Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-62.255.98.169-20130504143516/@comment-24590102-20140324111050

For this paragraph, please keep a bucket of salt handy. With that disclaimer dispatched: The way I hear it told, the slavery of Ancient Greece was somewhat akin to that of America's southern states prior to the American Civil War in that you could be born a slave under the laws of either regime. By contrast, the 'slavery' of Republican Rome was more akin to the hard labour of 20th century chain-gangs or that which some 20th century prisoners of war were set to when assigned to farms - and correspondingly, in Republican Rome, you could not be born a slave because the punishment/internment of the parents could not, legally, be inherited by their children. But this I've only heard, so I'd be curious to read of any archaeological or primary archival evidence which is probative; one way or the other.

But getting to the point; if Ancient Greece were truly a freethinking culture, where were their Abolitionists? And let us not forget what became of Socrates - which certainly would never have been tolerated in a freethinking culture.

And that's the thing; freethinking only became accessible to a representative proportion of people in a culture when the hand of the corresponding government/aristocracy was sufficiently restrained and I think you'll find that this is a strictly modern phenomena - which I fear is still very much the exception rather than the rule on the scale of cultures around the world.

Moreover, if you look at what is meant by freethinking or, rather free thinking, it's very much an absolute concept which does not inherently exclude any given class of people (such as "he who labours beneath the stone") but, rather, is inherently universal in potential application. This does not, however, discount the possibility of freethinking being adopted as one side of a double-standard - in which case it is, arguably, no longer simply just plain Garrick, oups, I mean freethinking.

