As a Roman letter expressing ambivalence about slavery from the 1st century, it has been compared to the early Christian writing in Paul's
Epistle to Philemon. And
Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century condemns slavery outright, in rhetorical terms that may draw from Seneca, but that go beyond him. In support of his argument, Seneca references the proverb
totidem hostes esse quot servos ("as many enemies as you have slaves"), cited by many Europeans in the early
Atlantic slave trade as a caution against
slave rebellion. Hegel's
master–slave dialectic in
The Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 picked up the philosophical theme, later commented on by
Jean-Paul Sartre and
Frantz Fanon in the 20th century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's sequel to the 1762
Emile, or On Education sees the novel's protagonist sold into the
Barbary slave trade, and develops Seneca's ideas, while taking them further to show slavery as inherently unjust. The letter is quoted in the British abolitionist
William Wilberforce's 1807
A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and is mentioned in
Pierre-Suzanne-Augustin Cochin's ''L'Abolition de l'esclavage'' in 1861 amid the American Civil War. Seneca's writings were popular with African American activists, and may have inspired the naming of the free settlement of
Seneca Village in early 19th century New York City, a possible influence of the
African Free School. At an 1855 raid in Washington, D.C., as police asked African American activists "whether they had anything to say", an activist simply placed three books on the desk: the Bible,
Life in Earnest, and ''Seneca's Morals
, and requested their examination.'' ==References==