The Stoic slave-philosopher Epictētus (ca. 50–135 CE) as depicted in Edward Ivie’s 1715 Latin translation of his writings in his student Arian's Enchiridion. His name is derived from epíktētos (ἐπίκτητος), meaning "acquired."
For Babette Salamon
Plato made three trips to Syracuse:
the first to see Mount Etna's fiery crater
—"It was not to savor Sicilian fine cuisine, O noble Aristidēs, as you claim!"—
the second in hope of finding in that city's tyrant Dionysus the Great a philosopher-king;
and third to rescue his friend Dion from imprisonment by the latter's heir, Dionysus II.
Who, however, set Plato up for slavery.
What sort of slave might such a savant be?
Like wise Epictētus, inventory . . .
whose very name was just a simple tag
that read: “Property.”
Put on the auction block in Aegina,
Plato was spotted there by Anniceris,
a Libyan on his way to Ellis
to compete in the four-horse chariot race,
who, finding the philosopher for sale,
snapped him up for eighty owls
(with five obols waived in unpaid fines)
—a bargain price for so much gist!
and returned him to the Athenian Propylaea,
thus earning greater merit than any chariot race could win,
as Olympiodorus observed in Alexandria a millennium after this.*
Even the poor slaves in Sounion's mines†
were made by word of Plato's rescue, it may be, perhaps a soupçon gayer.
“Back from Syracuse so soon?”
a colleague wisecracked when Heidegger
returned from kissing Goebbels’
ring
on Unter den Linden in Berlin's
Office of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Spin.
Ancient ruins at Nicopolis in Epirus, Greece, where Epictetus spent his life after being banished from Rome.
*See Olympiodorus (ca. 500–570 CE), Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9, trans. Michael Griffin (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 74–75.
†In the fifth century BCE, the silver mines near Cape Sounion paid for the Athenian triremes that won the battle of Salamis against the Persians, thus preserving Athenian democracy. “Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps” (Wikipedia).
Monday, January 6, 2025