for its mephitic exhalations.  It is more interesting to us to know that it was within a few miles of Colossae and Laodicea, and is mentioned by St. Paul (Col. iv. 13) in connexion with those two cities.  It must, therefore, have possessed a Christian Church from the earliest times, and, if Epictetus spent any part of his boyhood there, he might have conversed with men and women of humble rank who had heard read in their obscure place of meeting the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians, and the other, now lost, which he addressed to the Church of Laodicea.[61]

[Footnote 61:  Col. iv. 16.]

It is probable, however, that Hierapolis and its associations produced very little influence on the mind of Epictetus.  His parents were people in the very lowest and humblest class, and their moral character could hardly have been high, or they would not have consented under any circumstance to sell into slavery their sickly child.  Certainly it could hardly have been possible for Epictetus to enter into the world under less enviable or less promising auspices.  But the whole system of life is full of divine and memorable compensations, and Epictetus experienced them.  God kindles the light of genius where He will, and He can inspire the highest and most regal thoughts even into the meanest slave:—­

     “Such seeds are scattered night and day
        By the soft wind from Heaven,
      And in the poorest human clay
        Have taken root and thriven.”

What were the accidents—­or rather, what was “the unseen Providence, by man nicknamed chance”—­which assigned Epictetus to the house of Epaphroditus we do not know.  To a heart refined and noble there could hardly have been a more trying position.  The slaves of a Roman familia were crowded together in immense gangs; they were liable to the most violent and capricious punishments; they might be subjected to the most degraded and brutalising influences.  Men sink too often to the level to which they are supposed to belong.  Treated with infamy for long years, they are apt to deem themselves worthy of infamy—­to lose that self-respect which is the invariable concomitant of religious feeling, and which, apart from religious feeling, is the sole preventive of personal degradation.  Well may St. Paul say, “Art thou called, being a servant? care not for it:  but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.” [62]

[Footnote 62:  1 Cor. vii. 21.]

It is true that even in the heathen world there began at this time to be disseminated among the best and wisest thinkers a sense that slaves were made of the same clay as their masters, that they differed from freeborn men only in the externals and accidents of their position, and that kindness to them and consideration for their difficulties was a common and elementary duty of humanity.  “I am glad to learn,” says Seneca, in one of his interesting letters to Lucilius, “that you live on terms of familiarity