” and even sexually exploited, he symbolizes the plight of the dehumanized human, yearning for ways to resist but also learning that “once slaves were set on the level of beasts all need to cater to their human sensibilities were removed.” Ironically, the author Apuleius was himself a slaveowner, and his account of one man’s temporary bestilization was meant as comedy, not a call for abolitionist action.”

Such was the world before the moral character of Europeans was rotted by evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment liberal republican ideology in the late seventeenth/early nineteenth century and imposed on the Occident as a whole under two centuries of British and American hegemony.

Davis notes that the Romans were unperturbed about pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves who raped free virgins or forcing slaves to fight to death in gladiator spectator sports or crucifying rebellious slaves.

In the 21st century, Whites are arraigned before the moral code of the modern secular liberal who has only recently invented a number of fictitious sins (racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.) to assail and indict the White majority and to justify his own dominatiion.

The pretentious modern liberal should be laughed at like Lucius in The Golden Ass.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
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7 Comments

  1. re: “Do you prefer the Robert Graves translation?”@ John

    Suggest you read the Sarah Ruden translation: The Golden Ass [Hardcover]
    by Apuleius
    288 pages
    Publisher: Yale University Press; Reprint edition (January 2, 2012)
    Language: English
    ISBN-10: 0300154771
    ISBN-13: 978-0300154771
    Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
    Kindle edition available

    Dan Kurt

  2. What do male Alpha lions do? Make more lions, and protect their turf and pride from outsiders. Seems to me we could do with more animal White men, and its only the beta males of a species that would bitch about the strong and the cruel

  3. @Stonelifter

    Lions don’t keep slaves, idiot.

    And where do you get off talking about “alphas” and “betas”? As if you’re strong and everyone who doesn’t agree with you is weak? You’re hardly any kind of “alpha”, except maybe in terms of ego. You need to use drugs to achieve physical strength.

    You better hope the “Chimpout” never happens, because all those designer “sports labs” in Oakland, that supply your “gear”, might get looted and torched. Then you’ll shrink down into “beta” like all the “city fags” who happen to believe that slavery was immoral! 🙂

  4. I think wanton cruelty towards slaves for no reason is sick and such individuals are also a danger to the ruling group as well. That being said, the liberal establishment gives one the impression that slavery was less an economic system than some sort of giant S&M den set up by depraved whites for fetishistic reasons. As if they said, “Look, those fine upstanding Kings and Scientists over there in West Africa have black colored skin, and for no reason other than I don’t like the way they look I’m going to kidnap some to bring over to be The Gimp in some Leather Play.” Anyone who has worked in a company that employs large numbers of Blacks (particularly those the “temp services” send over,) knows an awful lot of them are completely incapable of showing up to work all five days of the week. No matter how darn bad they might need the job or the money, something stupid always comes up that is more tempting than the whole responsibility thing of holding a job. Slavery was the only practical way to get your crops picked instead of watching them rot in the field as your workers stayed home to “chill.”

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