I remember many years ago waxing lyrical as a student about the glories of Greece and the lesser glories of Rome when someone turned and said they couldn’t have much respect for slave cultures. As someone who had loved the story of Spartacus and thought the two lines he was given in the syllabus a travesty of honesty, I suddenly realised how right he was to point out that the philosopher theorising about rights, or the writer jotting down the first histories in Western thought were able to do so because whole rafts of the population were enslaved.
Slavery reflects badly on the masters in each and every instance and yet today we think slavery is the owning or people’s lives. That is the slavery of yesterday and yes it still exists today, but how much respect can we have for ourselves when we enslave millions to our needs in the richer countries? Cities all over the West should be paying reparations to Africa for the horrific mess we left the continent in making their wealth through the slave trade, millions of us should hang our heads to wear clothes made by five year olds who should be in school, but we don’t.
We don’t because like so many names that live in our minds from the ancient world, we don’t see the shoulders they are standing upon. Caesar was never any bigger than his army. And none of us is any bigger than the poorest, most downtrodden person in the world today because we are all standing upon someone.