I want to put some other commenters' discomfort with this article in a clearer form. It's an interesting piece, it tells you a lot, and clearly Emily Wilson ha

I want to put some other commenters' discomfort with this article in a clearer form. It's an interesting piece, it tells you a lot, and clearly Emily Wilson has a warm appreciation for Epictetus. But the overall framing seems to be guilty of the condescension of posterity. Specifically, the tone is: "isn't it a shame that Epictetus, despite his wisdom, wrote for other male slave-owners?" There is probably a ton to say about the exact nature of slavery in Ancient Rome, how bad it was, etc. I'm not an expert but for sure everyone can agree that by modern standards slavery was not an acceptable employment institution. Set that to one side. Essentially nobody in Rome believed slavery could be abolished. And everybody in Rome wrote for privileged men. (Maybe because being able to read was, like owning a private jet today, a very expensive privilege.) So if you criticize someone for that, you have to explain why everyone else had the same blinkers. One answer is "of course that's because they were all privileged themselves!" Except Epictetus wasn't! And Romans did challenge slavery, but in different ways. St Paul doesn't say "let us have a revolution to abolish slavery" but he does say that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. It seems pretty likely that a Roman analogue of the Communist Manifesto - a call for the political reorganization of society - simply could not have been written. Perhaps Roman society was not centralized in the way that 19th century capitalism was, and so simply wasn't amenable to top-down regime change in the way modern societies may be. Or perhaps the intellectual resources of modern social science simply weren't available that would enable people to think in this register. If so, complaining that Romans didn't write the Communist Manifesto seems ahistorical, and kind of silly.