It will be proper to say something here concerning the situation of the unfortunate men, who were thus doomed to a life of servitude.  To enumerate their various employments, and to describe the miseries which they endured in consequence, either from the severity, or the long and constant application of their labour, would exceed the bounds we have proposed to the present work.  We shall confine ourselves to their personal treatment, as depending on the power of their masters, and the protection of the law.  Their treatment, if considered in this light, will equally excite our pity and abhorrence.  They were beaten, starved, tortured, murdered at discretion:  they were dead in a civil sense; they had neither name nor tribe; were incapable of a judicial process; were in short without appeal.  Poor unfortunate men! to be deprived of all possible protection! to suffer the bitterest of injuries without the possibility of redress! to be condemned unheard! to be murdered with impunity! to be considered as dead in that state, the very members of which they were supporting by their labours!

Yet such was their general situation:  there were two places however, where their condition, if considered in this point of view, was more tolerable.  The AEgyptian slave, though perhaps of all others the greatest drudge, yet if he had time to reach the temple[016] of Hercules, found a certain retreat from the persecution of his master; and he received additional comfort from the reflection, that his life, whether he could reach it or not, could not be taken with impunity.  Wise and salutary law![017] how often must it have curbed the insolence of power, and stopped those passions in their progress, which had otherwise been destructive to the slave!

But though the persons of slaves were thus greatly secured in AEgypt, yet there was no place so favourable to them as Athens.  They were allowed a greater liberty of speech;[018] they had their convivial meetings, their amours, their hours of relaxation, pleasantry, and mirth; they were treated, in short, with so much humanity in general, as to occasion that observation of Demosthenes, in his second Philippick, “that the condition of a slave, at Athens, was preferable to that of a free citizen, in many other countries.”  But if any exception happened (which was sometimes the case) from the general treatment described; if persecution took the place of lenity, and made the fangs of servitude more pointed than before,[019] they had then their temple, like the AEgyptian, for refuge; where the legislature was so attentive, as to examine their complaints, and to order them, if they were founded in justice, to be sold to another master.  Nor was this all:  they had a privilege infinitely greater than the whole of these.  They were allowed an opportunity of working for themselves, and if their diligence had procured them a sum equivalent with their ransom, they could immediately, on paying it down,[020] demand their freedom for ever.  This law was, of all others, the most important; as the prospect of liberty, which it afforded, must have been a continual source of the most pleasing reflections, and have greatly sweetened the draught, even of the most bitter slavery.